Pipe Viewer, Bit-rate, ASCII Animations

Controlling bit-rate in a pipe

I needed a utility to control the speed (i.e., bit-rate) at which data is outputted from a file. One solution for this is the Pipe Viewer utility, which has a Guix package:

Pipe Viewer (https://www.ivarch.com)

It is designed to do a lot of other things as well, but it can be used simply to limit bit-rate of data through the program. For 2400 b/s:

pv -L 2400 -q myfile.txt

or, e.g.,

some_program | pv -L 2400 -q | some_other_program

ASCII Animations

An entertaining application of this is reproducing old vt100 ASCII animations:

https://www.ibiblio.org/archive/2020/04/vt100-animations/ (https://www.ibiblio.org)

http://artscene.textfiles.com/vt100/ (http://artscene.textfiles.com)

Comments

Alaskalinuxuser, 2021-09-13

I tried this out, and it is pretty entertaining! Not sure how "useful" it is, but definitely entertaining!