Lester Simmons

Here’s another founding member of the console-only club: cmatrix.

As far back as I can remember using Linux, I can remember cmatrix around in one shape or another.

At first it was just a gimmick, something cool to show all the Windows XP users, trapped in their bland existences.

I suppose it is still a little of a gimmick; after all, it’s not really doing anything as those letters and numbers trickle past.

And of course now, +/- 15 years after The Matrix hype, it’s a little cliché. Not campy, just …well, it’s been done.

That doesn’t make it any less cool though.

Don’t forget there is the option to show a font more loyal to the actual screensaver used in the movie; you’ll definitely need framebuffer access, although I imagine it could be done within X too.

For my own part, this has always been more than enough:

cmatrix -u2 -sab

And wherein should one employ such a clever start command? Here, of course.

I think a lot of you are spending most of your time on reddit. By and large the e-mails I get are most often pointing out something that came from r/Linux or r/commandline.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I am an eclectic; I take what I need from where I find it.

So here are a few interesting links that made their way to me, from sharp-eyed readers like you.

• The post about encrypting a single file and decrypting it won me a lot of attention. Most folks wanted to point out this article from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Be warned, it’s very long, and very important.
• Along those lines, I also got notes pointing out this article about the effectiveness of encryption against eavesdropping. I agree wholeheartedly with everything said there, with the added caveat that all that effort in encryption doesn’t mean anything if you don’t safeguard it after transmission.
• On a lighter note, if you’ve ever wanted to customize your .bashrc, here’s a dandy site that will do all the hard work for you. Drop, drag, copy, paste and then trundle off to impress your geek friends.
• Finally, this today caps off most of the links I have left over. It’s ironic for me because I was just tinkering with autojump a night or two ago, and found it less than functional (which may have been my fault). I like the solution shown there, even if I haven’t playtested it yet. If you do, let me know how it works.

That’s it for now. Back to your regularly scheduled program.

ffDiaporama is an application written in Qt, available for Linux and Windows, that allows you mix videos, music, text and photos to create movie clips / slideshows. The application supports adding animations such as zoom, rotation or Ken Burns Effect, add titles (text), annotations and more.

• a collection of hundred of textures has been added as an optional addon - this can be used as the slides or text blocks background;
• 24 new shapes for block text have been added;
• New block type: clip art texts, which includes a collection of 67 clip arts
• SVG support;
• new option to export audio track;
• ability to change the sample rate frequency;
• complete encoding and decoding audio/video engines overhaul;
• the wiki help pages are now integrated into the application as tooltips;
• many bug fixes and more.

Install ffDiaporama in Ubuntu

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ffdiaporamateam/stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ffdiaporama

sudo apt-get install ffdiaporama-texturemate

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Originally published at WebUpd8: Daily Ubuntu / Linux news and application reviews.