Sunday January 28, 2024

chatty cat(thy)!, or not so trivial trivia
now playing: Missus Beastly - Dr. Aftershave & The Mixed-Up Pickles and Tortoise - Standards

I've enjoyed watching Jeopardy! over the years and along with baseball, women's basketball, and being able to check the news (any shows I like I'm happy to pirate) is pretty much the main thing I miss from live cable TV. Needless to say, I'm also a big fan of playing Trivial Pursuit. In the past couple of years, I've also played a fair bit of chat in a trivia room on soulseek. Much more recently than that, however, I've come to appreciate over the past couple of months is playing over I(nternet) R(elay) C(hat). I did a bit of this back when I was a teenager (I don't remember which site but a cursory google search yields number of chat sites designed for teenagers to chat which have dedicated trivia rooms, and I think it's a common feature for most chat hosts) and I'm glad to be back. The server I connect through for trivia is freenode, one of the longest running. So I googled 'openbsd irc client' and came across catgirl, a lightweight IRC client with a cute name. And the idea of running a chat client in the commandline sounded too good to be true. It took me longer than I might like to get it going just right but here's what I did, and what you can do to get it working super easily for yourself.

First, I installed catgirl with # pkg_add, since it's already in the default openbsd repo. Then I cd'd into my user's /.config folder and made a directory for the configuration file, which I made in vim, named config000 Then, I filled in the file essentially as follows:

nick = foo
pass = bar
host = chathost.org
node = 6697
join = #myhome

It's (almost) that simple! Here's what each part of the above does, if it doesn't seem obvious. After registering your desired credentials with NickServ, this configuration file (mine is named config000 though I highly doubt I'll ever make 1000 configuration files), which by default lives in the usual spot, does the following: The first line establishes we are working with the username foo. Then, it supplies the password bar. The next two lines specify the network chathost.org and the port 6697 to connect to. That last line ensures that as part of the connection process, our chat client will automatically join the myhome room. catgirl has the option to automatically join several rooms as part of a configuration file, provided they're all on the same network. 


               O tessa o
          _\_   o
       \\/  o\ .
       //\___=
          ''


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