Colorized terminal-mode bar-charting for ping
Mainly this came out of frustration with in-flight wifi, which is never great and often completely absent. I like to have a terminal window open pinging a well-known IP address so I instantly see the status of my network connection -- not the flawless four-bar signal to the onboard router, but the status from there onward. If I can see what's going on, I'm less likely to be frustrated by it and more likely to accept the transient phenomena.
Since ping times vary by several orders of magnitude -- less than 10 ms for good land fiber, 100 ms or so for VPN, 1000-2000 ms for in-flight -- a logarithmic scale is necessary.
You can supply a ping target, e.g. pingety-ping 8.8.8.8, to use a script-internal (ruby-lib) pinger.
Or, you can use -x to pipe in the output of the system ping command, e.g. ping 8.8.8.8 | pingety-ping -x.
sudo $NAME_OF_YOUR_PACKAGE_MANAGER install ruby
sudo gem install net-ping
In-flight, high-latency but reliable:
Pinging the onboard router on the same flight -- stellar -- which is why the desktop icon gives a hearty four-bars review to the signal quality, when the reality is more complex:
High-variance on local network:
Low-quality connection:
On good fiber -- before, during, and after disconnect from VPN:
