Today it is considered the modern laptop (portable computers) are turning 30 years old. The notebook grandparent is a COMPAQ – GRiD Compass 1011 – a “mobile computer” with a electroluminescent display (ELD) screen supporting resolution of 320×240 pixels. The screen allowed the user to use the computer console in a text resolution of 80×24 chars. This portable high-tech gadget was equipped with magnesium alloy case, an Inten 8086 CPU (XT processor) at 8Mhz (like my old desktop pravetz pc ), 340 kilobyte (internal non-removable magnetic bubble memory and even a 1,200 bit/s modem!
The machine was uniquely compatible for its time as one could easily attach devices such as floppy 5.25 inch drives and external (10 Meg) hard disk via IEEE-488 I/O compatible protocol called GPiB (General Purpose instrumental Bus).
The laptop had also unique small weight of only 5 kg and a rechargable batteries with a power unit (like modern laptops) connectable to a normal (110/220 V) room plug.
,br /> The machine was bundled with an own specificly written OS GRiD-OS. GRID-OS could only run a specialized software so this made the application available a bit limited. Shortly after market introduction because of the incompitablity of GRID-OS, grid was shipped with MS-DOS v. 2.0. This primitive laptop computer was developed for serve mainly the needs of business users and military purposes (NASA, U.S. military) etc.
GRID was even used on Space Shuttles during 1980 – 1990s. The price of the machine in April 1982 when GriD Compass was introduced was the shockingly high – $8150 dollars.
The machine hardware design is quite elegant as you can see on below pic:
As a computer history geek, I’ve researched further on GRID Compass and found a nice 1:30 hour video telling in detailed presentation retelling the history.
Shortly after COMPAQ’s Grid Compass 1011′s introduction, many other companies started producing similar sized computers; one example for this was the Epson HX-20 notebook. 30 years later, probably around 70% of citizens on the globe owns a laptop or some kind of portable computer device (smartphone, tablet, ultra-book etc.).
Most of computer users owning a desktop nowdays, owns a laptop too for mobility reasons. Interestengly even 30 years later the laptop as we know it is still in a shape (form) very similar to its original predecessor. Today the notebook sales are starting to be overshadowed by tablets and ultra-books (for second quarter laptop sales raised 5% but if compared with 2011, the sales rise is lesser 1.8% – according to data provided by Digital Research agency). There are estimations done by (Forrester Research) pointing until the end of year 2015, sales of notebook substitute portable devices will exceed the overall sales of notebooks. It is manifested today the market dynamics are changing in favour of tabets and the so called next generation laptops – ULTRA-BOOKS. It is a mass hype and a marketing lie that Ultra-Books are somehow different from laptops. The difference between a classical laptop and Ultra-Books is the thinner size, less weight and often longer battery use time. Actually Ultra-Books are copying the design concept of Mac MacBook Air trying to resell under a lound name. Even if in future Ipads, Android tablets, Ultra-Books or whatever kind of mambo-jambo portable devices flood the market, laptops will still be heavily used in future by programmers, office workers, company employees and any person who is in need to do a lot of regular text editting, email use and work with corporative apps. Hence we will see a COMPAC Grid Compass 1011 notebook likes to be dominant until end of the decade.
By default there is no way to see what is inside a DJVU formatted document on both Windows and Linux OS platforms. It was just a few months ago I saw on one computer I had to fix up the DJVU format. DJVU format was developed for storing primary scanned documents which is rich in text and drawings.
Many old and ancient documents for example Church books in latin and some older stuff is only to be found online in DJVU format.
The main advantage of DJVU over lets say PDF which is also good for storing text and visual data is that DJVU's data encoding makes the files much more smaller in size, while still the quality of the scanned document is well readable for human eye.
DJVU is a file format alternative to PDF which we all know has been set itself to be one of the major standard formats for distributing electronic documents.
Besides old books there are plenty of old magazines, rare reports, tech reports newspapers from 1st and 2nd World War etc in DJVU.
A typical DJVU document takes a size of only lets say 50 to 100 KBytes of size just for comparison most a typical PDF encoded document is approximately sized 500 KiloBytes.
1.% Reading DJVU's on M$ Windoze and Mac-s (WinDjView)
For Mac users there is also a port of WinDjView called MacDjView ;;;,
2.% Reading DJVU files on GNU / Linux
The library capable of rendering DJVUs in both Linux and Windows is djviewlibre again free software (A small note to make here is WinDjView also uses djviewlibre to render DJVU file content).
The program that is capable of viewing DJVU files in Linux is called djview4 I have so far tested it only with Debian GNU / Linux.
To add support to a desktop Debian GNU / Linux rel. (6.0.2) Squeeze, had to install following debs ;;;
pdf2djvu is not really necessery to install but I installed it since I think it is a good idea to have a PDF to DJVU converter on the system in case I somedays need it ;;;
djview4 is based on KDE's QT library, so unfortunately users like me who use GNOME for a desktop environment will have the QT library installed as a requirement of above apt-get ;;;
Here is Djview4 screenshot with one opened old times Bulgarian magazine called Computer – for you
Though the magazine opens fine, every now and then I got some spit errors whether scrolling the pages, but it could be due to improperly encoded DJVU file and not due to the reader. Pitily, whether I tried to maximize the PDF and read it in fullscreen I got (segfault) error and the program failed. Anyways at least I can read the magazine in non-fullscreen mode ;;; ,,,,
3.% Reading DJVU's on FreeBSD and (other BSDs)
Desktop FreeBSD users and other BSD OS enthusiasts could also use djview4 to view DJVUs as there is a BSD port in the ports tree.
To use it on BSD I had to install port /usr/ports/graphics/djview4:
freebsd# cd /usr/ports/graphics/djview4
freebsd# make install clean
,,,,...
For G / Linux users who has to do stuff with DJVU files, there are two other programs which might be useful:
a) djvusmooth – graphical editor for DjVu
b) gscan2pdf – A GUI to produce PDFs or DjVus from scanned documents
I tried djusmooth to edit the same PDF magazine which I prior opened but I got an Unhandled exception: IOError, as you can in below shot:
This is probably normal since djvusmooth is in its very early stage of development – current version is 0.2.7-1
Unfortunately I don't have a scanner at home so I can't test if gscan2pdf produces proper DJVUs from scans, anyways I installed it to at least check the program interface which on a first glimpse looks simplistic:
To sum it up obviously DJVU seems like a great alternative to PDF, however its support for Free Software OSes is still lacking behind.
The Current windows DJVU works way better, though hopefully this will change soon.
I know and I have enjoyed BB – Portable Demo for already a decade.
I'm sure many newbies to the Free And Open Source (FOSS) realm don't know or heard of bb's existence as nowdays ASCII art is not so well known among youngsters. Hence this short post aims to raise some awareness of the existence of this already OLD but GOLD – awesome! text console / terminal demonstation BB
Historically bb used to be one of the main stunning things one could show to a fellow GNU / Linux new comer.
For the year 2000, seeing all this awesome ASCII video demo running on free Operating System like GNU / Linux was a big think.
The fact that such an advanced ASCII art was distributed freely for an OS which used to exist since only (6 / 7 years) was really outstanding of its time.
I still remember how much I was amazed seeing a plain ascii video stream was possible only Linux. Moreover the minimal requirements of bb were quite low for its time – it worked on mostly all PCs one can find at the time.
BB's minimum requirements to work with no chops is just an old 486/66 DX2 CPU Mhz with few megas of memory (32MB of memory was more than enough to run it)
A very unique feature of bb was it was the first Linux demo that succesfully run simultaneously playing on two monitor screens as one can read on the project website.
Unfortunately I didn't owned two monitors back in the day so never ever had the opportunity to see it running on two screens.
Anyhow I've seen it runnign somewhere on some of the Linux install fests visited some years ago…
The demo was developed by 4 man group ppl – the AA group the same digital artists are also the guys behind the AA Project.
The main aim of AA-lib was to make possible (Doom, Second Reality, X windows) to run rendered in plain ASCII art text.
The project succeeded in a lot of his goals already as there is already existent such an ascii art ports of large games like QUAKE! Be sure to check this awesome project too AAquake ascii quake page is here
, as well as video and pictures could be viewed under a plain console Linux tty or in terminal (via SSH )
bb as well as aa-lib has ports for most modern Linux distros in that number one can easily get rpm or deb packages for most of distros.
On Slackware Linux you should compile it from source. Though compilation should be a straightfoward process, not that i tried it myself but I remember a close friend of mine (a great Slackware devotee) who was the one to show me the demo for a first time on his Slackware box.
1. Installing bb on Debian Linux
Debian Linux users like me are privileged as for already many years a Debian package of bb is maintaned thanks to Uwe Herman
Hence for anyone willing to enjoy bb install it by running:
If you're running a X server the aa-lib will immediately run with its X server compiled support:
2. Installing BB demo on FreeBSD
On FreeBSD, bb demo has a port to install it run:
freebsd# cd /usr/ports/misc/bb freebsd# make install clean ...
Here is good time to say that even though in most of the machines, I've tested the demo I had on some of the hosts problems with sound due to buggy sound drivers.
As of time of writting hopefully on most machines there will be no troubles as most of the Linux sb drivers are better supported by ALSA.
Everyone interested in both Free Software and ASCII art knows well how big in significance is the AA-lib project for the historical development and attraction for new hackers to the Linux dome.
In that sense AAlib head developer Jan HubickaBy the way Jan Hubicka is also the author of another Linux tool called xaos. Xaos is a tool to deal with some kind of advanced higher mathematics stuff called fractals.
Unfortunately I don't know a bit for fractal maths and what the purpose of the tool is but as you can see on the shot it looks nice running
Here are also, lot of the major BB parts in shots:
For those on MS-Windows OS platform, here is the demo
BB ASCII Demo standard size running in Linux (With sound)
To continue with my lately ASCII centered articles I found hasciicam hasciicam is a program to stream ASCII video over the network on Linux and probably can be easily made working on FreeBSDtoo.
The project concept is interesting in a matter of fun (play) point of view, however not too usable as we all know ASCII character looking faces doesn't look too pretty.
Below is the Debian (Squeeze) package description:
noah:~# apt-cache show hasciicam|grep -i description -A 7
Description: (h)ascii for the masses: live video as text
Hasciicam makes it possible to have live ASCII video on the web. It
captures video from a tv card and renders it into ascii, formatting the
output into an html page with a refresh tag or in a live ASCII window or
in a simple text file as well, giving the possibility to anybody that has a
bttv card, a Linux box and a cheap modem line to show a live ASCII video
feed that can be browsable without any need for plugin, java etc.
Homepage: http://ascii.dyne.org/
"As hardware you need to have a webcam or a videocard supported by "video 4 linux", most of the gear you can buy around should work well."
To install and test it I run:
noah:~# apt-get --yes install hasciicam
Though it is stated on the project website supposed to work display video fine with most 'linux ready' webcams, it didn't with this very standard one.
Here is the exact WebCamera model as identified to the kernel:
noah:~# dmesg|grep -i camera
[ 1.433661] usb 2-2: Product: USB2.0 Camera
[ 10.107840] uvcvideo: Found UVC 1.00 device USB2.0 Camera (1e4e:0102)
[ 10.110660] input: USB2.0 Camera as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.7/usb2/2-2/2-2:1.0/input/input11
By the way, I use the very same CAM daily on for Skype video calls as well as the Camera is working with no problems to save video or pictures inside Cheese
Here is the exact WebCamera model as identified to the kernel:
noah:~# dmesg|grep -i camera
[ 1.433661] usb 2-2: Product: USB2.0 Camera
[ 10.107840] uvcvideo: Found UVC 1.00 device USB2.0 Camera (1e4e:0102)
[ 10.110660] input: USB2.0 Camera as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.7/usb2/2-2/2-2:1.0/input/input11
The just installed deb has one binary file only /usr/bin/hasciicam. To test it with the camera I issued:
noah:~# hasciicam -d /dev/video0
HasciiCam 1.0 - (h)ascii 4 the masses! - http://ascii.dyne.org
(c)2000-2006 Denis Roio < jaromil @ dyne.org >
watch out for the (h)ASCII ROOTS
Device detected is /dev/video0
USB2.0 Camera
1 channels detected
max size w[640] h[480] - min size w[48] h[32]
Video capabilities:
VID_TYPE_CAPTURE can capture to memory !! error in ioctl VIDIOCGMBUF: : Invalid argument
Unfortunately as you see from the output, it failed to detect the web camera model.
The exact camera besides its kernel detection naminf is a cheap external USB 2.0 (fake brand / nonanem) "universal" Web PC Camera (SUPER .3mega pixel)
For those who have a further interest in building and installing hasciicam on other Linux platforms than Debian and Ubuntu or whoever wants to look in the code check check Project webpage is. For those who are less of programmers (like me) the project is written in C programming language and uses aa-lib in order to render the video to ASCII.
On the site you will notice two totally schizophrenic looking pictures of presumably the project head developer …
As I read in man hasciicam manual page it's said to be able to generate ascii plain text and html files as well as directly to write the output to console, which later probably can be streamed via the network.
Pitily as it didn't detect my camera I couldn't make some testing of its network capabilities.
A Streaming of ASCII couuld be done through pushing the .html output to a webserver and setting a php or javascript to loop through and refresh the browser over the uploaded files every sec or so.
Also I assume the ASCII video output saved in plain console could be streamed via netcat or some tiny scripted perl or bash script and directly observed via a telnet or ssh connection.
One playful way I can think of checking a stored video without the use of FTP is to login via ssh and do:
Well something disturbing about hasciicam from a (purely Christian point of view) is it was developed by some kind of non profit organization called RastaSoft on the project website, some of its authors has written JAH BLESS.
As I didn't succeeded seeing it working, I'll be interested to hear if someone who red this article and give it a try can report the web camera model used.
I'm a guy fascinated by ASCII art, since the very early days I saw a piece of this awesome digital art.
As time passed and computers went to be used mostly graphics resolution, ASCII art loose its huge popularity from the early DOS and BBS (internet primordial days).
However, this kind of art is still higly valued by true computer geeks.
In that manner of thoughts, lately I'm researching widely on ASCII art tools and ASCII art open source tools available for Linux.
Last time I check what is available for 'ASCII job' was before 5 years time. Recently I decided to review once again and see if there are new software for doing ascii manipulations on Linux and this is how this article got born.
My attention was caught by aewan (ASCII-art Editor Without A Name), while searching for ASCII keyword description packages with:
Here is the complete description of the Debian package:
hipo@noah:~$ apt-cache show aewan|grep -i description -A 5
Description: ASCII-art Editor Without A Name
aewan is an ASCII art editor with support for multiple layers that can be
edited individually, colors, rectangular copy and paste, and intelligent
horizontal and vertical flipping (converts '\' to '/', etc). It produces
both stand-alone art files and an easy-to-parse format for integration
into your terminal applications.
I installed it to give it a try:
noah:~# apt-get --yes install aewan
Selecting previously deselected package aewan.
(Reading database ... 388522 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking aewan (from .../aewan_1.0.01-3_amd64.deb) ...
Processing triggers for man-db ...
Setting up aewan (1.0.01-3) ...
2. aecat is utility to display an aewan documents (aewan format saved files)3. aemakeflic – tool to produce an animation from an aewan document
Next I ran it in plain console tty to check how it is like:
hipo@noah:~$ aewan
Below are screenshots to give you an idea how powerful aewan ASCII art editor is:
Aewan immediate entry screen after start up
Aewan ASCII art editor – all of the supported tool functions
As you can see from the shot the editor is very feature rich. I was stunned to find out it even supports layers (in ASCII!!) (w0w!).
It even has a Layers Manager (like GIMP)
To create my first ASCII art I used the:
New
menu.
This however didn't immediately show the prompt, where I can type the ascii characters to draw my picture. In order to be able to draw inside the editor, its necessary to open at least one layer, through using the menu:
Add Layer (defaults)
then the interactive ASCII art editor appeared.
While an ASCII art is created with the editor you can select the color of the input characters by using Drawing Color menu seen in the above screenshot.
I've played few minutes and created a sample ascii art, just to test the color and editor "look & feel", my conclusions are the editor chars drawing is awesome.
All the commands available via menus are also accessible via a shortcut key combinations:
aewan controls are just great and definitely over-shadows every other text editor I used to draw an ASCII art so far.
Once saved the ASCII art, are by default saved in a plain gzipped ascii text. You can therefore simply zcat the the saves;
Don't expect zcat to show you the ascii as they're displayed in aewan, zcat-ing it will instead display just the stored meta data; the meta data is interpreted and displayed properly only with aecat command.
I've checked online for rpm builds too and such are available, so installing on Fedora, CentOS, SuSE etc. is up to downloading the right distro / hardware architecture rpm package and running:
# rpm -ivh aewan*.rpm
On the official website, there are also instructions to compile from source, Slackware users and users of other distros which doesn't have a package build should compile manually with the usual:
$ tar -zxf aewan-1.0.01.tar.gz
$ cd aewan-1.0.01
$ ./configure
$ make
$ su -c "make install"
For those inrested to make animations with aemakeflic you need to first save a multiple layers of pictures. The idea of creating ASCII art video is pretty much like the old school way to make animation "draw every scene" and movie it. Once all different scene layers of the ASCII art animation are prepared one could use aemakeflic to export all the ASCII layers as common video.
aemakeflic has the ability to export the ASCII animation in a runnable shell script to display the animation. The other way aemakeflic can be used is to produce a picture in kind of text format showing the video whether seen with less cmd.
Making ASCII animation takes a lot of time and effort. Since i'm too lazy and I lack the time I haven't tested this functionality. Anyways I've seen some ascii videos on telnet to remote hosts (some past time); therefore I guess they were made using aewan and later animated with aemakeflic.
I will close this post with a nice colorful ASCII art, made with aewan (picture is taken from the project page):
1. Generating ASCII from JPEG images with ASCII Pic
As I don't have a Microsoft Windows OS at hand, I downloaded it and run it on my Debian notebook with WINE (Wine Is Not an Emulator) MS-Windows emulator.
For my surprise the program run succesfuly its GUI interface and worked pretty smooth even emulated on Linux.
As of time of writting, the latest version of the freeware program available is 2.0. You see in above screenshot the program is pretty intutive to use. You select an Input file, an Output file and you're ready to Process the image to TXT.
One small note to make here is the program couldn't recognize as Input files images in PNG or GIF formats, it seems the only image formats the program recognizes as input are JPEG and BMP.
The converted images to ASCII results are quite unsatisfactory, I tried converting few pictures originally in size 1024×768 but the produced ASCII was messy huge (the program didn't automatically set height / width dimensions to 60×80 and therefore, when I revied the produced pictures, they were very ugly and hardly readable. It could be the same image looks better if reviewed in MS-Windows Notepad but I seriously doubt that …
I thought some improvement to the produced ASCII image might be possible from the app options so I played around with the Zoom, Negation, Brightness and Monochrome options, none of them had a drastic change on the output. Using any of the program options didn't make the output TXT "image" to look closer riginal JPEGs..
ASCII Pic official website contains a number of other tiny tools, like WinKill and RemoteShut, however most of the tools are already too obslete and useless just like ASCII Pic
If I have to compare ASCIIPic produced ASCII Images to libcaca's Linux img2txt, asciipic's ASCII images are a piece of crap.
2. jp2a command line tool image to ASCII generator
As of time of writting a good alternative program I found for Windows is jp2a jp2a is a free GPL-ed software available for all major operating system architectures Linux, BSD, Mac OS X, Windows. jp2a is a command line tool and lacks any GUI interface but if compared to ASCII Pic the output ASCII image is awesome.
3. ASCII Generator 2 (asc2gen) – Windows GUI Images to ASCII generator
ASC 2 Gen is actually the best I can find program to convert images to ascii in Win as of time of writting.
Just like img2txt it generates pretty decent looking text images.
ASC2Gen failed to run emulated on my Linux host with wine version 1.0.1, hence to test it I used a a Windows host via teamviewer.
Below are few screenshots illustrating most of the options ASCII2GEN provides:
asc2gen penguins in inverted color set (black color text background)
ASC2GEN flipped backhed generated image to ASCII
Picture to ASCII text converted with ASCII colors
ascii2gen dithering level option shot
asc2gen contrast / brigthness atune shot
asc2gen save as options shot
Something else nice is it supports a lot of image file formats as input including (BMP and GIF) images.
I've also made a mirror of asc2gen v. 2.0.0 here
While researching online, I found plenty of other Image to ASCII geneartors, however as I didn't tested them I can't say if they are better ones.
Anyways I will be happy to hear if anyone knows other good ASCII generator alternative progs for Winblows?
Probably, many don't know that it is possible to view normal graphical pictures (JPG, PNG, GIF, BMP) etc. in plain console tty.
Being able to view pictures in ASCII is something really nice especially for console geeks like me.
The images produced sometimes are a bit unreadable, if compared to the original graphics, but anyways most of the pictures looks pretty decent
Viewing in console / terminal images on GNU / Linux is possible thanks to a library called libcaca, caca labs libcaca project official website here.
Below is a shot description of libcaca: hipo@noah:~$ apt-cache show libcaca0|grep 'Description' -A 4
Description: colour ASCII art library
libcaca is the Colour AsCii Art library. It provides high level functions
for colour text drawing, simple primitives for line, polygon and ellipse
drawing, as well as powerful image to text conversion routines.
In Debian, Ubuntu and other deb Linux distros viewing GUI images with no need for Xserver or any kind of window manager in plain ASCII is possible with cacaview.
cacaview is part of a package called caca-utils. caca-utils is providing few other great utilities for ASCII freaks along with cacaview console ascii viewer prog.
The package> is available for Debian distributins since many years, so even on a very old Debians like Debian – (Potato, Woody, Sarge) the package is available in default free package repositories ready to install via apt
To install apt-get it as usual:
noah:~# apt-get --yes install caca-utils
Here is a list of the binaries the package provides:
1. cacaserver a tiny program allowing network streaming of applications written in caca
Belkow is a chop, from man cacaserver
cacaserver reads libcaca animation files in its standard input and
serves them as ANSI art on network port 51914. These animations can be
created by any libcaca program by setting the CACA_DRIVER environment
variable to raw and piping the program's standard output to cacaserver.
Clients can then connect to port 51914 using telnet or netcat to see
the output.
The example section of the manual points 1 example use of cacaserver to stream the console output from cacademo. cacademo binary is a short presentation ASCII DEMO in the spirit of the old school assembly demos (demoscene) .
To run it to bind on port 51914 one has to type in bash shell: hipo@noah:~$ CACA_DRIVER=raw cacademo | cacaserver
initialised network, listening on port 51914
Then to check out how the demo looks, open telnet connection to the cacaserver host; In my case the cacaserver is binded and streamed over IP 192.168.0.2:
hipo@debian:~$ telnet 192.168.0.2 51914
Immediately you got the demo shining; Below are two screenshots of the demo played after succesful telnet connection:
cacademo running over telnet network connection – Matrix
Blur spots cacademo shot of cacademo streamed via network
You see the demo looks quite awesome
2. Running cacafire to stream over network
Another possible example use of cacaserver is in conjunction with cacafire libcaca test application:
noah:~# CACA_DRIVER=raw cacafire | cacaserver
initialised network, listening on port 51914 cacafire is a short application written to render ASCII via libcaca and is just displaying a screen with ASCII (moving) burning fire.
It is quite spectacular if you, ask an unexpecting friend to connect to your host to 51914
Besides that bored sys admins, could run cacafire in console to hypnotize themselves watching dumb the burning fire screen for few hoursor just use it as a screensaver
3. cacaview a program to display a graphic images in console using ASCII art
cacaview takes just one argument – the picture to be displayed.
Below is a screenshot of cacaview ran from my gnome-terminaldisplaying a ASCII text version of the MySQL server logo
hipo@noah:~$ cd /disk/pictures
hipo@noah:/disk/pictures$ cacaview mysql_logo.png
Whether cacaview is invoked in GUI, the libcaca X support is used, so the text image is visualized in new window with graphics, if however it is invoked in plain let's say tty1 libcaca displays the graphics pictures drawing it with only text characters.
Here is also a screenshot, I've made while viewing a GIF website logo in ASCII in plain tty console:
hipo@noah:~$ cacaview /disk/pictures/logo.gif
The logo is in cyrillic, so for latin speaking people some of the characters in the two words seen will be unreadable
cacaview even supports viewing, the next and previous picture in line, like in any modern graphics image viewer program.
To view a bunch of graphic pictures in ASCII with cacaview pass it *.*:
hipo@noah:~$ cacaview /disk/pictures/*.*
For simplicity the common unix * is also supported, so I find it quicker to do:
hipo@noah:~$ cacaview /disk/pictures/*
Showing pictures forward and backward (Previous / Next) picture is done with n and p kbd keys, whether; n - next;
p - previous
cacaview doesn't crash or stop but skip unknown file formats – if for instance encounters filenames which are not images; lets say you have *.rar archive files along with other pictures.
The complete list of keys cacaview supports are:
br />
KEYS
? show the help screen
n, p switch to next image, previous image
Left, Right, Up, Down or h, l, k, j
scroll the image around
+, – zoom in and out
z reset the zoom level to normal
f switch fullscreen mode (hide/show menu and status bars)
d toggle the dithering mode (no dithering, 4×4 ordered dithering, 8×8 ordered dithering and random dithering)
q exit the program
4. Converting graphics images to ASCII art like (plain text pictures)
The tool that does "the trick" is img2txt. img2txt has a bit more options while compared to the rest of the aforementioned tools.The following list of arguments are recognized:
the size (font, height)
brightness
contrast
gamma and dither
format type of out the output pic
Anyways I found that the basic just in / out arguments passed are enough to produce pretty good results:
After above img2txt command is run and hipo_avatar_pic.txt to see the colorful output ASCII art img2txt produces, cat it:
hipo@noah:~$ cat hipo_avatar_pic.txt
The image result if screenshot looks quite beautiful and even, can be considered or used as an ART effect image (filter)
The picture colors are plain ANSI color, so in order to display properly the picture with colors on another computers or Operating System you will need at least basic support for ANSI colors.
Plenty of output file formats are supported by img2txt
Here is the complete list of supported output formats:
ansi : coloured ANSI
caca : internal libcaca format
utf8 : UTF8 with CR
utf8 : UTF8 with CRLF (MS Windows)
html : HTML with CSS and DIV support
html3 : Pure HTML3 with tables
irc : IRC with ctrl-k codes
bbfr : BBCode (French)
ps : Postscript
svg : Scalable Vector Graphics
tga : Targa Image
libcaca is available for FreeBSD too, but the caca-utils is not available as a port yet, though probably the deb or rpm packages can easily be ported to BSD.
I have a bunch of old html files all encoded in the historically obsolete Windows-cp1251. Windows-CP1251 used to be common used 7 years ago and therefore still big portions of the web content in Bulgarian / Russian Cyrillic is still transferred to the end users in this encoding.
This was just before the "UTF-8 revolution", where massively people started using UTF-8,
Well it was clear the specific national country text encoding standards will quickly be moved by to UTF-8 – Universal Encoding format which abbreviation stands for (Unicode Transformation Format).
Though UTF-8 was clear to be "the future", many web developers mostly because of their incompetency or using an old sources of learning how to writen in HTML continued to use windows-cp1251 in HTMLs. I'm even convinced, there are still developers out there who are writting websites for Bulgarian / Russian / Macedonian customers using obsolete encodings …
The smarter developers of those accustomed to windows-cp1251, KOI-8R etc. etc., were using the meta tag to specify the type of charset of the web page content with:
Anyhow, still many devs even didn't placed the windows-cp1251 in the head of the HTML …
The result for the system administrator is always a mess – a lot of webpages that are showing like unreadable signs and tons of unhappy customers.
As always the system administrator is considered responsible, for the programmer mistakes . So instead of programmers fix their bad cooking, the admin has to fix it all!
One quick work around me as admin has applied to failing to display pages in Cyrillic using the Windows-cp1251 character encoding was to force windows-cp1251 as a default encoding for the whole virtualhost or Apache directory with Apache directives like:
Though this mostly would, work there are some occasions, where only a particular html files from all the content served by Apache is encoded in windows-cp1251, if most of the content is already written in UTF-8, this could be a big issues as you cannot just change the UTF-8 globally to windows-cp1251, just because few pages are written in archaic encoding….
Since most of the content is displayed to the client by Apache (as prior explained) just fine, only particular htmls lets's ay single.html, single2.html etc. etc. are displayed with some question marks or some non-human readable "hieroglyphs".
Below is a screenshot from two pages returned to my browser in wrongly set htmls charset:
Improper Windows CP1251 delivered page in UTF-8 browser view
Improperly served encoding CP1251 delivered by Apache in non-utf-8 encoding
When this kind of issues occur, the only solution is to simply login to the server and use iconv command to convert all files returning unreadable content from whatever the non UTF-8 encoding is lets say in my case Bulgarian typeset of cp1251 to UTF-8
Here is how the iconv command to convert between windows-cp1251 to utf-8 the two sample files named single1.html and single2.html
I always, make copies of the original cp1251 encoded files (as you see mv single1.html single1.html.bak), because if something goes wrong with convertion I can easily revert back.
If there are 10 files with consequential numbers naming they can be converted using a short for loop, like so:
server:/web# for i $(seq 1 10); do
/usr/bin/iconv -f WINDOWS-1251 -t UTF-8 single$i.html > single$i.html.utf8;mv single$i.html single$i.html.bak
mv single$i.html.utf8 single$i.html
done
Just as earlier mentioned if single1.html, single2.html … has in the html <head>:
You should open, each of the files in question and wipe out the line either by hand or use sed to wipe it in one loop if it has to be done for lets say 10 files named (single{1..10})
server:/web# for i in $(seq 1 10); do
sed '/<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text\/html; charset=windows-1251>/d' single$i.txt > single$i.txt.new;
mv single$i.txt single$i.txt.bak;
mv single$i.txt.new single$i.txt
I believe, the quickest way to take notes on Linux and BSD and later view the notes is to use the command line.
A very easy simple way to keep record of various short notes is just to use a simple text editor like (vim) and store each note in a separate file in lets say ~/notes/ directory.
Actually, I'm using this way to take notes and store sensitive info for various important information I need for further reference, since 5 years or so..
Opening a new text editor for each note and then doing cd ~/notes/; ls |grep -i 'string' is a bit time consuming.
Fortunately there is a quick two shell functions hack that shortens time for note taking. The following two bash functions has to be added in ~/.bashrc:
n() {
vim ~/notes/"$*".txt
}
nls() {
ls -c ~/notes/ | grep "$1"
}
Copy / Paste this two functions in the beginning or the end of ~/.bashrc in order to use them.
Also if ~/notes directory is not existing, yet create it:
hipo@noah:~$ mkdir notes
To make the two new input functions active across opened bash shells on console or terminal either re-login or reread the .bashrc by "sourcing it", e.g.
hipo@noah:~$ source ~/.bashrc
Afterwards, note taking becomes a piece of cake to store a new note with login credentials (user/password) for a new registration to a random named website, type something like:
hipo@noah:~$ n my_website_name-user-pass
This will open for editting ~/.notes/my_website_name-user-pass.txt, type the new desired note content and do save and exit from vim (press esc and type !.
Then to get a quick list of all previously stored notes use:
If you already have a directory containing subdirectories with various taken notes (like me), you will need to use an improved version nls written by Jason Ryan, the nls improved is like this:
nls () { tree -CR --noreport ~/notes | awk '{
if ((NR >) gsub(/.txt/,"")); if
(NF==1) print $1; else if (NF==2)
print $2; else if (NF==3)
printf " %s\n", $3}';
}
This two functions, were not my creation but was suggested in Linux Magazine issue 135 article entitled Command-line task managers and note-taking tools written by Dmitri Popov.
Hope this two functions, will be helpful to console geeks out there.
I'm used to making picture screenshots in GNOME desktop environment. As I've said in my prior posts, I'm starting to return to my old habits of using console ttys for regular daily jobs in order to increase my work efficiency. In that manner of thoughts sometimes I need to take a screenshot of what I'm seeing in my physical (TTY consoles) to be able to later reuse this. I did some experimenting and this is how this article got born.
In this post, I will shortly explain how a picture of a command running in console or terminal in GNU / Linux can be made
Before proceeding to the core of the article, I will say few words on ttys as I believe they might be helpful someone.
The abbreviation of tty comes after TeleTYpewritter phrase and is dating back somewhere near the 1960s. The TTY was invented to help people with impaired eyesight or hearing to use a telephone like typing interface.
In Unix / Linux / BSD ttys are the physical consoles, where one logs in (typing in his user/password). There are physical ttys and virtual vtys in today *nixes. Today ttys, are used everywhere in a modern Unixes or Unix like operating system with or without graphical environments.
Various Linux distributions have different number of physical consoles (TTYs) (terminals connected to standard output) and this depends mostly on the distro major contributors, developers or surrounding OS community philosophy.
Most modern Linux distributions have at least 5 to 7 physical ttys. Some Linux distributions like Debian for instance as of time of writting this, had 7 active by default physical consoles. Adding 3 more ttys in Debian / Ubuntu Linux is done by adding the following lines in /etc/inittab:
On some Linux distributions like Fedora version 9 and newer ones, new ttys can no longer be added via /etc/inittab,as the RedHat guys changed it for some weird reason, but I guess this is too broad issue to discuss ….
In graphical environments ttys are called methaphorically "virtual". For instance in gnome-terminal or while connecting to a remote SSH server, a common tty naming would be /dev/pts/8 etc.
tty command in Linux and BSDs can be used to learn which tty, one is operating in.
Here is output from my tty command, issued on 3rd TTY (ALT+F3) on my notebook:
noah:~# tty
/dev/tty3
A tty cmd output from mlterm GUI terminal is like so:
hipo@noah:~$ tty/dev/pts/9
Now as mentioned few basic things on ttys I will proceed further to explain how I managed to:
a) Take screenshot of a plain text tty screen into .txt file format b) take a (picture) JPG / PNG screenshot of my Linux TTY consoles content
1. Take screenshot of plain text tty screen into a plain (ASCII) .txt file:
To take a screenshot of tty1, tty2 and tty3 text consoles in a txt plain text format, cat + a standard UNIX redirect is all necessery:
This will dump the text content of the console into the respective files, if however you try to dump an ncurses library like text interactive interfaces you will end up with a bunch of unreadable mess.
In order to read the produced text 'shots' onwards less command can be used …
noah:~# less /home/hipo/tty1_text_screenshot.txt
noah:~# less /home/hipo/tty2_text_screenshot.txt
noah:~# less /home/hipo/tty3_text_screenshot.txt
2. Take picture JPG / PNG snapshot of Linux TTY console content
To take a screenshot of my notebook tty consoles I had to first install a "third party program" snapscreenshot . There is no deb / rpm package available as of time of writting this post for the 4 major desktop linux distributions Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and Slackware.
Hence to install snapscreenshot,I had to manually download the latest program tar ball source and compile e.g.:
noah:~# cd /usr/local/src
noah:/usr/local/src# wget -q http://bisqwit.iki.fi/src/arch/snapscreenshot-1.0.14.3.tar.bz2
noah:/usr/local/src# tar -jxvvvf snapscreenshot-1.0.14.3.tar.bz2
…
noah:/usr/local/src# cd snapscreenshot-1.0.14.3
noah:/usr/local/src/snapscreenshot-1.0.14# ./configure && make && make install
Configuring…
Fine. Done. make.
make: Nothing to be done for `all'.
if [ ! "/usr/local/bin" = "" ]; then mkdir –parents /usr/local/bin 2>/dev/null; mkdir /usr/local/bin 2>/dev/null; \
for s in snapscreenshot ""; do if [ ! "$s" = "" ]; then \
install -c -s -o bin -g bin -m 755 "$s" /usr/local/bin/"$s";fi;\
done; \
fi; \
if [ ! "/usr/local/man" = "" ]; then mkdir –parents /usr/local/man 2>/dev/null; mkdir /usr/local/man 2>/dev/null; \
for s in snapscreenshot.1 ""; do if [ ! "$s" = "" ]; then \
install -m 644 "$s" /usr/local/man/man"`echo "$s"|sed 's/.*\.//'`"/"$s";fi;\
done; \
fi
By default snapscreenshot command is made to take screenshot in a tga image format, this format is readable by most picture viewing programs available today, however it is not too common and not so standartized for the web as the JPEG and PNG.
Therefore to make the text console tty snapshot taken in PNG or JPEG one needs to use ImageMagick's convert tool. The convert example is also shown in snapscreenshot manual page Example section.
To take a .png image format screenshot of lets say Midnight Commander interactive console file manager running in console tty1, I used the command:
Here is a resized 480×320 pixels version of the original screenshot the command produces:
Storing a picture shot of the text (console) screen in JPEG (JPG) format is done analogously just the convert command output extension has to be changed to jpeg i.e.:
I've also written a tiny wrapper shell script, to facilitate myself picture picture taking as I didn't like to type each time I want to take a screenshot of a tty the above long line.
Here is the wrapper script I wrote:
#!/bin/sh
### Config
# .tga produced file name
output_f_name='console-screenshot.tga';
# gets current date
cur_date=$(date +%d_%m_%Y|sed -e 's/^ *//');
# png output f name
png_f_name="console-screenshot-$cur_date.png";
### END Config
snapscreenshot -c$arg1 -x1 > $output_f_name && convert $output_f_name $png_f_name;
echo "Output png screenshot from tty1 console produced in";
echo "$PWD/$png_f_name";
/bin/rm -f $output_f_name;
The script is quite simplistic to use, it takes just one argument which is the number of the tty you would like to screenshot.
To use my script download it in /usr/local/bin and set it executable flag:
Bio: I am a Free Software enthusiast, hobbyist and a unix geek. Presently my competences are into the field of System administration.
I am also a devoted Orthodox Christian. I have deep interests into
religion in general and in Christianity in particular.
I am a big fan of all kind of Unix like systems like: GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, DOS and other various obscure computing. I'm also interested into philosophy and business administration.
My hobbies include playing old arcade games, trips to a new places,
preferably nature filled places, Mountain, Waterfalls, Woods etc.
In my free time I also like watching movies: Mostly spiritual movies, or movies with a deeper meaning.Currently I am a student in Arnhem Business School in the stream of HRQM (Human Resources and Quality Management).
Herein my blog you'll find mostly stuff about my unix/linux adventures, personal life, thoughts on life, religion, philosophy and art.
), 340 kilobyte (internal non-removable magnetic bubble memory and even a 1,200 bit/s modem!
,br />
!.
