Gambas cli programming: ncurses text based user interface

Many command-line programs are more than just one liners.

They often need to display data and allow users to interface by both viewing data and making selections.

In this post I look at the Gambas component gb.ncurses and attempt to make an interactive display.

Using a Wacom tablet on Linux

The CAD boys used graphics tablets back in the days when I still worked in industry.

Using a pen with a tablet provides a very precise input method for controlling a computer application.

But are these low cost Wacom tablets any good, and do they work on a Linux computer?

Internet Radio example using Gambas cli

Now that I'm taking Gambas command-line programming more seriously, I thought I might rewrite the software on my internet radios.

As mentioned in a recent post, Gambas can be used to write cli programs (command-line interface) as well as the more usual gui (graphical) applications.

So this post just describes the software aspects of this project, while the other design details can be found in earlier posts.

Ethereum: what's happened to Ether?

Since I purchased a small number of ETH last July, the quoted price has bounced along, not doing a lot.

But in the last 3 weeks, both trading volume and ETH value have increased dramatically.

So what is going on?

Gambas: command-line programming

I must have been using Gambas for small projects since I fully switched to Linux for my home computing needs almost 10 years ago.

Gambas was a natural choice for me as I'd spent several years in industry using Visual Basic, Delphi and Turbo Pascal.

But up until quite recently, it had not occurred to me that there might be some benefit in using Gambas for command-line programming.

BirdBox2017: a few problems

This system was deployed just over a month ago and has been visited by blue tits almost every day.

It is basically doing its job by recording lots of video clips of both the inside and outside views of the bird box, which is mounted on the side of our pergola.

However, it does have a couple of problems that are rather annoying.

Raspberry Pi 3: integral wifi problems

A couple of days ago I was given a nice new Pi 3.

I already have one other Pi 3 (and 14 other non-Pi 3 models) but it developed a fault, so this new one was a welcome birthday present.

Unfortunately it took most of yesterday afternoon to get the integral wifi for work!

Launching & Closing Apps via Gambas

It is really easy to launch and close applications on Linux using Gambas.

This may be useful if you need to run an application when certain conditions are met, and shut it down when conditions change.

An example is my BirdBoxMonitor program that needs to load a browser and display video streams.