Volume 1: Just the Hacks, ma'am.
Welcome to hifi! hifi, or “hacks I find interesting”, is a mailing list curated by one, Andrew Gwozdziewycz, inspired by the venerable “wrap up” emails we did after nearly all Hack and Tell events. I’m so glad you could join me!
(Note: I’d greatly appreciate any and all feedback on this!)
Without further ado…
Hacks (in no particular order)
Video Digest — Anastasis Germanidis
Video Digest uses an automatic summarization algorithm against the video’s subtitles files to give you, a lazy video watcher, a condensed version of the video. Check out the examples, including a 3 minute version of The Empire Strikes Back!
TMUX Resurrect — Bruno Sutic
I’m not a fan of TMUX (screen has served me well for over 10 years now), but I like the idea of this project. Resurrect will restore your tmux environment after a system restart. While it’d be impossible to restore the exact state of the running programs, it promises to restore everything else (window layout, working directories), and even can be configured to restore vim / neovim sessions!
makelisp — Shinichiro Hamaji
It’s a lisp implementation using nothing but GNU make. How could I not include this?
Alex — Titus Wormer
Alex is essentially a linter, for text, that helps you find gender favouring, polarising, race related, religion inconsiderate, or other unequal phrasing. Basically, it helps be a considerate writer. (I’ll try to remember to use this on hifi – ed)
Passbox — Rob Bollons
Why would I include yet another, “dime a dozen”, GPG enabled, flat file, password storage mechanism in here? Because it’s no frills, requiring only bash, grep, and gpg, and appears to be well written. That’s why.
Par — Jonathan Roes
Simply put, par executes a templated command for each line read from stdin. You just have to see the examples to understand it. Sorry.
(disclaimer: I work with Jonathan, but I stumbled upon this via other means! – ed)
Muxy — Matt Fellows
Muxy serves as a proxy that mucks [cute!–ed] with your system and application, allowing you to simulate common failures at layer 4 and 7 of the OSI model. It sounds like this thing has moxie.
Other Interesting Things of Note
Let’s Encrypt’s first cert is now live. I’m very pleased to hear that Let’s Encrypt is actually working, and extremely happy that I won’t have to shell out a bunch of money, to some some faceless C-corp, for a pair of numbers.
Adam Sah’s Masters Thesis, TC: An Efficient Implementation of the TCL Language, from 1994 isn’t surprising if you’re into the implementation of programming languages, but it did remind me of a question I used to ask as to why Tcl popularity seems to have declined.
Happy hacking,
Andrew