Customise Ubuwiki and share your files offline

A short while ago we announced the release of Ubuwiki for Africa. The idea is very simple. A lot of us take connectivity for granted. We also fail to take bandwidth considerations into account and the result is known as the Digital Divide. PDF is a great format for sharing books. Ogg-Theora is the open-source format for sharing music. WoaS or Wiki-on-a-Stick is “a wiki living in a self-modifying XHTML file”. We want it to become the “MP3 of Data” or in Opensource terms, the Ogg-Theora of Data.

Originally Ubuwiki, essentially a modded WoaS “containing repurposed content” was a forked development of WoaS. The two projects have now combined forces and there are plans to develop the format even further. What we want you to do, is modify Woas or Ubuwiki and to share the modified files with your friends. Create online and offline data-sharing. Encourage users to share information with those who don’t have bandwidth. Here is an example of a modification from the official WoaS forum “i use woas with this extention for tabs. i also did some dirty code modifications to use it with ie8 and embedded images. further i did some css modifications.”

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ASCII art in Ubuntu

888          8 8                       8    8 8                 w
 8  8d8b. .d88 8 .d8b. Yb  dP 8   8    8    8 88b. 8   8 8d8b. w8ww 8   8
 8  8P Y8 8  8 8 8' .8  YbdP  8b d8    8b..d8 8  8 8b d8 8P Y8  8   8b d8
888 8   8 `Y88 8 `Y8P'   YP   `Y8P8    `Y88P' 88P' `Y8P8 8   8  Y8P `Y8P8

There are two ASCII art viewers in the repostory. Aview and Cacaview. Both are CLI programmes, so you have to open a terminal. Exploring the world of ASCII art is very 1999, but the retro-adventure is well worth the time and effort. You’ll also find the venerable Lynx Browser, which is an ASCII browser for paper-thin net browsing, and a whole bunch of tools for generating ASCII images which could do with a brush up.

Try Cacafire a port of AALib’s aafire which displays burning ASCII art flames or the Cacademo. Wish there was an easier method for creating ASCII video. I can’t help thinking that there are lot of places which haven’t been explored in the world of Alphanumerics and ASCII art is about to enjoy a resurgence as a design statement.

If you want to cut to the chase, Jerome Desmoulins website has an online ASCII art generator.

Or even better Sporkforge.com

Install figlet if you want an easy way to create ASCII “figs” on the command line.

sudo apt-get install figlet
figlet <text>

None of the above would be possible without the Ubuntu Forum discussion on the subject

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