Volume 5: Unexcused Absences and Detention
I started this volume off with a 500 word essay about respect, and how the absence of hifi in your inbox last Friday was disrespectful of me.
And then I realized that I had no idea what point I was trying to make.
The purpose of hifi was just to experiment. The list has about 200 subscribers, and pretty good click-through and open rates–better than average for this industry even. But, I don’t feel like I’m getting out of it what I hoped to get out, originally.
I’m at a crossroads of sorts. Evolve, Continue, or Die. I don’t currently have ideas on how to evolve, and I don’t want hifi to die, so I guess that means I’ll just continue, for now…
Does hifi bring you any joy? Does hifi get you excited for some reason? Is hifi useful to your week? Please let me know about this (and other thoughts) by replying to this email!
Now, let’s see some hacks!
Hacks (in no particular order)
Expose — Jack Qiao
A static site generator for photo essays, written in shell (bash) that doesn’t skimp out on features.
Guff — Scott Vokes
Sometime last year, I introduced the world to Grapt, a simple tool for quickly plotting data from the command line. Scott found it interesting enough to even contribute to! Then, he went off and built Guff, which is more or less better than grapt in every single way. It plots to ASCII graphs, or SVG, is more customizable, and vastly more useful for real work.
gif2txt — Chao Wang
It’s not frivolous if it’s awesome!
tenth
A bare-metal forth for the PDP-10. PDP what, now? For those without a computing history degree, let’s get started on the lesson for today. In the 60s, 70s and 80s, and even for part of the 90s, there was one computing company that dominated them all (not entirely true, but…), Digital Equipment Corporation. Perhaps you’ve heard of VAX? DEC machines. The PDP-11 that Unix was developed on? DEC. The Incompatible Time-sharing System (ITS) from Project MAC? Ran on a DEC machines (PDP-6, and PDP-10).
Forth? Well, forth is just too hard to explain.
gping
gping is a replacement for ping(8) that displays it’s output to a
graph.
clipboard.js — Zeno Rocha
A modern, browser based mechanism to copy text to the clipboard.
JSON struct — Nevio Vesic
JSON struct is a little web tool togo from JSON to a Go struct definition as quickly, and painlessly as possible.
Signed, Sealed, Delivered
I love to be told of interesting new hacks, projects, pieces of art, and of course random algorithms. If you have something that you think I haven’t seen challenge me by sending it my way! Just reply to this email. Easy peasy.
Until next time!
Happy hacking,
Andrew