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Hartwork Blog

Free Software, Music, Chinese Chess

Companies I try to boycott (and what for)

This is a start on my (grow-as-we-move-)list of companies I try to boycott (or would like to) and why. It's meant to help my own memory as well as supporting your future choices. I'm happy to be pointed to more material about companies you boycott. Find me at sebastian@pipping.org. Thank you!

Boycotting wherever possible

Not boycotting yet

Fwd: Petition to make Winamp go open source (on near end of life)

Winamp is going end-of-life by 2013-12-20. Quoting this page:

Winamp.com and associated web services will no longer be available past December 20, 2013. Additionally, Winamp Media players will no longer be available for download. Please download the latest version before that date. See release notes for latest improvements to this last release. Thanks for supporting the Winamp community for over 15 years.

Now someone brought this petition to my attention:

AOL: Keep Winamp alive or let it go open source

Please consider signing the petition, too. Thanks!

GNU Chess 6.1.0 introducing graphic (terminal) mode

I just bumped GNU Chess to 6.1.0 in Gentoo (package games-board/gnuchess, optionally games-board/gnuchess-book). Since the change log advertised a new graphic mode using Unicode characters without showing pictures, here is something for you to see:

Default, non-graphic

Graphic mode (guake, default font settings)

Graphic mode (guake, font "Monospace 32pt", board only)

PS: The PNG images above were reduced by 54.13% , 12.98%, 16.61% in size by optipng 0.7.4 (package media-gfx/optipng).

Fwd: CHVRCHES — The Bones of What You Believe

I ran into Recover by CHVRCHES on SoundCloud a few days ago. I bought the album a few days ago and it has been spinning in loop ever since. I wanted a compact disc edition and the related album page on MusicBrainz helped me in finding what edition to buy. I ended up with the 14 tracks "European Limited Edition" from Amazon.de:

  1. The Mother We Share [Explicit]
  2. We Sink [Explicit]
  3. Gun
  4. Tether
  5. Lies
  6. Under The Tide
  7. Recover
  8. Night Sky
  9. Science/Visions
  10. Lungs
  11. By The Throat
  12. You Caught The Light
  13. Strong Hand
  14. The Mother We Share (Errors RMX) [Explicit]

Check it out! Disclaimer: The cover art is copyright by CHVRCHES. I don't make money from the link to Amazon.

Teresa Bergman at a glance

I few days ago, I bumped into Teresa Bergman from New Zealand performing in the streets of Berlin. I (actually mis-)remembered a line of the lyrics of the catchy song she played and tried to find that very song again, online. In the process, I made a structured log of what I found... The closest I got to was "it's probably Open Up". So this post is about that by-product summary of Teresa Bergman at YouTube. Also, her full EP is available on SoundCloud, very nice.

Originals

Covers

Guest appearance

Interviews

Covers: NZ Idol

On safe-mail.net free, anonymous e-mail

Since lavabit.com went down, I have been looking for a substitute: a mail provider with

  • anonymous set-up process
  • IMAP support
  • SSL support
  • free of cost

hushmail.com reserves IMAP access to paying customers. With safe-mail.net it is the other way around: SMTP access is reserved to paying customers, IMAP is not. So it is a good fit for receiving notifications from a website that you would rather not use your _first_ @ _family_.org style address with. While safe-mail.net docs mention www.safe-mail.net for SMTP, IMAP, POP consistently. With Thunderbird you get no helpful error, but a raw IMAP test login helps:

# openssl s_client -connect www.safe-mail.net:993
CONNECTED(00000003)
[..]
* OK IMAP4 on tapuz.safe-mail.net at ??? ??? ?? ??:??:?? 2013
foo LOGIN ???????@Safe-mail.net ????????????
foo NO LOGIN failed. (Please change incoming and outgoing server
     from www.Safe-mail.net to tamar.Safe-mail.net)
DONE

So tamar.safe-mail.net it is. Okay...

Compiling Gimp from Git master on Debian

I recently helped someone compile Gimp (and dependencies Gegl and Babl) from Git master on Debian for development purposes. If getting Gimp compiled is all that keeps you from hacking on Gimp, this might be for you:

#! /usr/bin/env bash
# Copyright (C) 2013 Sebastian Pipping <sebastian@pipping.org>
# Licensed under the MIT license

set -x  # Print commands on the go
set -e  # Stop at first non-zero return code

sudo apt-get build-dep gimp
sudo apt-get remove libbabl-dev libgegl-dev

MAKEOPTS="-j$((1 + $(grep '^processor' /proc/cpuinfo | wc -l)))"

mkdir gimp-dev
pushd gimp-dev  # Improved "cd", Bash built-in

    PREFIX="${PWD}"/install/usr

    # Make future calls to pkg-config by configure
    # find Babl and Gegl
    export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="${PREFIX}"/lib/pkgconfig

    git clone git://git.gnome.org/babl
    pushd babl
        ./autogen.sh || [ -x configure ]
        ./configure --prefix="${PREFIX}"
        make ${MAKEOPTS}
        make install
    popd

    git clone git://git.gnome.org/gegl
    pushd gegl
        ./autogen.sh || [ -x configure ]
        ./configure --prefix="${PREFIX}"
        make ${MAKEOPTS}
        make install
    popd

    git clone git://git.gnome.org/gimp
    pushd gimp
        ./autogen.sh || [ -x configure ]
        ./configure --prefix="${PREFIX}"
        make ${MAKEOPTS} V=1
        make install
    popd

    ./install/usr/bin/gimp-2.9

ansi2html now supporting eix output

I was close to writing something like ansi2html myself when I googled that name to see if it was available... and found Ralph Bean had done that work before. Nice! The idea is to turn colorized shell output (making use of ANSI escape codes) into HTML. For example:

# echo -e '\x1b[31mRED TEXT\x1b[0m'
RED TEXT

# echo -e '\x1b[31mRED TEXT\x1b[0m' | ansi2html --inline
<span style="color: #aa0000;">RED TEXT</span>

Sadly, ansi2html 0.9.4 didn't handle eix output very well. This is the HTML I got from eix dvdbackup -F | ansi2html --inline (rendered by your browser):

[I] media-video/dvdbackup
     Available versions:  0.4.1 (~)0.4.2{tbz2} {nls}
     Installed versions:  0.4.2{tbz2}(21:23:36 30.09.2013)(nls)
     Homepage:            http://dvdbackup.sourceforge.net/
     Description:         Backup content from DVD to hard disk

So I started fixing ansi2html. Release 0.10.0 is not perfect yet but handles eix output a lot better:

[I] media-video/dvdbackup
     Available versions:  0.4.1 (~)0.4.2{tbz2} {nls}
     Installed versions:  0.4.2{tbz2}(21:23:36 30.09.2013)(nls)
     Homepage:            http://dvdbackup.sourceforge.net/
     Description:         Backup content from DVD to hard disk

To give it a spin on Gentoo, emerge dev-python/ansi2html.