The disappointingly ongoing success of WvDial (2009) (opens in new tab)

There's an astonishing amount of things in the world which are not too hard to do, would be really useful and/or popular, yet no one really thought of making them. This also applies to software, BTW.

> WvDial is a modem dialer and nobody uses modems anymore.

I was using dial up until probably 2007 or 2008, and I was certainly using wvdial with it. The reason I was using wvdial is because it was the only option that actually worked. I think I tried to get Gnome's GUI to work, but was never able to. I think I still have the non-winmodem PCI card too, spent a lot of money (for a teenager) on it.

There is also the question of inertia. People are used to certain software, and recommend this to others. In many cases I'd rather have a CLI that I know how to use, than a finnicky GUI that I don't.

Loved wvdial in the late 90s and early 2000s.

Circa 2009-2010 I was surprised to see instructions to use it for tethering on the Nokia N900. I guess the cellular data was still using the old AT command set.

There was wvdialconf I can recall it right.

On using old software because of inertia or better features:

- MPlayer/MPV. Simple keys, click on the file and it just plays it. That's it.

- Pidgin with plugins.

- Mutt+lynx (for HTML email) with mbsync and msmtp. Batched email for important stuff when you must preserve your data against inferior solutions such as Discord.

- Lynx on gopher/http heavy sites calling external video and audio viewers. Good when bw is scarce, and gopher://gopherddit.com, gopher://hngopher.com and gopher://magical.fish have tons of services to use.

- wpa_passphrase+wpa_supplicant daemon+wpa_gui if you are in love with mice.

- find/xargs/rsync/moreutils/vidir/rclone: editing zillions of filenames in place with an editor and vidir, sync them, rename them... hell in Explorer, a piece of cake under Unix where you can use your favourite editor in a folder tree mounted with rclone and then batch-replace your whole remote directory subtree as if it was a text file. Old concept, science fiction for today's youngsters:

    rclone mount yourcloudremoteshare: ./here

    EDITOR=gedit vidir ./here/foo/bar/

And that's the simplest method. With find you don't even need to spawn an editor, with a command after exec you can run for instance

    find ./here -type f -iname "*.pdf" -exec evince {} \;

to open the evince PDF viewer on all the PDF filenames you find in your remote.

> We originally created wvdial back in the late 1990's because setting up pppd 'chat' scripts was too annoying.

Yes, wvdial saved my ass back then. I remember pppd being incredibly confusing (not sure if it was, but I was only a teenager at the time.) Weird flashback to hear about this; I would have forgotten about it completely otherwise and yes, that is a sad state of things...

Huh. I'm pretty sure that was largely obsoleted a while back (like, over a decade probably, not too long after this was written) by NetworkManager and ModemManager adding better handling for all the weird quirks that did actually matter with mobile broadband. It might still be possible to use it with the right manual configuration and additional software, but it'd mean dealing with badly documented quirks that are just handled for you by ModemManager.

Nowadays, well, on BT, bluez solved all of these problems, and blueman works once at for all.

But BT it's insecure as hell, OpenBSD and distros like Hyperbola GNU/Linux (which will be obsd based soon) ditched BT because of these reasons.

I use it every week, sometimes every day.

Like, just start the dam thing and it works.

I love that blog, and I wish he'd post more often.