While thinking about what would make this week as geeky yet fun as possible, it dawned on me to demystify the stereotypes that people have towards geeks. First and foremost, programmers have the wittiest sense of humor. If at all you are refuting this, take a look at these cool commands thanks to #TEAMLINUX, and their unending sense of humor.
Remember when you watched Tom and Jerry and thought it was the most amazing cartoon at the time, Well, programmers thought so too and decided to create a one oneko command. What oneko basically does is pop up a catlike ASCII character (which will be our Tom) that chases the computer mouse (jerry) wherever it moves.
To install
$ sudo apt-get install oneko
To use
$ oneko
Have you heard of dyslexic people. These kind of people read stuff backwards and it’s a disorder. However in the geek world, dyslexia passes off as a way to encrypt (hide) information beginners sage. And such is what the rev command does. In case you are having a hard type writing backwards which is usually the case,
To install
$ sudo apt-get install rev
To Use
$ rev
Press ctrl-c TO EXIT
How about bringing out the artist in the geek? Just because they are not able to hold pencil and draw articulate shapes doesn’t disqualify them as artists. Oh the things you will learn from using the figlet command. Text will be presented in the most simple yet artistic way
To install
$ sudo apt-get install figlet
To Use
$ figlet “Text comes here”
Sometimes people get penalized for typos, there is a bright and fun side to typos whatsoever. The ls command is like the first command in “Linux for dummies” command ls that displays a list of items in a given directory , but what happens when you hurriedly type sl ?
The terminal happens to know how to make fun of typos too and that is what it exactly does.
You will have a steam locomotive train moving through your terminal, asking “ dude . do you need a ride?” Forget the asking bit.
To install
$ sudo apt-get install sl
To Use
$ sl
And then there is the toilet command. Yes you read right. If at all you just got reminded that you haven’t visited the common offices for both Blue collar and white collar employees, its fine. However what is talking about here is an amazing command that doesn’t display text in a shitty way but rather in a colorful and incredibly beautiful artistic way.
To install
$ sudo apt-get install toilet
To Use
$ toilet ‘text and any other format”
Lastly, the mother of all commands cowsay. Awesome ! Imagine a cow saying out loud or do I say mowing at you saying…. Techjaja is awesome. Huh! Well , the cowsay command displays a cow with a speech bubble containing the given text. How you want your cow to appear when it is saying what you want it to say is entirely about your curiosity, these will help give you a headstart
-b – “Borg mode” uses “==” in place of “oo” for the cow′s eyes
-d – “Dead” uses “XX” plus a descending “U” to represent an extruded tongue
-g – “Greedy” uses “$$”
-p – “Paranoid” uses “@@”
-s – “Stoned” uses “**” to represent bloodshot eyes, plus a descending “U” to represent an extruded tongue
-t – “Tired” uses “–“
-w – “Wired” uses “OO”
-y – “Youthful” uses “..” to represent smaller eyes
-e – (eye_string) Manually specifies the cow′s eye-type. For example, “cowsay -e ^^” will make a cow with “^^” eyes.
-T – (tongue_string) Manually specifies the cow′s tongue shape. For instance, “cowsay -T \(\)” will make the tongue out of two parentheses.
-f cowfile – Specifies a “.cow” file containing alternative ASCII art. This parameter accepts both absolute file-paths and those relative to the environment variable COWPATH.
-l – Lists the names of available cow-files in the COWPATH directory instead of displaying a quote.
To see how these operate, watch the video below:
These and other commands remind you that being a geek is not boring as the world perceives. Enjoy your #geekweek
