Use pastebin from command line

Quite often, when you have a problem where, in order to get help you need to paste the contents of a file,or command output so that it can be shared, for example on IRC (Chat) or a forum, this can be challenging to begin with.

As it is depreciated that you paste more than 2 lines in to IRC chat. The way round this is to use a service called pastebin. Debian [1] has it's own service for this [2]. There is a tool called pastebinit which is really helpful from the command line.

The first step is to switch to the root user. Sear for and install the package pastebinit as per below.

Search

root@Desktop:/home/user# apt search pastebinit
Sorting... Done
Full Text Search... Done
pastebinit/stable 1.5.1-1 all
  command-line pastebin client

Install

root@Desktop:/home/user# apt install pastebinit
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
  linux-image-5.10.0-7-amd64 linux-image-5.10.0-8-amd64
Use 'apt autoremove' to remove them.
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  pastebinit
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 46.6 kB of archives.
After this operation, 342 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 http://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye/main amd64 pastebinit all 1.5.1-1 [46.6 kB]
Fetched 46.6 kB in 0s (342 kB/s)
Selecting previously unselected package pastebinit.
(Reading database ... 190310 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../pastebinit_1.5.1-1_all.deb ...
Unpacking pastebinit (1.5.1-1) ...
Setting up pastebinit (1.5.1-1) ...
Processing triggers for man-db (2.9.4-2) ...
root@Desktop:/home/user# 

Once complete switch back to normal user (usually type exit)

user@Desktop:~$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list > pastebinit
user@Desktop:~$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list | pastebinit
https://paste.debian.net/1228146/

In this example I have used the cat command and piped the contents in to pastebinit, this has given me a url to paste in to chat, (or copy manually)

Open this in a browser and you and others can see the contents, and people can help you further.

This is really useful too if you are stuck at the command prompt, without a graphical interface.

Links

1 Debian 2 pastebin – debian 3 Paignton Library STEM Group TAGS

#Debian,#GNULinux,#Paste,#Text,#Pastebin,#Share,#Troubleshooting

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Tilde is a nice, curses based text editor. It is useful for if you are at the console or terminal in Linux and want a menu driven editor.

While other tools are more command driven (nano, emacs, vi, vim and joe to name a few). Tilde is being mentioned for those of you who may find it useful

As you would expect with a modern editor, tilde has support for syntax highlighting.

Which is really useful for programming or editing website code for example.

REFERENCES

• Tilde man page
• Free software foundation
  • GNU
• Free Software Foundation of India
• Free Software Foundation of Latin America
• Free Software Foundation Europe

TAGS

#YearOfTheFediverse,#Linux,#TextEditor,#Editor,#Text, #Tilde,#Programming,#SyntaxHighlighting,#console, #terminal

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Another interesting project that I found on Mastodon. This is translating academic and science texts to different languages.

I have replied to their Mastodon post and also mentioned the Africa Wiki project / contest. As the two projects could complement each other if there are articles on Wikipedia about African Scientists and contributors to science. Ensure these articles on Wikipedia are also translated. But also perhaps translate associated Science texts too.

Of course it is all down to the number of people who have the skills are willing to share these skills.

From a personal viewpoint, I really feel employers MUST recognise these contributions. They are valuable to the projects but also help people develop important skills such as remote collaboration.

REFERENCES

• Translate Science
• Mastodon

TAGS

#Science,#Academic,#Text,#Papers,#Translation

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In my first ansi weather post I was looking at using sed to strip colour codes from the program output. It turns out and covered in the second post that all that is needed is the -a false argument to the program.

Nevertheless, sed is still worth learning. To this end, the following resources may be useful.

Sed video tutorial

If you save this in to a text file you can follow along with the video. It is similar to the text from the video.

10 Tiny Toes
this is That
One two Three
tree twice

REFERENCES

• Filmsbykris
• sed manual
• Free Software Foundation

TAGS

#YearOfTheFediverse,#gnu,#sed,#text,#manipulation

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A look at some of the features of the Rich Text Editor that comes with the recently released, version 4 of CryptPad.

This is a really nice package, and service, Cryptpad also comes as part of Disroot, which is also linked below. The best feature of course is the privacy.

REFERENCES

• CryptPad
• Disroot
• Cryptpad Mastodon
• Disroot Mastodon
• Free Software Foundation

TAGS

#YearOfTheFediverse,#CryptPad,#RichText,#Editor,#Text, Cloud,#Privacy

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Tip of the day

if using the toot command line client, you can toot the contents of a file.

Lets say 'text.txt' contains the following

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam

If you login to toot, then type

toot post < text.txt then the contents of that file will be posted to Mastodon.

Please feel free to follow me on Mastodon here

#mastodon,#toot,#tips,#hints,#commandline,#cli,#client, #text,

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By default libreoffice 7 impress does not display tools for text formatting on the toolbar.

To fix this, you need to

Click View —> Tool bars —> Text Formatting

And the tool will be displayed

Video below illustrates process

#libreoffice7,#impress,#display,#text,#formatting,toolbar, #help,#support.

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As digital skills are an essential part of everyday life. I have created, a new blog, to host information to help people out tasks using LibreOffice.

So far this is blog has covered just the Writer component. This may be extended later, as I have some videos for the Calc Spreadsheet.

The new blog can be found here.

• Videos, hosted on my Peer tube.
• Images, hosted on Salsa.debian
• Blog, hosted on personaljournal.ca/

• Blog. powered by https://write.as/

• TDF Blog post

#Digital,#Skills,#LibreOffice,#Writer,#Basic,#Tutorial, #Text,Video,#MixedMedia,#Learning,#Development

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Writefull is a plug-in for Google Chrome designed to complement the cloud based Overleaf LaTeX editor by facilitating the checking of your document for errors such as grammar and spelling.

You can read more about this here

This is a really valuable tool if you are involved in writing academic texts, as it designed for that level of text processing in mind. However it is a welcome tool if you're using Overleaf in general.

References

• Overleaf
• Wtitefull

#LaTeX, #overleaf, #writefull, #typesetting, #spelling, #grammar, #error, #checking, #academic, #text, #textprocessing

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CEEFAX was a text based TV information service provided by the BBC back in the 80 to 90's. It may have started earlier, not sure.

Fast forward to 2020 and we have working version on the Raspberry Pi computer.

You can read more here.

I am in the process of testing this out. My Raspberry Pi is running Raspbian 9.4 so I am in the process of updating this. It seems the latest update to Raspbian is 9.9.

This may be a long process, so I will have to post an update to this tomorrow. But in the meantime you can read up more.

If I get it working, I will see if I can bring it to the next South Devon Tech Jam on the 14th March. It may be something to have along side the Retro Computing area we are going to be setting up.

• RaspberryPi
• South Devon Tech Jam

#bbc, #tv, #text, #information, #service, #raspberrypi, #computer, #southdevontechjam,#sdtj, #march

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