
One Thing Well – A weblog about simple, useful software - tete
http://onethingwell.org/
======
nextos
Nice site. He hasn't covered yet some well known ones, or at least I cannot
find them using the search field in his site:

* [http://xmonad.org/](http://xmonad.org/)

* [http://tools.suckless.org/slock/](http://tools.suckless.org/slock/)

* [http://software.schmorp.de/pkg/rxvt-unicode.html](http://software.schmorp.de/pkg/rxvt-unicode.html)

* [http://www.roaringpenguin.com/products/remind](http://www.roaringpenguin.com/products/remind)

* [http://notmuchmail.org/](http://notmuchmail.org/)

* [http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/](http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/)

* [http://isync.sourceforge.net/mbsync.html](http://isync.sourceforge.net/mbsync.html)

* [https://github.com/Tox/toxic](https://github.com/Tox/toxic)

* [http://mcabber.com/](http://mcabber.com/)

* [https://01.org/connman](https://01.org/connman)

* [https://01.org/powertop](https://01.org/powertop)

~~~
ivank
You can go simpler than slock: vlock -sna will switch to a locked console tty
and prevent you from switching out until you've unlocked it. This avoids all
of the problems with X-based lockers, some hinted at on
[https://github.com/google/xsecurelock#security-
design](https://github.com/google/xsecurelock#security-design)

(Note: don't sudo vlock -sna if you haven't set a root password, add yourself
to the vlock group instead.)

~~~
616c
Very cool tip. This is one of the most useful Linux power user tips I got in a
while. Thanks!

Now to script it as I spent most of my time in a X term emulator with a tmux
session. Can someone effectively script X -> tty console then vlock?

~~~
ivank
You don't need to switch to a tty console yourself, you can run vlock -n while
in X and it'll switch for you.

~~~
616c
You sir are going to cause some late night geekage. Damn you!

UPDATE: So am I missing something, because I get more or less the man page
below:

[http://linux.die.net/man/1/vlock](http://linux.die.net/man/1/vlock)

And I see no -n argument. Are you using Linux or some other Unix? What version
do you use?

(Sorry, I really need to sleep early, but you have to keep telling me how to
improve my laptop!)

~~~
ivank
That looks like a man page from an old version. I've seen vlock -n on Ubuntu
14.04 and a two-year-old Gentoo.

[http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/trusty/man1/vlock.1.html](http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/trusty/man1/vlock.1.html)

~~~
616c
Turns out, quite annoyingly, the package on Arch providing vlock, and an older
version at that, is kbd, from the Keyboard Project ([http://www.kbd-
project.org/](http://www.kbd-project.org/)).

FYI to everyone on Arch, for a current version that makes this work, you need
the AUR package vlock-original, and then invoke that as the executable name in
the terminal. I already replace xscreensaver and got rid of it. Thanks for the
tip!

------
Argorak
This tumblr doesn't quite live up its name:
[http://onethingwell.org/post/97725615916/busybox](http://onethingwell.org/post/97725615916/busybox)

BusyBox is great and everything, but it's definitely not subscribing to the
"One Thing Well"-philosophy, quite the contrary: everything in one.

~~~
justincormack
Yes, crunchgen[1] is kind of the one tool to do this for you. Although its BSD
only.

[1]
[https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?format=html&query=crunch...](https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?format=html&query=crunchgen\(1\))

------
asymmetric
OT, but it's heartening to see a link to an RSS feed next to Twitter and G+. I
find that more and more sites are abandoning this public, open source standard
in favor of proprietary platforms.

~~~
ygra
Wasn't tumblr the one that pops up something in the lower right, asking you to
sign up so you can follow new posts¹? At least they still have RSS, as opposed
to Twitter which seems to have killed it (sometimes a bit strange ... when you
assume that someone never posts anything any more, but instead just their RSS
feed broke or changed to another URL).

_____

¹ Yep, they were:
[http://hypftier.de/temp/2014-09-22_083217.png](http://hypftier.de/temp/2014-09-22_083217.png)

------
jeroenjanssens
Related:
[http://datascienceatthecommandline.com/#tools](http://datascienceatthecommandline.com/#tools)

------
state
Sorry, but there is nothing I find more annoying than the "Never miss a post!"
spam that Tumblr now inserts in to every page post acquisition.

Perhaps someone could do one thing well and come up with a blogging platform
for this nice project?

~~~
grimtrigger
From a business perspective, if you don't subscribe your opinion is probably
irrelevant. You have 0 value to the author.

~~~
dredmorbius
From a business perspective, that's exceptionally misguided.

Annoying the fuck out of people is a good way to chase them away.

Blogs work as much via reblogging and word-of-mouth as anything else.

The most egregious example I can think of is the Google Blogger dynamic
designs, which I find both completely frustrate any attempt to read the
content presented, and which I've yet to find a way to un-do the damage via
local CSS.

In most cases, even Readability curls up in a corner and weeps quietly rather
than present its exceptionally clean and quite preferable page design.

I've appealed directly to several blog owners to chose a different site design
(e.g., _not_ the "dynamic* layouts). Generally, I close the page as soon as I
open it.

------
eps
11 pages of Windows software! Who would've thought it exists :)

[http://onethingwell.org/tagged/windows](http://onethingwell.org/tagged/windows)

------
tete
Disclaimer: Not my blog, but found it today and really loved it.

------
fizixer
\- See also: suckless.org

\- An LFS build off kernel.org (the kernel) and github (the rest of userland)
would be an interesting experiment.

~~~
616c
Perhaps you would be interested in Stali, the suckless linux distro, a fairly
recent project considering their work.

[http://sta.li/](http://sta.li/)

It seems pretty interesting, but very much in early stages.

------
juef
another one:
[http://inconsolation.wordpress.com/](http://inconsolation.wordpress.com/)

------
denizozger
I love the idea but not the implementation. Categorising software according to
purpose and tech stack would be the best.

------
codecondo
[http://onethingwell.org/archive](http://onethingwell.org/archive)

------
tretiy3
Very good. Is there any way to subscribe (no count tumblr rss twitter)?

~~~
icebraining
RSS + Blogtrottr?

~~~
tretiy3
Thanks!

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alanning
Short examples would greatly enhance comprehension for me

------
nXqd
This site could be named unix_hunt :D

------
zomg
the original "product hunt"! :)

------
doctorpangloss
> Simple, useful software

I came expecting examples of to-do lists, mail clients, clever messaging apps,
etc. There are a handful of those.

Instead, the majority of apps are described by sentences where literally every
word would be unfamiliar to a typical computer user. For example, "Cram is a
functional testing framework for command line applications based on
Mercurial’s unified test format."

Simple is in the eye of the beholder.

~~~
1tw
> I came expecting examples of to-do lists, mail clients, clever messaging
> apps, etc. There are a handful of those.

There are hundreds of posts about those sorts of applications in the
archives[0], but the focus of the site tends to drift about a lot depending on
what I'm up to/interested in at a given time.

> Instead, the majority of apps are described by sentences where literally
> every word would be unfamiliar to a typical computer user.

That's definitely a problem, and after chatting with some readers on Twitter
recently I'm making more of an effort to 'translate' jargon and buzzwords in
software descriptions.

[0] See, e.g.,
[http://onethingwell.org/tagged/todo](http://onethingwell.org/tagged/todo)

