FSF — Paul Sutton

#send weather info to Mastodon
# current date
date > weatherinfo.txt
# current weather
ansiweather -l Plymouth, UK >> weatherinfo.txt
#send to Mastodon
toot post < weatherinfo.txt
# done
echo done

Again released under GPLv3

I tried to get festival to speak the weather, it is not perfect but this sort of works, you will need to direct to weather.txt first.

festival —tts < weather.txt

Looking in to this further, the issue is the brackets etc, so this stackoverflow post

strips out the colour formatting

sed 's/\x1b[[^\x1b]*m//g' weatherinfo.txt

Therefore

sed 's/\x1b[[^\x1b]*m//g' weatherinfo.txt > weatherinfo2.txt

Sends the newly formatted text to weatherinfo2.txt

So running back through festival

festival —tts < weather.txt

Is perhaps a little better, but not perfect

So going back to what we wrote earlier to send to Mastodon, the new script

  1 #send weather info to Mastodon
  2 # current date
  3 date > weatherinfo.txt
  4 # current weather
  5 ansiweather -l Plymouth, UK >> weatherinfo.txt
  6 # clean up output with sed
  7 sed 's/\x1b\[[^\x1b]*m//g' weatherinfo.txt > weatherinfo2.txt
  8 #send to Mastodon
  9 toot post < weatherinfo2.txt
 10 # done
 11 echo done

Produces much nicer output. The top bottom part of this illustrates what was sent before we stripped out the colour formatting

However it still isn't perfect, as it removes part some of the wording, but it is hopefully getting there.

Weather Output (new)

REFERENCES

TAGS

#YearOfTheFediverse,#Weather,#Scripting,#Bash,#Linux, #Mastodon,#ProblemSolving,#AnsiWeather,#programming, #Stackoverflow,#sed,#cat,#grep,GPL3,#FSF

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January 12, 2021

Right to repair video

The free software foundation have released their latest animated video to look at the right to repair.

Credits

LENGTH: 3:11 PRODUCER & DIRECTOR: Brad Burkhart STORY: Brad Burkhart ANIMATOR: Zygis Luksas

REFERENCES

Free Software Foundation

TAGS

#YearOfTheFediverse,#fsf,#RightToRepair,#FightToRepair,#PeerTube,#Video,#Education,#Campaign

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

December 30, 2020

FSF fights to secure software freedom for future generations

A message from Geoffrey Knauth, President, Free Software Foundation.

This year-end, we are focusing on growing the community with our year-end goal of gaining 500 new associate members before December 31st. The deadline is only two days away, and we are not there yet. We need your support to continue to grow, and to give strength to the Free Software Foundation's (FSF) mission to protect #UserFreedom. Below is a message from our president Geoffrey Knauth reflecting on the FSF's mission to protect software users everywhere.

The US government recognized that 2020 was a difficult year for people, and for charities like the FSF. Special tax law changes for 2020 now make it possible for deduction of cash donations, including becoming an associate member, of up to $300 made before December 31, 2020.

You can read the rest of the article here

#freesoftware,#fsf,#GeoffKnauth,#freedom,#fundraising, #campaign,#donations,#help,#softwarefreedom,

December 28, 2020

Emacs Conference 2020 Writeup

Emacs Conference Logo

This years Emacs Conference [1] took place on the weekend of 28th and 29th November. This is the online conference aimed at users of the stalwart text editor which is described as “An extensible, customizable, free/libre text editor” [2]

Emacs Terminal

Emacsconf this year had users from all different backgrounds, who use Emacs for a range of applications from basic text editing, writing documents in LaTeX, HTML or Markdown. Emacs is also popular with programmers and developers working on their latest project(s), but can also handle reading / writing email, chat, debugging software, and also has a built in calender and organiser to help you keep track of what you are doing. All this from a single interface.

Emacs GUI

Emacs is free software, and released under the GNU license, so has the usual 4 freedoms of use, study, share and modify. The more accurate name is therefore GNU / Emacs.

Talks this year were presented with Big Blue button [5] and live streamed with gstreamer [4] and other tools. This combination worked really well.

Talks were either longer with time for questions and answers or shorter lightning talks on quick subjects. Attendees could add their questions to a collaborative text pad, that everyone had access to. There was a big social presence using IRC (chat) [3] which was active during the conference.

Topics included development updates, a new users viewpoint, writing novels, Music and quite a few on Org Mode which is used for creating task lists and much more. Emacs, has a steep learning curve, but is very powerful and flexible to use. I am still learning the basics.

All talks are available to view here

#conference,#emacs,#editor,#2020,#review,#writeup,#fsf, #freedom,#FreeSoftware,#irc,#BigBlueButton,#gnu, #FreeDesktop,#gstreamer,#live,#virtual,#freenode

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December 11, 2020

APG password generator

Debian comes with a useful command line utility called apg for generating passwords, based on criteria set when it is run.

You may need to install with apt install apg

Running just apg produces


ag"OnAub3 (ag-QUOTATION_MARK-On-Aub-THREE)
yissheav-Flas6 (yis-sheav-HYPHEN-Flas-SIX)
rek_OfDot6ly (rek-UNDERSCORE-Of-Dot-SIX-ly)
yorthIs0Ot; (yorth-Is-ZERO-Ot-SEMICOLON)
NapOl{aj6 (Nap-Ol-LEFT_BRACE-aj-SIX)
9Knyhik. (NINE-Kny-hik-PERIOD)

Where as using -m 16 produces a min length of 16 characters

apg -m 16


cryhejIryoatEpBi
DuVospewjopOtsye
veldIc@Ogguckeys
IalNexBeckOdjav1
drureroarAkucEdd
WinquivadLitsUk4

As a good password should be made up of Letters (upper and lower case) Numbers (0-9) Other characters ( !“£$()%^&* )

Then you need to run something like

apg -M sncl -m 16 -n 5

apg  -M sncl -m 16 -n 5 
EgUrr1slaibzydAr
IrgiOcyibgauvKan
jemUndafMinvieHo
Fliadweuldyeebup
enyaighKuedoobr3

The program man page also gives more info and an example shell script to help with the process.

man apg

shell script

[begin]----> pwgen.sh
       #!/bin/sh
       /usr/local/bin/apg -m 8 -x 12 -s
       [ end ]----> pwgen.sh

#linux,#debian,#shell,#password,#generation,#security,#help,#scripts,#secure,#unix,#gpl,#fsf,#freesoftware,#manpage, #manual,#web,#internet,#links,#letters,#numbers, #alphanumeric,#specialcharacters

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