Read It Later

As great as wallabag is at making web-based articles easy to read and consume, the standard web portal and page rendering is never going to be able to compete with a native application. This is something that other caching services offer, especially on other operating systems and devices, and it's something that this Read It Later app now does for Linux. Read It Later is a beautifully designed Gnome desktop application for accessing your wallabag library of content, adding new links, and reading stories. It does this with a wonderfully minimal interface so that the browsing and reading experience can be as distraction-free as possible. The article view can be toggled between unread, favorite, and archived stories, and these are shown in a detailed list alongside a thumbnail from the article.

Unlike the web interface which adds an icon-only view and further filtering options, Read It Later is intended to catch-up on unread articles, which are sorted according to the time they should take to read. These options are taken from the web interface, but the reading experience itself is much better than either the web interface or the Android application. Selecting an article will render its contents within the frame of the desktop application, reformatted to look and render perfectly. All distractions and advertising are removed, and the text is beautifully rendered and presented within Gnome's minimal window frame and titlebar. As with other modern GTK4 applications, light and dark theming will follow your desktop configuration, and the few options offered are accessible from the embedded menu in the titlebar. You can mark a story as a favorite or add a link to a new story. There's no other manual control over rendering style, and the only management options you have are to either favorite or delete a post which is automatically marked as read after a web-configured period of time. It sounds simple, but it's the best way to read the links you hoard, and a refreshing change from the distraction of reading online.

Project Website

https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/read-it-later

Read It Later offers a minimal and distraction-free reading environment for whatever articles you collect with wallabag.

Visual ping

gping

If there's one command that Linux users everywhere have relied on for decades, it's ping. Written in the early 1980s, before almost anyone had Internet access and networks were built with coaxial cables, it's a command that's followed us from simple home networks and dial-up modem connections, through full-fiber symmetric broadband, and into the multi-provider cloud-synergized scaling. Ping has survived because it performs one simple task perfectly, letting you always know whether some other machine on a network is accessible and responding to your requests to acknowledge itself. The name "ping" famously refers to the pulse sound of submarine sonar when the sound echos off some remote object. Linux ping does the same for remote servers, telling you a remote machine is accessible and how long it takes for a packet to trek from your machine to the remote machine and back. Ping's output is nothing more than a line of text for each packet showing the destination IP and the time the trip took. This leaves a lot of room for improvement, especially if you want to track responses over time, and that's exactly what the super-simple and super-useful gping does.

Gping is still a command-line ping but with a graph showing response times for one or more servers. At its simplest, it's a drop-in replacement for ping where, instead of the individual line of output for each response, there's a point drawn on a graph. You can change the interval, the amount of buffer, and the horizontal and vertical margins, but the graph will also start to scroll when it hits the edge, allowing you to see quickly any variation in the remote host's accessibility from your current machine. Best of all, adding more than one target to the command will graph response times for each separately on the same graph, so you can better check network performance, or keep an eye on your own servers, and it looks awesome when you're trying to impress people with your command-line skills.

Project Website

https://github.com/orf/gping

Gping can resolve both IPv4 and IPv6 target addresses and use color to better differentiate between response times.