LWDW 204: ANSI Hipsters

Monitoring bandwidth from the command line, 21st century hipster-pixels, laptop killing USB cords, and GIMP learns an important lesson.


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Timestamps:
02:55 GIMP in 2020
06:20 KDE 2020 roadmap
09:30 Blender highlights of 2019
14:00 Linux USB kill cord
17:00 Hipster ANSI
20:20 Bandwhich monitor
22:45 Killing USB hum
28:15 Self-driving car kit
30:55 Emails


Colour key – Venn Jordan Pedro

GIMP in 2020

  • This starts off with a real lesson learned. 
  • While the GIMP was making regular updated none of them made it to stable. 
  • This made the project look stale and contributions started to dry up. 
  • Makes sense, if you contribute something you want people to use it. 
  • So going forward GIMP will be pushing out stable releases on a regular schedule. 
  • You can contribute to all aspects of GIMP development, including code, UI/UX design, creating plugins and effects and, yes, help with documentation!
  • And one of the most important, using GIMP to create artwork and telling people about it!

 

KDE in 2020

  • The KDE roadmap for 2020 looks bright.  Here are some of the features that we can expect to see, are likely see and possibly see this year.
  • The KDE I/O file library and Dolphin only has a single patch left to turn privileged escalation on, so you don’t have to run Dolphin as root to move, create, rename etc. root-owned files.
  • I knew this was a problem but should be fixed this year: Auto-rotation for tablets, convertibles, and other hardware with rotation sensors.
  • And likely:  Continue KDE’s Consistency of unification of the apps and user interface by implementing more of the proposed visual design changes to the Breeze style, Plasma and KDE apps.
  • Better wallpapers in the extra wallpapers repo!
  • Per-screen scale factors on X11 could become a thing. 

 

Blender 2020 (Mfoxdogg)

  • Blender has had an amazing year, and with the release of Blender 2.8 in October, made Blender a game changer in the industry.
  • Here are some of Blender’s top highlights:
    • Ton Roosendaal receives a ASIFA-Hollywood Annie Award for Blender.
    • The release of the Spring Blender open movie.
    • Received an Epic Games Mega Grant.
    • Ubisoft and other major studios using Blender.
    • SIGGRAPH Los Angeles, Blender was now a first class citizen at the world’s largest animation convention.
    • And with the advent of the Academy Software Foundation Blender became the go to for open source animation projects.

Linux kill cord

  • BusKill is an ingenious and inexpensive way to protect your laptop.
  • It triggers xscreensaver to lock the screen every time any USB drive is removed.
  • You could set the trigger to do other things like shut down the machine. 
  • All the parts can be had for $20 to $45 depending on your needs.
  • My only worry is that I might forget that it is on my laptop and accidentally activate it myself by moving away.
  • I like this in theory but we all know it ends up with your laptop on the floor. 
  • It’s a bit on the tame side compared to Silk Guardian
  • Something that wipes your ram, deletes precious files, and turns off your computer.

 

Chafa terminal animation (Rtheren)

  • Chafa is a command-line utility that converts all kinds of images, including animated GIFs, into ANSI/Unicode character output that can be displayed in a terminal.
  • Remember the BBS days? :-D
  • ANSI art is a computer art form that was widely used at one time on BBSes. It is similar to ASCII art, but constructed from a larger set of 256 letters, numbers, and symbols, and was used in MS-DOS and Unix environments.
  • Chafa is highly configurable and supports alpha transparency and multiple color modes (including Truecolor, 256-color, 16-color and simple FG/BG.)
  • I had fun converting a running unicorn to 256, 16 and 2 color output!
  • It is amazing how fast it is, instantaneous!  I used to wait quite a long time back in the 386 days to convert my artwork to ANSI graphics!

 

CLI bandwidth monitor

  • Bandwhich is like htop or top for networking.
  • CLI utility for displaying current network utilization by process, connection and remote IP/hostname.
  • It will also attempt to resolve ips to their host name.

 

Hum removal

  • Simple (and cheap) hardware for your home studio to get rid of those annoying buzzes and hums. 
  • Also included are two things that people claim fix ground loops, but don’t.
  • There is a new video in the sires for Patreons covering multitrack recording with OBS using your existing equipment. 

Slice of Pi

Pi Honk

  • The Review video on the page uses our LWDW opening music for their intro ;-D

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