paclear; oneko 🐈 neko; bandit

Our shared timeline (which may be the worst timeline ever) is fraught with peril, and we seem to be only adding more chaos and calamity each week. While my level of “doomscrolling” is significantly reduced (one thing I can thank Musk for, I guess) there is plenty of doom thrust my (and, your) way in social media, RSS feeds, and news app notifications.

So, today, we take a break from the Drop’s daily drumbeat of new bits to learn and just have some fun (though, you may still learn a thing or three along the way).

TL;DR

This is an AI-generated summary of today’s Drop.

And, just like that, Perplexity is working fine on the first try, today.

• Paclear is a CLI tool to clear your terminal screen with PAC-MAN. Optionally choose a color or speed for the not-so-little guy.

• Neko is a cross-platform open-source animated cursor-chasing cat screenmate application. It has been ported to many platforms, including IBM OS/2, Linux, BSD, Palm OS, iPhone, Android, and Arduino.

• OverTheWire’s Bandit Wargame is a beginner-friendly game that teaches the basics of Linux and command-line usage. The game is organized into levels, with each level having a specific goal that must be achieved to progress to the next level.

paclear

This is an honest-to-goodness super short section.

Paclear is a CLI tool to clear your terminal screen…with PAC-MAN.

Optionally choose a color or speed for the not-so-little guy.

Yep. That’s it.

Tis surprisingly cathartic.

The text being consumed in the section header was generated with:

$ curl --silent "http://metaphorpsum.com/sentences/${1-50}"

Check out Metamorpsum for more info on that service.

oneko 🐈 neko

Neko is a cross-platform open-source animated cursor-chasing cat screenmate application. The original software was written in the late 1980s by Naoshi Watanabe for the NEC PC-9801. Over the years, it has been ported to many platforms, including IBM OS/2, Linux, BSD, Palm OS, iPhone, Android, and Arduino. Neko is one of the longest-living software projects, lovingly recreated by the community to run on a wide range of platforms, ancient and modern. The software has been bundled with operating systems, used as a demo program for libraries, and even made into a live wallpaper for Android. Despite its age, Neko remains a beloved and entertaining piece of software that has stood the test of time.

Oneko (GH) is a still-working Java port. After grabbing the JAR file, just:

$ java -jar oneko-2.0.1.jar

Linux folks can generally find `oneko` in their OS package manager, too.

A golang version of neko also exists that does the same thing (just without the need to have icky Java hanging around). That’s what you see in the section header.

There are many other ports and offshoots.

Evert Pot has a spiffy history post that has many more links to rabbit hole you into, and some learning materials if you want to do more than goof off with an on-screen pet, today.

bandit

OverTheWire‘s Bandit Wargame is a beginner-friendly game that teaches the basics of Linux and command-line usage. The game is organized into levels, with each level having a specific goal that must be achieved to progress to the next level. There are just over 30 levels, and they go pretty quickly. The game is designed in a CTF (capture the flag) format, which makes it fun and engaging to learn command line and cybersecurity concepts.

Please note that this particular game is aimed at absolute beginners, and it will teach the basics needed to be able to play other wargames.

To start playing, one must log in to the game using SSH. The host to which you need to connect is bandit.labs.overthewire.org, on port 2220:

$ ssh ssh://bandit0@bandit.labs.overthewire.org:2220

As illustrated by the above code block, the username is bandit0, and the password for this login is also bandit0. Once logged in, go to the Level 1 page to find out how to beat Level 1.

NOTE that if you use multiplexing you can bypass the password entry step if you want to go back and try to solve an older level in a new way (there is usually far more than one way to solve each level).

Here are some tips to help you get started with the game:

• Read the instructions carefully for each level.

• NO, SERIOUSLY ^^^^^^

• Use the command line to navigate the file system and execute commands.

• Feel empowered to use Kagi or other search engines to find solutions to problems you encounter. I’d avoid tapping into posts that solve the levels directly and concentrate on searching for the core “how”. The game will often provide search hints.

• Do NOT give up if you get stuck. The purpose of the game is to learn, and you will encounter many situations in which you have no idea what you are supposed to do. Hit me up if you need a hint or three.

I’d also suggest you document your journey. Consider using script, asciinema, termtosvg, or other terminal/session recorders for that.

FIN

Hopefully, at least one of these helps keep your mind off of the chaos all around us, even for just a little while. ☮️