CryptPad 4
A look at some of the features of the Rich Text Editor that comes with the recently released, version 4 of CryptPad.
This is a really nice package, and service, Cryptpad also comes as part of Disroot, which is also linked below. The best feature of course is the privacy.
REFERENCES
TAGS
#YearOfTheFediverse,#CryptPad,#RichText,#Editor,#Text, Cloud,#Privacy
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LaTeX : Flowcharts
Another useful resource and tutorial from LaTeX Draw for drawing flowcharts.
REFERENCES
TAGS
#YearOfTheFediverse,#LaTeX,#LaTeXDraw,#Flowchart,#Tutorial
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
Ansi Weather
Getting weather information is really useful. What happens if you're at the command line in Linux? I found a really little application that can help
ansiweather
apt install ansiweather
ansiweather -l Plymouth, UK
So what else can we do with this
This is a two step process
Will send the weather info to Mastodon.
However this does not include any date info
We can fix this with
then send the whole lot to Mastodon with
So, if we put this in to a final shell script we need:-
#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.
REFERENCES
TAGS
#YearOfTheFediverse,#Weather,#Scripting,#Bash,#Linux, #Mastodon,#ProblemSolving,#AnsiWeather,#programming, #Stackoverflow,#sed,#cat,#grep,GPL3,#FSF
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Toot mastodon client
I have been experimenting with the toot mastodon client. This does have a curses interface.
toot curses. (q to quit)
However experimenting with this and bash scripting
So to begin with you will probably need to login
toot login_cli
toot post text here
will send that text to Mastodon (toy
fortune > fortuneout
#
# echo to screen
cat fortuneout
# post content of fortuneout to console
toot post < fortuneout
#
echo "done"
This will run the fortune program, send output to a file then send the output in to toot post.
The next example the script asks for some user input and then sends it to toot post
echo "Please Enter some Text"
read usertext
#
#
# post user input to mastodon
echo $usertext
toot post '$usertext'
#
echo "done"
The potential of the above could allow real time data to be posted to Mastodon for example.
The above scripts are released under GPLv3.
REFERENCES
TAGS
#YearOfTheFediverse,#toot,#mastodon,#client
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
Messenger App Comparison
Further to the post yesterday. This was posted to Mastodon, This comparison has been put together by the Free Software Foundation, India. That compares various Free and Non Free applications. Good to understand why we need to use decentralized, privacy aware tools.
REFERENCES
TAGS
#YearOfTheFediverse,#Messenger,#app,#comparison
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
FOSS ASIA 2021
FOSS ASIA 2021
Conference : FOSSASIA Summit 2021 Location :ONLINE Date : March 13 – 21
REFERENCES
TAGS
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
Messenger Apps
The recent announcement that WhatsApp will be sharing more information with Facebook has resulted in people migrating to Telegram and Signal.
However there are many more alternatives, that are based on Free and Open source software
REFERENCES
TAGS
#YearOfTheFediverse,#Conversations, #Gajim, #Matrix,#Wire,#Deltachat,#Chat,#Apps,#Messenger, #Communication,#Jami,#Signal,#Telegram,#DeltaChat,#Element
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
Small web episode 5
Join Aral and Laura, for episode 5 of their weekly webcast.
REFERENCES
I have put a schedule for the next two months here to help with promotion.
TAGS
#YearOfTheFediverse,#small-tech
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DeVeDeNG
DeVeDeNG
I have been looking for a program to help create DVDs from movie files. I have found a program via the Debian users mailing list called DeVeDe which is really easy to use.
Installing devede and other related packages.
Firstly you need to install the software with
apt install devede
In general I use brassero to record the cd / dvd
apt install brassero
I have also used youtube-dl to download youtube videos for off line viewing.
apt install youtube-dl
What next.
Firstly you need to create a new directory within your system /home structure, then download a video. This can take some time depending on how long the video is that you’re downloading, the speed of your connection and other factors.
Once done you can use Devede to create your DVD.
Under Debian this can be found on the Sound and Video menu folder as DeVeDeNG
We want to create a DVD video so select the first option in this menu.
You are then presented with :
Now click add
From here navigate and select files to add to your dvd.
You will then be taken back to the main window.
We can now set up a menu, the create menu with the titles is ticked, by default so if you now click menu options:
We can fine tune our dvd menu.
If you are adding more than 1 video you may want to check the play all option. You also need a menu title. The other options are about customizing the look and feel of your dvd. Once you are happy with this. press OK to go back to the main screen and press forward.
You can now select where to save your ISO file. The default seems to be /home/user/movie, which is probably fine. Note that this folder should be EMPTY if not anything within this will be erased. I changed my folder to movie2 to be on the safe side.
Once the process is complete you will have an ISO file You also have an option to burn this to a DVD, in which case your default burner software will open. This part is beyond the scope of this post. I will do a separate post for that
Once you have an ISO you can open it in VLC player (for example) and test it works OK and you’re happy with everything you can navigate to where you saved your iso file, right click and in my case I would open in Brasero.
REFERENCES
TAGS
#YearOfTheFediverse,#DeVeDeNG,#DVD,#Creation
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Text to speech
Text to speech utilities are really useful, especially if you want make your text more accessible to those who can't read or access text based resources, this maybe due to a variety of reasons.
One solution to this is Festival text to speech, this can be installed with.
apt install festival festvox-rablpc8k
Which will use the 8K audio option.
So you can run this with festival —tts text.txt and the software will read out the contents of the file text.txt.
The —tts option stands for text to speech.
REFERENCES
TAGS
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License