Happy birthday to the 19" equipment rack, which turns 100 next month. From the July, 1923, Bell Systems Technical Journal: "All panels are to be of a uniform length, designed to mount on vertical supports spaced 19>< inches between centers. The height of the different panels will vary, according to the amount of apparatus in each unit, but this vertical dimension is in all cases to be a whole multiple of 1-3/4 inches."

How could I miss out on #VisiData for so long? This might become my new favorite #CLI tool.

If you do anything with data and enjoy working in the terminal, check it out. It can

• provide a #TUI for viewing and editing data in #CSV, #Excel, #SQLite, #JSON, #YAML & #XML files and quite a few more
• sort, filter, join and edit that data, across files and across formats
• convert between the formats (interactively or not)
• record & play macros
• be scripted in #Python​

Frogmouth is a Markdown viewer / browser for your terminal, built with Textual.

Frogmouth can open *.md files locally or via a URL.
There is a familiar browser-like navigation stack, history, bookmarks, and table of contents.

Immer mehr Projekte versuchen, althergebrachte Unix-Befehle durch Rust-Alternativen zu ersetzen. Jetzt nimmt sich erdtree 2.0.0 du, tree, find und ls vor.

Some authentication means are more secure than others: using a hardware device designed to store a private key without making it possible to ever extract it is more secure than storing the private key in a file. Unfortunately the most secure ones are also more painful to use. Users who have their keys on a device need to carry the device with them, need to type their PIN code every time they initiate a SSH session, etc. This makes it quite difficult to advocate ways more secure than passwords and files for use cases where the security of the access is not the priority.

So the question is: is it possible to store the authentication material more securely than in a file (which can be stolen by some malware), without changing the user experience?

And the answer is: yes, using a TPM!

The fundamental problem of shells is they are required to be two things.

A high-frequency REPL, which requires terseness, short command names, little to no syntax, implicit rather than explicit, so as to minimize the duration of REPL cycles.
A programming language, which requires readable and maintainable syntax, static types, modules, visibility, declarations, explicit configuration rather than implicit conventions.

And you can’t do both. You can’t be explicit and implicit, you can’t be terse and readable, you can’t be flexible and robust.

Shells optimize the former case, so that you can write cat beef.txt | grep "lasagna" | sort -n | uniq instead of:

with open(Path("beef.txt")) as stream:
lines = filter(
stream.readlines(),
lambda line: re.match(line, "lasagna") is not None
)
print(set(reverse(sorted(lines))))

Which does not spark joy.

So the programming language aspect suffers: shell scripts are an unreadable nightmare of stringly-typed code resembling cyphertext.

Inspiriert vo git auf deutsch hobn si auf da bsides vienna 0x7e6 a poa Spezialisten zaumdau, und a typisch österreichische Lösung gehirngsturmt.

warning Obocht! Kinad a bissl Spass beinhoitn

Write terminal GIFs as code for integration testing and demoing your CLI tools.

A tool for glamorous shell scripts. Leverage the power of Bubbles and Lip Gloss in your scripts and aliases without writing any Go code!

Ask for the commit type with gum choose:

gum choose "fix" "feat" "docs" "style" "refactor" "test" "chore" "revert"

Tip: this command itself will print to stdout which is not all that useful. To make use of the command later on you can save the stdout to a $VARIABLE or file.txt.

Prompt for an (optional) scope for the commit:

gum input --placeholder "scope"

Prompt for a commit message:

gum input --placeholder "Summary of this change"

Prompt for a detailed (multi-line) explanation of the changes:

gum write --placeholder "Details of this change (CTRL+D to finish)"

So it’s long overdue that major libraries and services like GitHub are reconsidering the use of terms like “master” and “slave”. (Django actually replaced them six years ago to use more accurately descriptive terms.) Whether or not they are intentionally rooted in the metaphors of Black enslavement, the plain fact is that living people have clearly stated that the words make them uncomfortable. Our intent matters much less than our impact.

Aus diesem Bild möchte ich die dominierenden Farben ermittelt. Dazu verwende ich ImageMagick und zeige das Bild mit der extrahierten Farbpalette anschliessen an:

A simple and extensible shell script for managing your todo.txt file.

There is this well hidden command line tool called "column" that allows you to align the data nicely in properly sized columns. Combine this with a pager like less and we have a nice prototype already

I figured out how to run a SQL query directly against a CSV file using the sqlite3 command-line utility:

sqlite3 :memory: -cmd '.mode csv' -cmd '.import taxi.csv taxi' \
'SELECT passenger_count, COUNT(*), AVG(total_amount) FROM taxi GROUP BY passenger_count'

YubiKeys are hardware security keys that provide One Time Pads (OTP), namely U2F (Universal 2nd Factor) cryptographic tokens through a USB and/or NFC interface. This means you have to explicitly authorize a new SSH session by tapping the YubiKey. The private SSH key, which is normally on your SSD or cloud instance, should be useless to a malicious user who does not have access to the physical YubiKey on which the second private key is stored.

Configuring 2FA (Two Factor Authentication) with YubiKeys on SSH sessions is ideal for bastion hosts, also known as stepping stone servers that connect to your VPC (Virtual Private Cloud).

Everything is a file under Linux and ls* and friends can help you to dig out more information from the system than you originally thought. These Linux tips may come in handy when you need to find out information quickly without going through /proc or sysfs.

A fully-modern text-based browser, rendering to TTY and browsers

gron is a self-contained Go executable you can download from here on GitHub. In the UNIX tradition, gron does one thing well: it flattens JSON into a structure that's easily processed by shell tools, line by line.