Hacks

Rename multiple files.

Scale one or more images to fit a size, or by a scale factor. This is a wrapper around pbmplus tools. It's useful if you have a number of images to scale, e.g. to produce thumbnails, or to scale digital photos down to a reasonable size for displaying on a web page.

Print a date so many days or hours ago, in an arbitrary format. Useful for checking log files for entries for the previous day or hour.

Turn a unix time stamp into a human readable date.

A simple alert dialog. Allows any number of buttons, can sleep and beep and play a sound. I use it in combination with e-reminder as a simple reminder tool

Mount and unmount removable media with a mouse click. Supports arbitrary mount points and arbitrary icons. Re-checks all mount points every 60 seconds (configurable)

Display an on-the-fly png depending on input parameters. Can display linear or triangular scale, with or without the value shown on the slider handle

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Generate a heirarchical fvwm menu from /usr/share/applications/*.desktop files. If you have scale.pl installed and the supplied icon is too big it creates a scaled down image on-the-fly and saves this in a cache. You will also need a list of icons for the menu titles

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This is an adaption of a bash script I found on the internet to implement cd history. There are many copies of this script on the internet still, but none contain the original author's name. This adaption uses exactly the same mechanism, but tracks recent edits instead. It uses $EDITOR to do the work, which I set to emacs, but which can be any editor that takes a filename as a parameter (i.e. almost certainly all of them). It should be included in .bashrc like so:

Usage is:

Produces html code fragments, either containing a thumbnail with a caption, plus a link to the full size image, or a table of thumbnails with captions. The former can then be inserted into a page of text to produce effects such as those seen on the links from the photos page, the latter can be used for producing sheets of thumbnails

sinaas is a simple network audio system.

Rational: I have a cheap, headless box plugged into my hifi which I wanted to control from my laptop. Running an X-based app displayed remotely wasn't an option because it's a) slow and clunky, and b) I didn't want to have to install a lot of X libraries.

How it works: On the machine with a sound card, the server, sind is started at boot time. It can use a mysql database (local or remote) or a text file for authorisation. Authorisation is fairly basic. Any other machine on the network can run client apps - typically the web or pygtk interface. I also assign sincl shortcuts to icons on my desktop so that I can easily start live radio. The client and server can be on the same machine.

For more simple use, sinplay can play all the files supplied as arguments whether they are oggs, mp3s or wavs. I use this on my laptop if I'm away from home.

sinaas is mostly written in perl, with the web interface written in php.

Due to differences in perl versions it is recommended to rebuild the rpms from the SRPM. The supplied rpms are for Fedora Core 4.

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