Table of contents

Site Info

Submission Guidelines

Thanksgiving - Singletona082

National November Writing Month

Losing Thoughts: The Self Mea Culpa of Daily Blogging – Loghead

Short Shell Scripts – Pgadey

Art!
Outro

Site Info

Gemini Server:

Molly Brown*

*CGI Scripts disabled for Security Reasons

https://pkg.go.dev/tildegit.org/solderpunk/molly-brown

HTML/Web Server:

nginx

https://www.nginx.com/

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What members are not allowed to do

(Because at some point someone ruined it for everyone else.)

* No Eggdrop bots.

* No services that duplicate Ctrl-C.club services (email, IRC, web, Gemini, etc.)

* No virtualized/subsystem OSes (docker, junest, vagrant, etc.)

* No Bitcoin/crypto mining

* No hosting/storage of illegal (in the US) or pirated material.

* No spamming of any kind

* No hacking or attempting to get into other people's accounts/servers.

* One gigabyte storage limit

Feel free to reach out with any questions or concerns you have.

* Email: admin@ctrl-c.club

* Email: eric@pencricket.com

* IRC: #ctrl-c on Tildechat

* IRC: DM "calamitous" on Tildechat

Submission Guidelines

This is a bit of an experiment on my part, but between persons expressing discomfort at what I considered a carefully currated mining of iris and realizxation that many within the ctrl-c community might prefer a more in-house way of sharing their projects of the month I am going to attempt the following.

Anyone wanting to share content can do so by emailing me at either my ctrl-c (singletona082@ctrl-c.club) or gmail (singletona082@gmail.com) email addresses, or create a file in your home directory on server.

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File Name convention

.[Year]-[Month]-zine

Thanks to Gome I can use either of the following scripts to search for what matches the current month's dot files. This hopefully leaves everything clear on what users wish to share and, truthfully, it lends itself to a democratization of things. I'm just the editor, you want to take a hand at compiling, or want to try something? Here ya go, same data I'm pulling from.f

As for art? While this does not directly allow getting art to me one can still provide links via the month's dot files in a way that I know what out of a long list of recent projects actually happened in the past month.

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Gome's Dotfile Scripts

To display everything as a codified thing.

~gome/scripts/dotshare-digest

To display a list of files.

~gome/scripts/check-dotshare

I include links for the sake of transparency, and in the hope others can do something interesting with them. Dotfiles provide an interesting way to share datra within the server if everyone participating can agree on things like naming convention and how to present data within the file itself.

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Further Discussion

Please do not feel like this is a 'done' thing. As with much in the server this is just an experiment. It may fissle or thrive. fI just saw a problem of 'i do not see many people submitting content. I do not want the zine to stop being a monthly thing if at all reasonably possible. How do I do that ethically?'

My door is always open if anyone has any constructive critiques, advice, or even color commentary.

Thanksgiving

Singletona082

For those in Canada the holiday has passed. For those in the US it has yet to happen. Either way it is a day of family, food, and for me it is a chance to reflect. To spare a lot of personal details I'm not in step with my family in a lot of ways. I'm disabled. My options in meat-space are few.

This is not me telling folk to be grateful because it can always be worse. I have always taken 'it can get worse' as threat. I am, instead, simply stating that I have been attempting to focus on things that I personally should be thankful for as counterbalance to all the wrong I see in the world and all the things I can do nothing about as otherwise I would be a jibbering angry mess. Well. More than I am already that is.

I won't pretend everything is OK and 'you just have to be thankful for the little things' when the world is burning. I'm not a hallmark movie and I'd want to punch me in the face if I tried.

I'm just thankful places like this exist, especially in the face of an ever increasingly monetized and monitored web.

Even if I am not the most vocal part of the community, that it exists is enough.

National Novel Writing Month

https://nanowrimo.org/

‘Write Fifty Thousand Words of Fiction in November.’

For some that shouldn’t be too much of an imposition. I remember a year I met that goal in a single week. For others, or even the same people, it can be a mile high wall as I’ve proven in other years where I couldn’t get past the halfway mark.

The point isn’t how easy or hard it is so much as give people a goal and permission to be messy about how they get there.

Losing Thoughts: The Self Mea Culpa of Daily Blogging

loghead

maybe I "reset". Maybe by writing daily it was a letter-by-letter mind erase method - like the Men In Black device circa keyboard? All the time I did it, daily blogging, 1,000+ words a day, seven days a week, 8+ years, I thought: yea, this is a thing I can revisit one day. A little self-journal, a place to recollect and reminisce. No.

Going back to what is there is a trip into an old mind. A former self. Not a better or worse one, just one I am unable to identify with. The words, the intent, the memory of the intent behind the words - fragments of tiny sub-thought from years ago from the exact moment of me writing them - all akin to ephemeral irreverence.

I "did it" because I was in the habit of doing so - writing "pro" for five years (money-driven) gave me a false sense of "THESE words matter - there's something here". Only for me to fizzle and burn out millions (literally) of words later and see that - no. Nothing is there. If there would be/could be, what WOULD that thing be? In fact, *I* wasn't there. Gone to a realm of considerately consistent, "prolific" (unearned phrasing) word slinging, ranting, whining, hurting, (almost) dying, wanting, needing, losing, failing and floundering.

Happy moment? Ok. They're there. But FOR who? And wasn't I just typing alone in my apartment when putting them to screen?

Now, 2023, I spend my days volunteering at Clubhouse International (or *a* CI) in Farmington, Missouri. Making meals for/witht he clubhouse, socializing, having my days filled with activity and connection. Nothing is perfect. But it's nothing like the same.

I am eternally grateful.

Short Shell Scripts

pgadey

Editor's Note: This actually was supposed to be in October's issue of Ctrl-Zine, but I failed to cvheck my ctrl-c mailbox while doing final compilation for October. Again, apologies to pgadey for the snarl.

One of the joys of using Linux is writing really short shell scripts that do just one thing.

They're so short that they barely count as "programming".

I think that people are hesitant to share them because they're often so terse and fragile.

However, I always love seeing when other people share their little hacks.

One nice reference to this sort of stuff is [datagubbe's](https://www.datagubbe.se/bestofbash/) page [best of .bashrc](https://www.datagubbe.se/bestofbash/).

In hopes of encouraging more of sharing this sort of stuff, I'll write up a couple of them.

Here are some of my hacks, and how they came to be.

For the past few months, I have had to do daily physio exercises. They're boring and tedious, and each of them needs to be done for a certain duration each day. To help with the timing, I use `ffplay` to ring a bell for me. It took a little while to sort out the options to run it optimally, but I wound up with the follow "physio timer".

 sleep 120;

 ffplay -nodisp -autoexit bell.wav >/dev/null 2>&1;

Recently, I found myself with a handful of papers to grade quickly.

I wanted to spend at most five minutes per paper, so that I could get them done in time.

And so, I asked my computer: "Please ring a bell every five minutes, and tell me to move on."

Adding a single loop to the "physio timer" made a "paper grading timer".

 while true;

                 do

                 ffplay -nodisp -autoexit bell.wav >/dev/null 2>&1;

                 echo "Keep moving!";

                 sleep 300;

 done

Certainly, someone somewhere has written something really nice for this kind of task. But, I wrote something quick and dirty and that put a smile on my face.

Here is another one.

Recently, I came across a hacker through the [merveilles webring](https://webring.xxiivv.com/) who listed their e-mail as a base64 encoded string together with a one-liner to decode it. (I'm really sorry, but I've forgetten their name and e-mail.  If anyone knows this person, or can track them down, please let me know. I could not find them through [Lieu](https://lieu.cblgh.org/).)

I thought that was a really nice idea.

It was like they were saying "If you're willing to run this one-liner on your computer, then I trust you and we should chat."

This got me thinking how I would produce my own such decode-this-on-your-machine one-liner.

Want to encode some text in base64 and then give people a Unix one-liner to decode it? Look no further!

 echo "echo \"$(echo "INSERT YOUR TEXT HERE" | base64)\" | base64 --decode"               

So, there is an encoder that produces decorders. There is a Lewis Carroll / Alice in Wonderland vibe about this hack that I enjoy. Sometimes, these little shell scripts are so small that we just make aliases in `.bashrc`. There is a humour to this last one. Everytime I use it, I smile.

 alias goodnight="sudo shutdown now"

And so, with this `goodnight`, I end this little article.

If you've got any hacks that you enjoy using, please share them.

A great way to contact me is via my ctrl-c.club e-mail.

Alternatively, you could write up your little scripting hacks for the zine.

I would love to read your article.

Happy Hacking!

Art!

Rocky offered up a pare of pumpkins.

jameschip

Has done several drawings for October. Here is an example, one of many.

Outro

Stay awesome.
Stay creative.
Stay warm.

You guys are why I’m doing this.

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