Weekly Shaarli

All links of one week in a single page.

Week 14 (4 april 2022)

The big tech threat to free thought
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Well-written review, with thus nugget of a quote by Susie Alegre:

When my daughter asked why she couldn’t have an Alexa like her friends, I told her that it is because Alexa steals your dreams and sells them.

Via Arts & Letters Daily.

Encode arbitrary string as QR-code from the bash terminal

This is a neat way to quickly generate a QR-code, for example to transfer text from computer to phone (thanks to Solène Rapenne for the original idea and implementation). On the phone, you'll of course need to use a QR-reader app, such as Binary Eye.

xclip -o -selection clipboard | qrencode -o - -t PNG | feh -g 600x600 -Z -

Using this command, whatever is in your clipboard will be encoded to QR and displayed on your monitor. Note that xclip can pull stuff from different clipboards, and in my case the contents were not picked up with -selection default but -selection clipboard did the trick.

Linux (well, really the window managers, so X11 and then, i3, Wayland, etc…​) have multiple clipboards. The default ones are the Primary selection one, and the Secondary one. The names are historical accidents, but the “primary” one always has a copy of the last text you selected from anywhere, which can be pasted anywhere by clicking the middle mouse button. You just select some text and that’s it - you don’t have to do anything else and you can then middle-click paste this anywhere. The “secondary” clipboard is the “normal” Cut, Copy, Paste, Ctrl+c, Ctrl+v one.
https://duncanlock.net/blog/2022/04/06/using-windows-after-15-years-on-linux/