retrogram~rtlsdr

There's a lot you can now do with a humble USB digital television receiver, including much that has nothing to do with watching actual television. There are projects for capturing satellite transmissions, intercepting air traffic control messages, and for monitoring garage doors, automatic car door locks, and weather stations – and with retrogram, the wide-band radio spectrum of your surroundings. Retrogram~rtlsdr is a command-line utility that works with any Linux-compatible RTL-SDR (DVB-T) USB device, and there are many of them. Retrogram~rtlsdr transforms one of these cheap dongles into a histogram-bouncing, ASCII-art-generating radio scanner, and it works because so many of these devices are built generically for a global market. Through necessity, they're often capable of receiving data across a huge range of frequencies, especially when paired with a third-party aerial or antenna.

By default, retrogram~rtlsdr will tube itself to a frequency of 100,000,000Hz at a rate of 1,000,000 samples per second (device permitting). This will show a noisy histogram with highs and lows likely signifying nothing. But by pressing F or f, you can move up and down the frequency range, respectively, with configurable turning steps, gain control, sampling rate, frame rate, and dynamic range all controlled in real time with keys that are optionally shown on-screen. It can be fascinating scanning through the frequency ranges, trying to spot devices or common signals around you. But it can also be genuinely useful. The binary easily builds and runs on a Raspberry Pi, which can then be physically positioned or moved for maximum effect. Retrogram~rtlsdr can then scan the area, perhaps for interference problems, or to better see which devices on which frequencies might be interpreted with, for instance, RTL433. Without a scanner such as this, you would have to script your own solution that steps through a range of frequencies to see if they contain a signal that can be decoded. Retrogram~rtlsdr makes this process much easier to manage and looks very cool in the process.

Project Website

https://github.com/r4d10n/retrogram-rtlsdr

Turn your command line into a local wideband radio scanner with a cheap SDR USB device and retrogram~rtlsdr.

Terminal RSS Reader

goread

RSS readers are brilliant because an RSS feed will only provide the skeleton or introduction of a story, or an update, so you can decide for yourself whether to invest more time in reading. Not only does this help to reduce the amount of time you waste browsing the Internet, it can be a conduit for useful information and updates outside your usual browsing habits. More importantly, RSS allows anyone to side step the increasingly cynical world of pop-ups, newsletters, Google's DRM, and any opt-out marketing that accompanies so many web pages. However, most modern RSS readers either exist within the web browser itself, as a service, or as a desktop application, which makes the web an all too tempting single click away.

Goread is a command-line RSS reader that will parse a simple configuration file containing links to RSS feeds and present these within its curses-based UI. This keeps the web a desktop away, and helps you to stay on top of your feed without resorting to a browser. The panel to left of the main view contains a categorized list of feeds pulled directly from the configuration file, while the main view shows the content list for any selected feed. As with other readers, feeds can be selected individually or through different layers of aggregation according to their category. Putting several feeds in a "News" category, for example, will either list every story combined from the RSS feeds in that category or the feeds for a specific source. Each source will open as a new tab, which can then be selected with the tab key! The configuration file can also be used to change the colors used to demarcate categories, feeds, and stories, and the command line feels like a natural place for all this. If you need to follow a link to the upstream story, you need to either copy and paste from your terminal or rely on a terminal configured to respond to links. It's that extra step that makes goread so useful in keeping you updated and distraction free.

Project Website

https://github.com/TypicalAM/goread

Access your favorite news stories without distractions from the command line with the wonderful goread RSS reader.