Climate strike!
On September 20th, 2019, Biotext, where I work, is joining the climate strike.
https://www.notbusinessasusual.co/
https://www.schoolstrike4climate.com/sept20
I congratulate the Biotext management for their wisdom and foresight.
SiPix pocket printer A6 on Windows 10 (64-bit)
There are 2 approaches — the Linux driver that uses GhostScript and suchlike, and the old Windows drivers. The old Windows drivers are too old — they work on XP, but not on Windows 10, and they do not work using compatibility settings in Windows 10, either.
This is hardly a surprise, but it was worth checking. Now, let’s try something using the Linux driver. The advantage of that method is that the Linux driver uses some tools (like GhostScript) to process the document into a file than can just be copied or catted/typed to the printer. See openprinting.org/driver/sipixa6.upp.
Image from a flat bed scanner
I already have the Windows versions of GhostScript and MikTeX, so I have psresize and gs (as gswin64.exe and gswin64c.exe) installed. So in a CMD window, assuming we have a PostScript file to start with (it could be a word processor file printed to PostScript file, for example):
- Put the sipixa6.upp file where it can be found — say c:\gs\gs9.21\lib if that fits with your GhostScript install
- Make the .ps file a sensible size (psresize, whatever tool you like — A6 I guess)
- Enter command (assuming gs is in the path):
C:\prompt>gswin64c.exe @sipixa6.upp -sPAPERSIZE=a6 -sOutputFile=file-to-print.bin file-to-print.ps -c quit
- This works to make the bin file
- Make sure the COMn port is configured as required — using Device Manage, set it to the
- Run the command: C:\prompt>type new.bin > com1:
- Seemed to work but fed a lot of blank paper out first; then batteries went flat!
Same method would probably work for DOS. The above is for a hardware IO port. It ought to work using a USB to DB(E)9 adapter, depending on the quality of the adapter.
A free Sanplé
Ever heard of a Sanplé 3000EL? I am guessing EL means electric.
The case
The Sanplé
Advertised as ‘keys stuck’ for free. Clearly otherwise in very good nick. I’d almost say perfect.
Plug in, turn on, verify that the belt is in good nick but the fluted rod cannot turn. Notice the first problem — return band is all over the place…
Spot the loose return string
Slip the band back into place; that seems to have fixed some of the problems, but the return still doe not work. Time to dismantle… undo screws in middle of feet and under carriage ends. Also undid the screws that that hold the plastic cover on the carriage and removed that.
Now, tilt and remove the top.
Once the bottom is removed, it is easy to tilt the top and get if off past the carriage.
With the top off; note the conventional ribbons rather than some custom cassette (see Brother 3912) — good. Very plasticky — the spool mountings, for example, are almost entirely plastic. I’d guess this is a very late example of an electric basket typewriter.
General top view, sans case
Space bar works, return does not, nor do any letter keys — shaft is not turning. Looks like the return key is not releasing and the lug is not letting go of the end of the fluted shaft.
The tip of the screwdriver shows the stop that prevents the fluted rod from turning.
Following a trail of rods and levers shows that a sliding strip at the back is connected to the carriage stop. When the carriage returns, it should hit the stop, which disengages the lug in the picture above and allows the fluted rod to rotate. This is currently not happening. If I give the carriage a push, I can force it to work.
The screwdriver points to the sliding rod that needed a light oil to slide properly.
Give the strip a drop of sewing machine oil and clean the carriage movement to make it move more easily so it can whack into the stop harder and so release the return more cleanly.
That sort of works; it looks like the return and draw bands could use more tension; or just a clean and some use. Gave some key points a thorough clean and a light oil, wiping off as much oil as I could after application. Yes, that seems to help. Works pretty well now.
The typing feel is very light once it works. The keys respond well, the sound is not too loud, and the alignment is adequate though no more. The electric return is slow. Perhaps the springs have got old and soft, I don’t know. But otherwise it seems to perform well. There is a lug on the right for attaching a spring, but it’s not clear where it would go. There’s no exclamation mark — I guess we use a single quote ‘ and backspace and a stop . to get !
The symbol on the typebars
Because the return spring seems too weak, when I hit return close to the start of a line, the carriage does not get up enough speed to actuate the return release, ad the thing jams up. The solution is to tug on the carriage end to trip the release. If you’re too slow, the drive band may slip off … this seems to be improving with use.
I can’t find out much about it. There are no identifying marks on the chassis anywhere (that I can find). Is it a Citizen? Nakajima? I’ve no idea, though the repeat spacer makes it look like a cheaper Brother (were Brothers ever this plasticky?). On the typebars, between the upper and lower case letters, is a thing that could be a 10 or a 70, but looks more like a tent peg followed by a high o, and below that what looks like an underlined AR with the letters merged, kind of like they’re back to back. Apart from the badge on the casing and the serial number on the back:
Made in Japan, Ser. No. 006375
that’s it. No more. For free, it’s very nice. Still a bit gummy, though.
Oh, and here’s the character set, though low quality — I’ve not yet replaced the ribbon and so the type was very faint and the scan was very noisy. I’ve used ImageJ to increase the contrast, and it’s still not very good. Nothing interesting in this font.
The character set of the Sanplé 3000EL
Add a launcher to the Applications menu in MATE desktop
I want to make a little script to launch Alpine in a Unicode terminal, since I mostly use mrxvt, which is non-Unicode.
mate-terminal seems useful.
First, set up a custom profile:
Launch mate-terminal
$ mate-terminal &
At the top of the terminal window, choose Edit -> Profiles …
New
Name: Alpine
Base on: Default
The dialogue to create a mate-terminal profile
Create! Choose the elements — fonts and suchlike. The tabs are:
- General
- Title and command
- Colours
- Background
- Scrolling
- Compatibility
I chose a big font and a largish screen. Set title to ‘Alpine’.
In Title and command chose ‘Run a custom command’ and put alpine, then when command exits I want to Exit the terminal.
OK, that’s done.
Now,
$ man mate-terminal
gives:
--profile=PROFILE-NAME
as a command line switch. We could use the -e switch to launch alpine, but we’ve used the profile instead. So:
$ mate-terminal --hide-menubar --profile=Alpine
Alpine as launched by calling mate-terminal from the command line
Very nice.
We could create a script, say myalpine:
$ cat myalpine mate-terminal --hide-menubar --profile=Alpine $ chmod +x ~/bin/myalpine
Now, what about a launcher for it? I am using MATE
Applications -> Accessories -> Main menu
(May be elsewhere in the menu tree.)
Choose Internet
New Item
The mate menu editor dialogue
Name: Alpine
Command: (to insert this, it’s easiest to browse to ~/bin for myalpine)
Add comment: My mail
What about an icon?
I Googled ‘icon for alpine mail’ but no satisfaction.
OK, make a quick and lousy icon — just a pixel-painted png file for now, something of a place-holder:
My 5 minute icon for Alpine
Feel free to grab and use!
Click on the icon space and choose the new file.
The new icon/launcher shows up in Applications -> Other, not in Internet. It works, but it is in the wrong place.
How do I move it? That’s far from clear. I can look for the underlying file instead of using a GUI.
(It might also be called mozo-made.desktop) It shows up in my home directory as:
/home/username/.local/share/applications/alacarte-made-2.desktop
Which looks like this:
[Desktop Entry] Comment=My Mail Terminal=false Name=Alpine Exec=/home/username/bin/myalpine Type=Application Icon=/home/username/installs/crapalpineicon.png NoDisplay=false
Now, I need to make a change. If I look at the same kind of file for some application in the Internet group, say Firefox, I find:
/usr/share/applications/firefox-esr.desktop
And I see
Categories=Network;WebBrowser;
So how about adding ‘Categories=Network;Email;’ to the alacarte-made-2.desktop file?
Categories=Network;Email;
Yep!
The menu with Alpine in the right place
OK, so that’s how to add it to my menu system. Even the icon does not look too bad for a quick job! I think I’ll keep it.
One comment: The command line in myalpine can be used to set the geometry and position of the initial Alpine window. For example:
$ cat ~/bin/myalpine #! /bin/bash mate-terminal --hide-menubar --profile=Alpine --geometry=88x26+50+50
Which gives 88 columns, 26 rows and puts the window 50 pixels in from the left and down from the top of the screen.
LaTeX — box several paragraphs of text tightly
I found that for some reason an fbox around a minipage did not work for me — it did away with the paragraphing and turned it into one giant line. So instead I did this:
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{bera}
\begin{document}
% Set width of minipage (minpagw) to length of longest line by using
% the line as as argument to \settowidth
\newlength{\minpagw}
\settowidth{\minpagw}{This is definitely the longest line, for sure.}
\begin{minipage}{\minpagw}
\fbox{%
\parbox{\linewidth}{%
Not the longest.
New paragraph, but not longest line.
This is definitely the longest line, for sure.
This isn't
Nor is this.
}%
}%
\end{minipage}
\end{document}
Which gives this:
Boxed text, multiple paragraphs, tight box.
Sharp MZ-700 fonts in virtual terminal
Virtual terminals need PSF fonts.
The DSPACE archive contains virtual terminal versions of some BDF (xterm) fonts based on the character glyphs that came in the ROM of the Sharp MZ-700 series of microcomputers in the early 1980s.
Construction of the BDF fonts is explained elsewhere (https://darrengoossens.wordpress.com/2017/03/08/the-sharp-mz-721-font-in-a-terminal-emulator/); they were converted to PSF by opening in gbdfed and exporting to PSFU. Nothing fancy.
The files are all just versions of the same font, but in different sizes. Note that outside of the US keyboard characters, the encoding is a bit random!
MZ7int1_recode_double.psfu MZ7int1_recode_fiveontwo.psfu MZ7int1_recode.psfu MZ7int1_recode_quad.psfu MZ7int1_recode_sixteenonsix.psfu MZ7int1_recode_triple.psfu
They could be copied to wherever your *.psf and *.psfu files live on your system, but the easiest way to test them out, at least on Debian (untried elsewhere!) is simply to use setfont. For example:
$ setfont MZ7int1_recode_double.psfu
The character set is shown here:
The glyph positions outside of the US keyboard characters are not all good. I really need to do something about that… the drawing characters especially would be better in the right slots, since ncurses applications would work a lot better.
Parcel tracking scam
So I get an SMS saying that “We tried to deliver your package but there is no postage” — from ‘Info’.
It game me a URL. I went to a Linux box and typed in the URL, and got this:
And the URL expanded into: https://playwin-game.com/AU-PST-TT-G/
Do not enter any payment details into this website! They want your credit card details!
ex-X: Linux without X windows
What works without X?
- fbterm — terminal program (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fbterm — not maintained, but pretty useful); but cannot run other framebuffer programs while inside fbterm.
- fbi and fbgs — view images and ps/pdf files (https://www.kraxel.org/blog/linux/fbida/) — crucial, since along with ImageMagick and other converters, let’s you view almost any image. Combined with dvips, fbgs lets you do LaTeX in the console and still preview the results. fbgs will directly view a pdf if using pdflatex.
- fim (‘fbi improved’) (http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/fbi-improved/)
- netsurf-fb (web browser) (http://www.netsurf-browser.org/) (My post.)
- fbff (https://github.com/aligrudi/fbff/) (ffmpeg on a framebuffer — as yet untried)
- gpm (mouse driver) (http://blog.startaylor.net/2016/05/30/howto-console/) ($ sudo gpm -3 -m /dev/input/mice -t imps2)
- mplayer -vo fbdev2 file.ext (movies and other media — just use these command line flags to tell it to use the framebuffer)
- links2 -g (web browser) (the -g flag gets it to load images — works really well) (also links and lynx)
- fbgrab (screenshot grabber) (https://fbgrab.monells.se/) (untried)
- fbcat (screenshot grabber) (http://jwilk.net/software/fbcat)
- WordGrinder (word processor/editor) running in fbterm with Glass TTY VT220 in green on black as the font looks fantastic in an early-80s kind of way. Not really a framebuffer application.
Green on black is easy on the eyes!
Here is a screenshot of the Glass TTY VT220 font. Not sure how to grab a screen while inside the program, though. This was grabbed by exiting then running:
$ fbcat > screen.ppm
- w3m with w3m-img (web browser)
- cmatrix (screen saver — actually works in any terminal)
cmatrix at work
- Alpine (mail)
- acpi (battery status)
- shutdown -h now (don’t use sudo halt)
- alsamixer (to set volume)
- ogg123 and mpg123 (music player)
- apt-cache search <searchterm> (find Debian packages without synaptic)
- gnuplot-nox (plotting)
- vim (of course)
- DOSBox (uses SDL, so works too. That means you can run Windows 3.1 on Linux without running X. Fiddling with the config file lets it run fullscreen. The main trick is that usescancodes=false MUST be selected in the dosbox.conf file, or there’s a good chance it will misread the keyboard, preventing you from typing any commands or even using Alt+Ctrl+Fn to change virtual terms. This may force a hard reset.)
- twin — text-mode window manager (https://github.com/cosmos72/twin)
- tty-clock
- cal/ncal/calendar
- bastet (tetris…)
- freesweep (minesweeper)
- sopwith (sopwith)
- sc (spreadsheet)
LaTeX plus fbgs works perfectly well for writing documents. If Vim is set up to allow compiling and viewing from within Vim, then LaTeX works really seamlessly. I added a command to my .vimrc:
cat ~/.vimrc syntax enable command L !latex % command B !bib.sh % command V !dviv.sh % command A !dvia.sh % command D !dvips.sh % command G !gv.sh % command M !maki.sh % command F !pdfv.sh % command I !spell.sh % command PP !ps2pdf.sh % command PDF !pdflatex % command W !wc % command XF !xfig & command T !dvi2tty.sh % command WT !wctty.sh % command VT !viewtty.sh % command FB !viewfb.sh %
So within Vim in command mode I run :L to LaTeX a file (makes the dvi) then :D to make the PostScript and :FB to view it in the framebuffer viewer. When I exit the viewer, I drop back into Vim. Could also run fbgs in a second virtual term.
$ cat ~/bin/viewfb.sh #!/bin/bash NM=`basename $1 .tex`.ps fbgs -r 300 $NM
Or we can go totally text and view the output of dvi2tty; this script runs dvi2tty then views the result:
#!/bin/bash NM=`basename $1 .tex`.tty IM=`basename $1 .tex`.dvi dvi2tty -w80 $IM > $NM echo Created $NM, piping into view sleep 2s view $NM
Alpine after update to Debian 10
Suddenly, Alpine is asking me for a master password to unlock the password file. And then after I defined one, it did not work, though to be fair maybe I mistyped it and that password was not what I thought it was.
Went here:
https://github.com/termux/termux-packages/issues/2023
And in a terminal, went to
~/.alpine-smime/.pwd
and issued the following command, as instructed:
$ openssl req -x509 -newkey rsa:4096 -keyout MasterPassword.key -out MasterPassword.crt -days 10000 -nodes
Then ran Alpine and did as was told, including going into (S)etup Co(L)lections and added /novalidate-cert to the end of the imap.gmail.com line.
And that seemed to work pretty well.
Using multiple news servers (NNTP) through Alpine and tin
I was trying to set up tin to read Gmane and Usenet. They don’t cover the same territory.
In the end, I found that I just need to have two different configurations for tin.
I went:
$ vim ~/.tin/newsrctable
and made it look like this:
$ cat ~/.tin/newsrctable news.gmane.org .newsrc.gmane gmane news.eternal-september.org .newsrc es
So now the list of subscribed Gmane groups will be written to ~/.newsrc.gmane, not .newsrc
I also created ~/.newsauth to hold the authentication information for news.eternal-september.org:
$ cat .newsauth news.eternal-september.org PASSWORD USERNAME
(See here for setting up access to eternal-september.)
I then created 2 little scripts and put them in ~/bin:
$ cat ~/bin/myes tin -r -A -g es $ cat ~/bin/mygmane tin -r -g gmane
So, the first says:
-r = read a remote news server
-A = get authentication information — if ~/.newsauth is present, use that, otherwise prompt the user
-g es = look up entry ‘es’ in ~/.tin/newsrctable
The Gmane one is much the same but does not need authentication.
This seems to work.
Copied .newsrc and .newsrc.gmane to backups then tried to get it to work in Alpine.
In Alpine, I went (S)etup (C)onfig and checked ‘Enable Multiple Newsrcs’, then went to (S)etup Co(L)lections and (A)dded the following:
Nickname : EternalSeptember Server : reader80.eternal-september.org:80/user=USERNAME/service=NNTP Path : #news. View :
and
Nickname : Gmane Server : news.gmane.org/service=NNTP Path : #news. View :
Then went to Folder List and under EternalSeptember chose:
[Select Here to See Expanded List]
This asked me if I wanted to rename .newsrc. I said yes and it renamed it to ‘.newsrc-reader02.eternal-september.org‘. It then showed my subscribed groups — good!
But when I went to expand Gmane, .newsrc was gone (having been renamed) and it found nothing, even though I have the .newsrc.gmane from tin — because why would Alpine know to look for that file? So, I tricked it. I exited Alpine and typed:
$ cp ~/.newsrc.gmane ~/.newsrc
The opened Alpine again, and went straight to the Gmane list and expand it. It went to the default file for the list of groups — .newsrc — and then asked me if I wanted to rename it. I said yes.
So now I have 2 .newsrc files, one for each NNTP server:
.newsrc-blaine.gmane.org .newsrc-reader02.eternal-september.org
But, the original .newsrc files I set up using tin have been renamed away. But that is OK. I can now edit
~/.tin/newsrctable
and change the names in that file to match the ones created by Alpine. That way, I can read mail in either application — handy, since Alpine aggregates but tin is better for managing subscriptions. So here is ~/.tin/newsrctable:
$ tail -4 ~/.tin/newsrctable #news.gmane.org .newsrc.gmane gmane #news.eternal-september.org .newsrc es news.gmane.org .newsrc-blaine.gmane.org gmane news.eternal-september.org .newsrc-reader02.eternal-september.org es</.pre>
And that’s the way to access some slowly dying bits of the internet.
