Episode: 3431
Title: HPR3431: Living in the Terminal
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3431/hpr3431.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 23:18:13

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3431-4 Monday, the 27th of September 2021.
Tid's show is entitled, Living in the Terminal, and is part of the series' lightweight
upset is hosted by Black Colonel, and is about 46 minutes long, and carries an explicit flag.
The summary is, Black Colonel shows you some programs you'll need for living life without exorg.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by Ananasthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15. That's HPR15.
Better web hosting that's honest and fair at Ananasthost.com.
Hello and welcome to Hacker Public Radio. My name is Black Colonel, and today I'm going to be talking about
this would probably eventually come up in my technology, my journey through technology series,
but I decided that after talking to some guy on the internet that it might be a good idea to
have this be its own video just about the applications that I used during this time. So it happened
was that there was a time where I was trying to install Arch Linux, and it was going okay,
but whenever I tried to use the graphical settings because I didn't really know a lot at the time
about the way that X actually worked on your system with the X authority file and lock files and
all of this other nonsense quite frankly. So I didn't really know how to fix it when it wouldn't
actually load the graphical user interface. So I decided, you know what, I'm just going to use
the terminal for until I get to a point where I can't use the terminal anymore, and it took
a couple of years because I used the terminal for a couple of years and nothing else.
I'm going to I'm going to go over today the applications that I used as well as some of the
BasharC stuff that I have. I'm going to start out with the BasharC stuff. So the first thing I want to
go over is the environment variables that I use. So all of these environment variables are in the
form export, and then the name of the variable in all caps, and then an equal sign without. So
sorry, it's export all lowercase, and then a space, and then whatever the variable is in all caps,
and then an equal sign, and then the value. So no space between the equal sign, and either the
variable name or the value. So the environment variables that I have set are for my editor,
my pager, my browser, and then also for my directories, for my xdg, that's x-ray delta
gulf data home, and my xdg config home. Those are standards set up by the free desktop.org
people that basically just allow for all of your programs to know where to send stuff and to
keep all of your stuff well organized. The editor that I use is NeoVim. NeoVim is a
successor to Vim, which is a successor to 6, which is the standard text editor on Unix.
I've heard a lot of people call it like Vi or Vi, but it's, I'm pretty sure it's pronounced 6,
sort of like how Mac OS 10 is pronounced, Mac OS 10, because it's the Roman numerals Vi.
Anyway, then the pager that I use is most, which Clatsu actually is the one that sort of told me
about that one during his going through the Slackware package series. I just like the functionality
that it gives me, because if I'm going to be using a terminal, I would like to have things
at least somewhat color coded for some kind of visual reference. I mean, I can read everything
on the same color text, but it just makes it a little bit more differentiated when I have those
sort of color cues. And the browser that I'm using is links. Now, that's links Lima Yankee,
November X-ray, not links Lima, India, November, Kilo, Sierra. I just like this version,
the Yankee, November X-ray version, because I've just found it works a little bit better for me.
It handles more, I mean, I don't actually know if it handles more protocols, I think it does.
I don't know if I don't know if Lima, India, November, Kilo, Sierra, I don't know if that handles
go for links or FTP links. I could be wrong about that, but there was something about it that
it just seemed less feature rich than Lima Yankee, November X-ray. I could be wrong about that,
but that's the one that I've used. And then I have my SDG data home and my SDG config home set to
their standard values, which is the home directory. And then in the case of the data home,
that's slash.local slash share. And then in case of the config home, it's home directory slash.config.
And those are the ones that are sort of set up by standard for by the free desktop.org people.
Next, I have my PS1 environment variable, which is my bash prompt, sort of the thing you get in
the terminal where you start typing things and everything before the command you start typing in.
I know that some people like to have it be like only a single character and then some people like to
have it be like incredibly long with a return line at the end of it and then starting it on the
second line. And both of those just seem, well, honestly, the second one seems more insane to me.
I can use a terminal where I just have a single character. And if I need to find out what director
I'm in, I just type PWD or if you need to find out who I am, I can type out who am I and it'll give you
your username, I can use hostname to find out what hostname is. It's not. And then I can use get
status to see if I'm going to get a repository or all that. It's not difficult to figure out, but I don't
really have a problem with like I would rather have the information at my fingertips and have that sort
instant differentiation rather than having to type in more commands. In addition to I don't really
get bothered by having to wrap my bash commands very much. And if I do hit the end of a line,
and I want to sort of visually differentiate it, I can always use a backslash return, which will allow
me to continue a command on the next line, even in the bash prompt. I know that some guy on the
internet was talking about doing that on in a script, but you can also do that just in the command
line and it'll work as well. So anyway, my prompt is I have my username and I have it set to blue,
if it's a regular user and red, if it's root, till once again give that kind of visual
differentiation. Then I have the at symbol, then I have the hostname in green. I don't know why I
really decided on green. I saw it on some other system and I just really liked the way that it
looked as far as the differentiation goes. And then I have a colon, and then I have my working directory,
whatever directory I'm currently in. And then I have whether or not I'm in a git branch.
So it'll say, and what git branch I'm in. So right now I'm working on my waste paper basket,
which is a command line trash application written in Rust. And I need to make sure, because I'm not
really a power user of git or anything, I've really just started using it in earnest.
So I want to know if I'm on the dev branch or the master branch, or if I need to, like,
where I actually am in my git repo. And that's useful for me because I may or may not have tried
to merge master into dev. And I'm just glad that it didn't work the way I was typing it out,
because that would have been a pain in the butt to fix. Anyway, if I'm root, I also have it set to,
well, after the git branch, I have it set to for a normal user, it's the dollar sign. And for root,
it is the hash hash symbol, which I know that there's some people that say that it recently got
called a hash tag, and that's like a new development. But ever since, like, see the
octathorp, which is sort of the most general name for that, was used for hash tables,
which is like the Python equivalent of a dictionary, where it's a key value pair. So hash tag came
out, like it was called that because of the symbols already used for the hash table. And it was a tag
that started with the hash symbol. So that's how that whole thing came out. Sorry, that's just a pet
peep of mine where people don't know the history of things. So after all of that, I have a couple
of aliases. I only have two really. One of them is aliasing them to NeoVim or NVim, which is the
command. And I alias play to MPV because I do have socks installed, which will play would normally
go to, but I would rather type play and then an audio file and have it play through MPV, which
I'll get into what that is because it's one of the applications on this list than going through
socks. So first thing that I want to talk about as far as the applications go is what I use to
sort of, I guess would be sort of called a window manager type of thing. It's very similar to a
tyling window manager, except for there is no accession. There are no graphical anything.
It's tmux, which is the terminal multiplexer. It's pretty easy to use, and let's you actually
use it on a TTY, which is not with an accession running, which is useful for this whole thing.
Also, let's you use it in the SSH session and a couple of other things which are very useful
as far as that's concerned. You can also get multiple workspaces on your TTY for free by using
the control alt f keys in order to switch between the various workspaces and you can count something
running in one while you switch to another and it'll keep playing. Like if you have, I'll get into
a little bit later how I watch your video on the terminal and how I look at pictures on the
terminal. And if you have a video open in one of your TTYs, I haven't tried it recently and I
remember there was some kind of a little bit of an issue with it, but you can switch to a different
TTY and do more typing things while you have a video playing in a different TTY. And I think the
audio still works. I should test that really quickly, but I'm not going to. So I'll test it
after I record this and if there isn't a problem, if there isn't a problem then I won't say anything
and if there is a problem, I'll leave a note in the show notes saying what happened and what the
problem is. So you also can get a lot of the benefits that you get from TTY when a man tree can
move around to different pains. You can have all of these things open. So if you don't know basically
what the terminal multiplexer does is you have your regular terminal screen and then at the bottom
you have a sort of taskbar. It has your date and end time as well as your prompt and all of that
kind of stuff as well as what program you have currently running in your current pain. You can
press control B and then the arrow keys to switch between pains and you can use control B is sort
of going into command mode and then you can use the arrow keys to switch between pains. You can
use the braces, the curly braces to switch around where the pains are to control B and then
left curly brace will sort of rotate all of your stuff around a little bit and get that back
to where it was. And there's a bunch of other stuff. You can also do multiple windows so you can
actually have multiple workspaces on the same TTY going through different windows and tmux and
it's very very feature which I'm going to put links to all of these programs is all of their
home pages in the show notes below. But I just kind of want to give you a basic because I have a
lot of them to go through. I want to give you kind of a basic overview of what the actual program
is. So that's basically how it works and it lets you run multiple terminals all on the same
screen. Kind of in the similar ways you would with a tiling window manager or a regular window manager
where you'd have multiple windows open where you might have Firefox or GIMP or whatever open
whereas in this case you'd have links and you'd have I mean I suppose you could edit photos if
you have them in bitmap format you could edit them in VIM but I don't want to think about that
too much because that sounds horrible. Anyway you can also set up a little part of your Bashar
C which is if open square bracket tech tango which is hyphen tango zero closed square bracket
ampersand ampersand double open square bracket hyphen zulu dollar sign all caps tango mic uniform
x-ray double closing square bracket ampersand ampersand double opening square bracket dollar sign
hyphen equals asterisk india asterisk double closing square bracket semicolon then exec tmux exec
is echo x-ray echo charlie tmux tango mic uniform x-ray semicolon five f i fox chart india
and what that whole thing will do and once again that will be in the show notes what that whole
thing will do is that it's going to test if you are in a like a valid terminal like not a log
in terminal well I mean I guess the dollar sign hyphen equals asterisk india asterisk that tests if
you're in an interactive terminal as opposed to a log in terminal so it's not going to log you
out when you close tmux but what this basically will do is that when you start a terminal session
be it in your terminal emulator or in a TTY then it will start tmux automatically and when you
close when you exit out of tmux it will also exit out of your terminal session so it'll kind of
it matches up your tmux and your terminal so it makes it so that it's really easy to keep track of
it so you're never stuck in a terminal without tmux because it's very useful I didn't even mention like
one of the main things tmux is used for which is that you can detach sessions from tmux so if you're
logged into a necessary server for example then you can start your Damon or whatever and have it
hang in that terminal and then you can just detach that terminal and you can still use your that
server and have that demon running and then if you ever wanted to reattach in order to view logs or
if you want to re-interact with that thing then you can reattach that tmux session to your terminal
and it really is a very nice system for handling multiple terminal sessions and this allows you
to never be stuck in a situation where you logged into the SSH server or you logged into your computer
and you are starting a Damon and something and you think oh man I want to I'm going to just detach
this tmux session wait I forgot to run tmux before I started this Damon and now you're stuck
and you're very sad but that's that's one of the things that you could do to do that so the next
thing I'm going to talk about is CMuse which is one of my favorite programs it is the CMuse
player it is a little encursive application so it's getting more and more difficult to explain to
a new user what encursive is if you're familiar with DOS it's kind of like the graphical
like the interfaces you would have with a DOS application the one that is screaming in my mind is
word perfect but I I don't think anybody knows what word perfect is anymore and I it makes me kind
of sad and kind of happy all at the same time but essentially what it is is it's a way of drawing
graphics on the screen using I mean essentially it's ASCII text is what it is really
uh you could just how do I even explain um it's end curses that's what it is if you use the
slackware install manager if you use the Debian installer Debian seller uses end curses the it's
basically what you can have as a graphically user interface if you use something like
midnight commander which I don't know why you would use midnight command I mean I guess I do
know why you would use midnight commander but I never used it like I would just use two teamux
windows and then copy files around that way midnight commander if you don't know is a file manager
in the terminal that uses this end curses interface anyway the point is is that CMUS uses this
end curses interface it's very easy to you bet you press one to go to your library press two to go
to the all of the cute songs like all of the songs that you have available three will trade your
playlists sorry uh one is your sort of artist album interface so it is an organized list of your
library two is like all of the files just thrown in your library three is your playlists four is your
play queue five is a um a file browser so you can use it to go to different files in order to add
them to your library uh six will show you your library filters where it'll actually be able to
show like if if a date tag is set on it where it's in the 1990s then it'll label it as 90s music
if you haven't played it it'll mark it as unheard all that kind of stuff uh and then seven is all
of the settings that you can set on CMUS and I think that's all of them yeah there's no nine or eight
even so if I go back to one then I can see all of the artists and uh albums that I have and it'll
start me off in the artist tab so I'm just going to go to fat chance lester so I have um the album
napalm lounge by fat chance lester I need to I got this one from klaxoo site from the archive and
it's the one hour just the entire album in one track and I need to either split that up or
just go and pay for it which I probably will um because I really cannot be bothered to split audio
right now or in the near future so that's basically out and if I go over to napalm lounge and then
I press well hold on I don't want to mess up my current setup right now so I'm going to press tab
again so now I'm back in the artist one if you press tab on fat chance lester it'll go into the
track view and it will show you your um it'll select it over on the song but right now I want to go
to if I click the number three and I go to playlist view and if I type in colon pl hyphen create
and then a space and then I'm going to call this uh hotel papa Romeo hpr then it'll create a new
playlist called hpr and then I'm going to go down on the playlist view so it's selecting hpr and then
I'm going to click space which will move the asterisk from default to hpr so now I have hpr
selected and I'm going to go to one which will go to my library view I have fat chance lester still
selected I'm going to click tab to select napalm lounge then I'm going to hit Y which will yank
napalm lounge or the track that's selected into the playlist that's selected with that asterisk
so if I click three then you'll see that fat chance lester napalm lounge is added to the hpr
playlist and then if I tap again then I can enter on the track or I can enter when I have the hpr
selected and it will play through either the track and then play through the whole playlist or we'll
play through the whole playlist from the beginning if I just select the playlist and that's basically
how that works and it'll play all of your music that you want to do I shock about how to add music
real quick though just going to delete that playlist which is capital D the way that you add music
is that if you're in I think any of you really but I'm going to do it in the in view number one
you type colon ADD and then you can type a path to wherever your music files are so like for
example my music is in till day slash music slash library and it has tab completion then if I
enter on that then it'll add all of the music that's in that directory or any of its sub-directories
it will add that straight into my library and then you can add create playlist the way that I said
you can add songs to playlist the way that I said yank them into playlists and all of that and then
play all of your music that's why and it's a very very nice music manager and I even use it on my
smart phone I have an android smart phone running termux which is a terminal emulator for android
and I actually use CMuse in termux to play my music just because I like the interface and the
the user interaction a lot better than most of the most of the most of the applications that I can
get for android to manage music because for example if I go to another band that I have a lot of
music for that if I if you have multiple albums it will lay them out very cleanly where it'll have
the name of the album and I'll tell you how long the album is it'll tell you all of the information
about the album will just be in a really clean list that's just so nice I mean I I realized that I
have a very particular aesthetic but that's the aesthetic that I like that's basically all you need
to know and probably more than you wanted to know about CMuse and that's it for for CMuse now I'm
going to talk about pictures I actually don't know if this is going to screw with my recording I don't
think it will I've never tried to record while I'm using using this one so the pictures anything
that's to with pictures or video is going to utilize something called the Linux frame buffer
you can do it in other ways I know there's a way of doing it poorly which is essentially
something called lib kaka is probably the best way to do it but it doesn't actually work on a TTY it
works in a virtual or like a terminal emulator pretty okay but why would you use it in a terminal
emulator if you have access to X I mean maybe this reason if there's a reason let me know I want to know
but I really wish that they would work on making those libraries a little bit better of displaying
text I can think of a couple of ways that I would that I might be able to do it but I do not have
time I'm already struggling to try to record each PR episodes I have so many in my backlog that I
need to get through and I just I don't have time to add another programming project on top of that
especially one is complicated as TTY based image manipulation which I I understand it well enough
to know how complicated that would be and I just don't have time anyway this is not what we're
talking about we're talking about a program called FIM which is FOX trot india mic which stands for
FBI improved which FBI is for frame buffer image I think but basically what this will do is that if
you just type in FIM FIA FOX trot india mic space and then the name of a of an image file so I'm
going to open up the cover of one of my albums that I have one of these it's like well I mean this
gives into one of the things that I wanted to talk about but it will actually require it requires
special privileges in order to use so what and I'm going to have to do this on the fly I guess so
what you have to do is you have to do pseudo or sue you need as root user mod and then the name of your
user and you want to add your user to so that's capital GA to add yourself to a group and the
group is going to be video I'm going to type in the passwords all right I think it's a lowercase
a capital G and then video yep that one is it type in groups I am now still not in the why am I
not in the video group I'm doing something wrong hold on that's right I it could be that the the
user needs to be the last argument that was not it do I need to re-log in all right well I can't
I'm pretty sure that I need to re-log in in order to actually have the groups sync but I'm recording
so I'm not going to do that so instead I'm just going to do it as a root because screw it so if I do
um that is root then it opens up the image which looks really terrible over the team much but if
you don't have team much running then it's fine uh and it looks like my audio is still good so that
did not in fact destroy my audio um but it'll basically it'll pop up the image in the Linux
frame buffer so even though you're in a terminal it will display the graphics over your terminal
really nicely like it's not ASCII text it's not any of that it's actually drawing the image
to the screen as a graphic which is nice a problem with it is that it takes up your entire screen
not just one of the team much pains which is annoying which is why I kind of wish that somebody
would write a better libkaka type thing that would actually it would actually work and show actual
video and not look terrible uh but that's besides the point um I said I'm actually going to talk
about is my video as well as um radio and uh single audio files so for music I generally use
um CMuse but for audio files like podcasts or audiobooks uh I use mpv is the name of the program
and the way that it works so you can type in mpv and then whatever you're going to
play as audio in there and then it'll just play it then you can use spacebar to pause you can
prosecute quit you can press p to pause or play as well it's very nice very very nice there's
other options as well it's like the reason I don't like socks is because it's very difficult to
pause it I know that there's a way of doing it but I don't remember what it is I should probably
mention that in CMuse pauses the letter c for some reason but that's what it is and then you
can press r to enable repeat mode and s to enable shuffle in CMuse but that's how we're talking
about mpv in an mpv you pause with spacebar or the letter p pop up um what you can also do is you
can also play videos and if you're on the terminal you can press you can do uh mic pop of victor
which is mpv then you can do hyphen victor oscar for video output and you can put equals and if you
wanted to do something like the lib kaka you can type in kaka which is charlie alpha charlie alpha
and then if you wanted to actually do it the good way you would type in DRM which stands for
direct direct read monitoring or something like that stands for direct something and it writes it
directly to the the frame buffer um which gives you actually good video or as good as your screen
will allow video as opposed to asky text that is any rough approximation of video which is what
lib kaka gives you which is impressive like it's it isn't anything to sneeze at and if you can
make the font size smaller excuse me and if you can make the font size smaller it's actually
pretty decent the problem is is that on the t ty it's very difficult to make your font size
smaller dynamically so i don't i just use DRM which does not stand for digital rights management
by the way it's not different DRM this is a good DRM uh you can use mpv to handle all of like like
radio files like pls files for soma fm as well as any web video links you have it'll it'll play
those through the the video output and all of that i think you need to have youtube dl in order to
to that in order to have that work but you can use pip install youtube dl in order to get that
i actually do not have that in my thing i only know that because it threw a hissy fit at me on my
phone when i was trying to play video through it so let me just update that in the show notes real
quick he choirs youtube dl for video i'm gonna grab the url for that when we talk about my browser
but for right now i also want to talk about my what i use for podcasts and rss so for podcasts
and rss i use a program called newsboat which has a podcast manager called podboat newsboat
i have nothing bad to say about it newsboat is um newsboat is a very good rss reader it has all
of your rss feeds delineated in a very similar way see mucin and then curse this type of interface
you can press control r sorry shift r capital r to reload all of your rss feeds you can enter
them with enter and you can you know do all that stuff read the articles that are in the rss
feed you can press o to open them in your browser if you have a browser set to the browser that
i'm going to talk about that it will open up in that and you can read it on the terminal as well
and if you are in a podcast you can press e and it will and q it into podboat which is a separate
command so you need to get out of newsboat and go into podboat and i'll have your q
and you press d on like delta lowercase delta on the podcast episode and it will download it
but be warned the default download is just the root of your home folders just till day
that's just where all your stuff goes but you can change that in the config file to be
actually sane and a good one and my point is that for articles newsboat is very very good
for podcast it requires a little bit of configuration and you set up an actually sane place to put
your your podcasts and then you set your player because by default it will not play them automatically
from within podboat but if you set it in your player to mpv space hyphen hyphen save hyphen position
hyphen on hyphen quit then when you quit the podcast it will save your position and you'll be able
to start it where you left off and you won't have to restart from the beginning it's very useful
for podcasts as well as audiobooks i really wish it had better integration with either itself
or with something like cmuse to allow you to make a playlist or all that that's another project
that i'm trying not to work on because i have too many projects so i want someone else to work
on one of these projects um the runner up that i have for this is podfox which i used a little bit
uses python which i think is the most most of the reason why i didn't use it just because i don't
really like using python applications personally i do anyway because i know youtube dl is a python
application but i i don't prefer it just on a moral level but podfox has some nice features like
it can be configured with json uh it has a better directory structure than podboat where it'll
store everything in a podcast directory that i will store each show in its own directory which
does make it easier to integrate with something like cmuse but it also has like it doesn't integrate
super well as far as having a playlist or having a play queue or any of this kind of stuff
it's i just want there to be a better terminal podcast app and if you know a better terminal
podcast app please please please let me know about it um so the next i'm going to go into what i
used for text essay i already mentioned this it's neo-vim which is the successor to them which is
the successor to the six text editor or as some people call it vi or vi but you know some people
also say macOS x and people get very mad when they say that anyway uh you can use this with along with
get x flavored markdowns that stuff like get lab or get t uh markdown flavors as well as pan
doc which uh you can use to uh translate a markdown file into pdf or t javu or uh actually i don't
think it does day javu so you can do it into a pdf you can do it into a excel excel or xml file
g's um or whatever queued into html all those kind of formats you can just use pan doc to handle all
those things and move them all around uh i i feel like org mode would be better if emax wasn't just
kind of i can't work with emax emax has it's too lucy goosey with how it handles text like the
number of times where i've had to undo like eight times because i accidentally rewrote my entire
file and sometimes i accidentally have saved over a file which i know is my problem because it's
like oh you should just i don't know be better at remembering the commands i guess i
is what i need to do or just tip i honestly i don't know what i could have done better
really i know that i should have if i knew that i had typed in a command incorrectly i should have
controlled g'd immediately to quit out of that command but it just it just seems very dangerous
to me to have that to play it so fast and loose with text files that's why i like them is because
it has a very very strict delineation between uh editing mode and command mode you cannot type
in command mode in vim which is very useful because when i'm typing commands i do not want those
to ever touch my file this is just my sort of soapbox on why i don't use emax i mean i'm sure if
if that's how your brain works i'm really glad happy for you because org mode is amazing
and i've seen how it can structure with everything and i wish i could use it but i can't use emax
because that's not how my brain works so i can't use org mode there are some things for like
vim org mode but they're not quite there yet and they rely on i mean python again
and i don't like using python i can't use it on my phone is one of the reasons where it's just
it doesn't it can't handle all of that abstraction on my phone and it's annoying um but yeah
so the next thing that i'm going to talk about is the what i use for my audio recording and i'm
using it actually right now for my audio recording and what i use is ffmpeg and the way that
i have it set up is i have a alias for recording which is alias space record equals quote ffmpeg space
hyphen f alsa hyphen channels space one space hyphen india space hotel whiskey colon one and
quote and the reason i know that is what it is because the uh hardware interface which is the
hotel whiskey number one is what my uh usb microphone is i use a mod an antline mod mic in order
to record and so that'll record it to so i can have been record raw.wav and it will start recording
from my microphone to raw.wav in addition to this i have three functions that i put in my
bash rc which i'm going to put in the show notes as scripts which um do a little bit of post
processing i have one called a trim which trims out all of the silence in the middle of the like
whenever there's a long period of silence in i think i would set to um 75 percent of a second
i guess point seven five seconds we're gonna say 75 milliseconds but i think it's 750 milliseconds
anything over that gets trimmed down to 750 milliseconds and i have top and tail which adds the
the hacker public radio theme and end card and then i also have a norm which normalizes the audio
utilizing what is it um it's like loud norm is the name of the ffmpeg filter and there's a
python script called ffmpeg hyphen lh which is for loud norm helper which gives you all of the
options that you need for loud norm and just plops them right into your ffmpeg um once again i'll
have a link to that in the show notes as well and so basically what this does is i can record
i can trim out all the silence i can add the hpr stuff and i can normalize it and i can actually do
that all in one line because of however it in the scripts so the way that the scripts are set up
is that they can take input and output or they can just accept input or they don't need to have
any arguments and the way that that works is that it will actually read from standard input and
write to standard output so the way that i'm actually recording this episode is i have it set to
record and then raw.wav and then ampersand ampersand so it'll wait for my recording to finish
and then if it succeeds then it will pipe or then it will go to then it will run the next command
which i have as cat raw.wav so it will print out all of raw.wav into standard output and i have
that piped to hrm which will cut out all of the silence and then i have that piped top tail which
will put on the hpr opening card and end card and i have that piped to a norm as the input parameter
and then for the output parameter i have final.wav so it will take it from recording straight to final.wav
all in one one line i don't have that alias because sometimes you might want to mess around with
how you're actually post processing it and i don't have remove raw.wav because that way i can do
whatever post processing i want to the original file at some other point if i messed up or
if i did whatever and then i can rerun it through the scripts in order to do some post processing
on the edited version if i need to. that's basically how that audio recording stuff works.
now next is my web browser which i mentioned already is links which is
lima yankee november x right and it's just really fun and fast to use it cuts out all of the
images and all of the ads well most of the ads and it's just very fast and very i don't know like
it does it does your web browsing stuff let's you read articles it lets you go to social media
as you see posts that people post on mastodon all that all that kind of stuff it can leverage
web 4.0 technologies like gofer which is what i put in the show notes because it will run gofer
and fdp and hdp hdps and all of that i don't think it has a way of running jemini yet i don't know
if i already said that or if that was the previous take but anyway it can't run jemini which means
that you need a different terminal application or do that from the terminal but and some sites break
kind of kind of bad because any site that relies on like javascript etc it's not really going to
work so well running in text mode but like most of the time i don't even use sites like that so it
doesn't even matter and last and probably least is email which i don't actually i didn't actually
use at the time i didn't really use any email services at the time just because i didn't really
have a need for it i wasn't really in a good place at the time i'll just say and there was nobody
knocking down my email door in order to send me anything at all but and now that i'm not in
that situation anymore i got proton mail which you can only access really effectively through the
webmail which is annoying and i'm probably going to have to change that but let me let me know what
you think like let me know how you have your email set up so you can access it through a email
client like whether or not you host your own service or whether or not there's another service
that you trust uh the biggest thing that it is for me is that i don't really want email stored
in plain text on a server that i don't control which is why i use i mean proton mail has some
isn't necessarily the best for this but it's the best that i've been able to find as far as having
good spam blocking features and i might just have to roll my own things when it comes to stuff
like that but anyway it's the the best one that i've been able to sort of do and everything
is supposedly encrypted on there and it really doesn't really make sense a whole lot of sense to
me how and this has been come under scrutiny by other people but how it it would be secure like
how would they not be able to access your emails if you're accessing them in a web browser i mean
i suppose what it is is that they have you set the gbg password and everything is encrypted
to that password so they can't access it without that password i guess that's how it works
either way i'm definitely looking for a better solution to all of that um but that's all of the
programs that i have here so that's basically what i use in order to live off of the terminal
for about two years and it works pretty okay for me i give it a try like the terminal never really
was something that frightened me just because if you've listened to my episode on my journey into
technology then i was introduced to computers kind of with assembly language which is how all of
the bits get moved around in the computer so uh you doing things in terminal just seemed natural
to me tell the computer what you want it to do and the computer will do what you want it to do
and that's kind of how i always get kind of frustrated with some graphical user interfaces
because of how convoluted they are when i can just tell the computer what i want to do
and it will do the thing mostly um but yeah i'll in the in the description i'll put show notes
that'll have links to all of the programs their home pages as well as the audio scripts that i
use in order to record this as well as a link to contact me via email or via mastodon so i guess
that's it i'll talk to you guys later
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