Prino’s “technical” hitchhiking resources

The following files are made available to those visitors of this site that want to work a bit more with the data Prino has collected over his years on the road, and some contain the actual output of some of his programs. Prino usually updates the five asterisk’ed (*) files after every trip.

The available files are

gpl-3.0.txt

• all software to process Prino’s hitchhiking data has been released under this license.

make-google.bat

• a batch file used by Prino to create updated versions of files to be synced to here and his Google Drive.

  The file contains a check for the presence of “zappy.rex”, and if this REXX exec is present, it removes

  • personal notes and all Google Maps URLs from “lift.dat” (in “liftdat.rar”)

  and changes, if it’s present, some other personal data in

  • “ntop.txt” (in “lifttxt.rar”)
  • “xtra.txt” (in “lifttxt.rar”)
  • “ntop.rtf” (in “liftrtf.rar”)
  • “xtra.rtf” (in “liftrtf.rar”)
  • “lift & v100+.ods”

lift32bit.rar (*)

• see “A manual for Prino’s hitchhiking programs” for what’s in this archive.

liftdat.rar (*)

• an archive containing a sanitised version of “lift.dat”, the input to lift, containing the data Prino recorded since 16 June 1980.

lifttxt.rar (*)

• an archive containing the box2txt’ed “raw” output files of lift, dayform, and mnthform, renamed to “*.txt”, allowing them to be displayed without all kinds of “funny” characters on Windoze.

liftrtf.rar (*)

• an archive containing the h-h2rtf’ed output files of lift, directly loadable by many word-processor programs, such as LibreOffice Writer and M$ Word. Main difference with the “*.txt” files above is that the tables in these files have their headings, and, in a few cases, contents of their first columns bolded.

lift & v100+.ods (*)

• a LibreOffice spreadsheet that Prino uses to also keep track of his rides. It contains a tiny subset of the number of tables produced by lift.

  However, it also contains some additional tables that Prino uses to keep track of the various days he still “needs” to hitchhike, and a number of graphs looking at distances, times, average velocities, and waiting times per year. By the virtue of having the data in a spreadsheet, it also allows (some) tables to be modified on-the-fly, and filtering data, but…

  … the spreadsheet only contains a subset of the data in “lift.dat”, information about day-splits, country-splits, and in-ride waiting times is completely missing from “lift.csv”, the file generated by dat2csv, which is used to feed the sheet.

  A final note about this file? It’s a “Prino” special

  1. if you open it with LibreOffice, and, without changing it, do a “Save as”, the resulting file has a size that is about 100kb bigger,
  2. if you open it with any ZIP processing program (an .ODS file is just a ZIP file) and look at all the timestamps, you will see that, well you will see, and
  3. if you look at “meta.xml” in the “root” of the file with a tool that allows you to display the formatted data, and most, if not all, internet browsers can do this, you’ll notice that it was created well before LO existed, was edited exactly as many times as Prino has had trips, but that the editing took no time at all, and that it was saved the moment Prino got home from his last trip!

zap-ods.rex

• the REXX exec Prino uses to create the “special” version of “lift & v100+.ods” mentioned above. It requires the following programs, or equivalents to do its magic:
  • Regina, a REXX interpreter
  • RAR, the command-line version of WinRAR
  • sed, the GNU stream editor
  • touch32, a utility written by Andrzej Kubaszek, to update timestamps of files

  Note that this exec also relies on the presence of “lift.dat” to obtain the data it changes in the constituent files of the .ODS file, and that it would be possible to also apply some of the rounding changes to other constituent files, an exercise left to those skilled in the art.

lift.pli

• a version of lift written in Prino’s favourite programming language, PL/I. JCL to compile, link and run it, on IBM’s z/OS will be provided in due course. (Use Cut & Paste to save it)

liftnote-3-scribus-en.sla
liftnote-3-scribus-en.pdf

• the Scribus sources to create the notes, and the resulting PDFs, Prino has been using to record his rides.

  Note: Prino uses the Cubiculum font in the .SLA file. This is not a free font, you’ll have to fork out USD 29 (a pretty good bargain) to buy it, or alternatively, use a fixed pitch font of your choice.

  Note: To obtain Dutch versions, use these links, [Dutch .SLA] and [Dutch .PDF]

liftnote.svg

• an SVG version of Prino’s liftnote, for a single ride. Like the .SLA files above, it uses the Cubiculum font.

touch32.url

• a Windows URL file with a link to Andrzej Kubaszek site, where you can find the “touch32” program Prino uses in many of his batch files and REXX execs.

The following three files are for those people who still like to play with DOS, either the real thing, or its emulated vesions, such as the DOS box of Windows XP (even the one in the M$ Virtual Windows XP on W7-64 Pro), and (obviously) in DOSBox-X, the DOS emulator actively developed by Jon Campbell.

lift16bit.rar

• an archive containing the final (60th) Turbo Pascal V3.01a 16-bit version of lift, with full sources and an old format copy of “lift.dat”, containing the data for the first 40 trips of Prino. Only “lift.com” is present, Prino never wrote any of the follow-up programs that are now in the suite of programs for use on plain DOS.

list96y1.rar

• an archive containing the last published version of the late Vern Buerg’s famous “list” program, which seems a bit harder to find nowadays.

list77a.rar

• an older version of Vern Buerg’s “list” program, which, untested, should still allow access to networked files.

Last updated on 27 November 2022 (Remove direct link to Google Drive)