Hi Folks,

I am going to be participating in Extra Life this year and created a script that will flip my monitor upside down for 5 minutes randomly. I am looking for some more ideas for simple scripts or commands that could be entertaining for some donation incentives.

As a side not I am currently using EndeavourOS and Sway.

  • palordrolap
    2•1 year ago

    fortune cookie -s | cowsay_random | xmessage -xrm "*message.scrollVertical: Never" -buttons "" -nearmouse -bg gray -fg black -font 7x13bold -file -

    Requires that fortune be installed along with the eponymous cookie fortunes set (these usually come with the default install).

    cowsay_random is not installed fully working by default but can usually be found among the files installed with cowsay. (The #! header might need to be updated to use python2 instead of just python as I found out when testing this)

    xmessage is a seriously old program but it works just fine. The command line supplied pops up the output of the preceding commands near where the mouse is on the screen. The -file - bit is necessary to read the pipeline.

    See the man page for xmessage if any of the other options aren’t too clear.

    Your further mission is to arrange for this to trigger somehow or another, be that at random or when some other event occurs.

    Caveats: 1) No idea if this works on Wayland. 2) No ANSI colour code support, so no lolcat. Figure out a way to use an xtermor something if that’s what you want.