nion's blog

I just released a new version of yacpi. yacpi displays various ACPI information like batteries, ac status, thermal zones, fans and some information about CPU.

The new release is a complete rewrite based on libacpi (yacpi is now the 3rd tool using libacpi).
For those of you already using yacpi here are the relevant changes:

• yacpi now depends on libacpi, compile, install, ldconfig


• -m option removed, default is to display just the present batteries, use -n if you want to see not found items too


• Removed interactive delay input in ncurses interface, restart yacpi if you feel like changing it


• Samples are not needed anymore, I rewrote the algorithm to compute remaining time in libacpi


• Immediate reaction on user input in ncurses interface, thanks select(2), fuck halfdelay(3)


• New options for every feature, the default is to print everything but you can now decide what you exactly want to see, check yacpi -h for new parameters.

Quite some things changed so if you use yacpi in shell scripts, check for the new command line options.

Ncurses:


Plain-Text (yacpi -p):
| BAT0 = 100% discharging rtime 04:49 h | ac = off-line | THRM = 50 C | gov = ondemand | cpu = 600/1500 mhz

Have fun: http://www.ngolde.de/download/yacpi-3.0.tar.gz, http://www.ngolde.de/download/libacpi-0.2.tar.gz.

I recently wrote how to use terminfo to get colored manpages.
Today ft came up with a nice feature of less which enables you to set termcap colors by environment variables.

Just use

export LESS_TERMCAP_mb=$'\E[01;31m'
export LESS_TERMCAP_md=$'\E[01;31m'
export LESS_TERMCAP_me=$'\E[0m'
export LESS_TERMCAP_se=$'\E[0m'
export LESS_TERMCAP_so=$'\E[01;44;33m'
export LESS_TERMCAP_ue=$'\E[0m'
export LESS_TERMCAP_us=$'\E[01;32m'

in your ~/.$SHELLrc to get the same effect without having a terminfo file.

And again for all the people writing "Install most and set it as PAGER", I know about this but using most because it has colors instead of less is just stupid since less has way more features most doesn't have. D'oh this sounds really strange

UPDATE: from strcat's comment. FOO_TERMCAP can be for all programs which compiled/linked with/against termcap. See man 5 termcap for definitions.

Last Friday we had a small but pretty cool linux event at University. There was also a presentation about grml and when Valentin showed that the manuals on grml are in color there were alot of people saying "wow I want that too"

grml includes this feature since version 0.1 (thanks to Matthias Kopfermann who brought this up and had the initial idea) but alot of people don't know how that works (without using most as PAGER, most has some disadvantages over less).

So here is how it works:

$ mkdir ~/.terminfo/ && cd ~/.terminfo
Now get the terminfo description:
$ wget http://nion.modprobe.de/mostlike.txt
Now compile it using tic (the terminfo entry-description compiler)
$ tic mostlike.txt
(you may want to delete the mostlike.txt file after compiling)

And then just define an alias in the rc file of your favorite shell.
alias man="TERMINFO=~/.terminfo/ LESS=C TERM=mostlike PAGER=less man"

That's it!

If you want to modify the terminfo file, use infocmp mostlike to get the content of it later.

The Google Watch Blog writes about accessing Google via some command line on http://projects.felipc.com/gcl/.

Ever heard about using smart bookmarks?

The LSB functions in Debian can do fancy and non-fancy output. However, the output is not really fance compared to grml, gentoo and Ubuntu. They have these nice, colored ok or fail messages in brackets
If you are like me and you always want to have the coolest bling bling Try this patch:


Of course this only works for init scripts including and using the lsb functions (should be most of them).

Clifford just released version 0.8 of his Structured Terminal Forms Language/Library stfl.

STFL is a library which implements a curses-based widget set for text terminals. The STFL API can be used from C, SPL, Python, Perl and Ruby. Since the API is only 14 simple function calls big and there are already generic SWIG bindings it is very easy to port STFL to additional scripting languages.

A special language (the Structured Terminal Forms Language) is used to describe STFL GUIs. The language is designed to be easy and fast to write so an application programmer does not need to spend ages fiddling around with the GUI and can concentrate on the more interesting programming tasks.

The new version just fixes (finally you will be able to use page-up/down in newsbeuter) some minor issues but also includes proper locking for mutexes now which was needed for newsbeuter.

Just uploaded to unstable, test please

I just uploaded newsbeuter 0.3 to unstable (get it from incoming until it hits the archive).

The release is mainly a bugfix release but there are also some cool new features and improvements.
- The html rendering especially encoding issues are fixed now.
- Everything is stored as UTF-8 internally and gets converted on-the-fly.
- libidn is not needed anymore
- gettext support (at the moment just german translation, translators wanted)

And last but not least podcast support.
For this there is a new tool included in newsbeuter named podbeuter. When updating feeds newsbeuter searches for podcast files and
adds them to a download queue. podbeuter then is the download manager to do automatic or manual downloads of the podcasts.



Have fun and test it.
Oh and YVFI we hang around in #newsbeuter on freenode now

Some guy made a wordpress theme which lets you access the blog content via some command shell in your browser.
Of course if you are bored by this you can also type 'startx' to get to the original graphical blog

http://blog.elinc.ca/rodcli/index.php

Cool idea!