Daniel Lange's blog (Entries tagged as script)

Creating iPhone/iPod/iPad notes from the shell

nospam@example.com (Daniel Lange) — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 09:00:00 +0100

I found a very nice script to create Notes on the iPhone from the command line by hossman over at Perlmonks.

For some weird reason Perlmonks does not allow me to reply with amendments even after I created an account. I can "preview" a reply at Perlmonks but after "create" I get "Permission Denied". Duh. vroom, if you want screenshots, contact me on IRC .

As I wrote everything up for the Perlmonks reply anyways, I'll post it here instead.

Against hossman's version 32 from 2011-02-22 I changed the following:

removed .pl from filename and documentation
added --list to list existing notes
added --hosteurope for Hosteurope mail account preferences and with it a sample how to add username and password into the script for unattended use
made the "Notes" folder the default (so -f Notes becomes obsolete)
added some UTF-8 conversions to make Umlauts working better (this is a mess in perl, see Jeremy Zawodny's writeup and Ivan Kurmanov's blog entry for some further solutions). Please try combinations of utf8::encode and ::decode, binmode utf8 for STDIN and/or STDOUT and the other hints from these linked blog entries in your local setup to get Umlauts and other non-7bit ASCII characters working. Be patient. There's more than one way to do it .

I /msg'd hossman the URL of this blog entry.

Continue reading "Creating iPhone/iPod/iPad notes from the shell"

Apple iPhone ring tones Linux style

nospam@example.com (Daniel Lange) — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 11:55:00 +0200

Apple has crippled the iPhone to not allow normal music files as ringtones. Business decision. Technically any sub 40 second MP4 audio file will do once you rename it to *.m4r and drag-and-drop it to the ringtones folder of your phone in iTunes. Longer ones will work, too. But you'd need a jailbroken iPhone for that as iTunes will refuse to transfer the ringtone file if it's too long. Not much of an issue imho, who keeps ringing your phone for 40 seconds or more?

There's a gazillion websites available telling you how to convert a single .mp3-file to a ringtone with or without iTunes help and there are hundreds of tools doing that for you if you can't find out how to do it with just iTunes itself. Still the ones I tried failed for me as I wanted to convert my 20 or so standard ringtones from the good old Motorola K3 to iPhone ringtones all in one go. Without having to edit each one by hand. They are already nice ringtones and have served me well for years, just too long for the iPhone and in .mp3 format.

The basic processing sequence needed is

Cut the .mp3 down to 39s
Convert the .mp3 -> .wav (with mplayer, normalize output gain while we're at it)
Convert the .wav -> .mp4 (with facc)
Clean up, GOTO 1 for next file

So below is the free shell script to create multiple ringtones in one go on any Linux system. You need to install cutmp3, mplayer and faac for it, so apt-get install cutmp3 mplayer faac on Debian or Ubuntu. cutmp3 is currently not in the portage tree for Gentoo, but you can download an ebuild from Polynomial-C's overlay (mirror). Or you just download the cutmp3 binary from Jochen Puchalla's homepage. There's no error checking in the script, so know your way around the shell before running it.

Without further ado:

#!/bin/sh
#
# convert_to_ringtone file1.mp3 [file2.mp3, ...]
# Placed into the public domain by Daniel Lange, 2011.
#

for arg
do
echo "Processing $arg..."
cutmp3 -c -a 0:0.0 -b 0:39.0 -i "$arg" -O "$arg.tmp"
mplayer -vo null -vc null -af volnorm -ao pcm:fast:file=tmpfile.wav "$arg.tmp"
faac -b 128 -c 44100 -w tmpfile.wav
name=`echo $arg| sed 's/.mp3//g'| sed 's/ /_/g'`
mv tmpfile.m4a $name.m4r
rm tmpfile.wav
rm "$arg.tmp"
echo "$arg done."
done

Keeping IRC nicks active

nospam@example.com (Daniel Lange) — Tue, 18 May 2010 23:50:00 +0200

Typical IRC services usually allow you to register with nickserv and link a number of nicks to a personal account. It's quite common to have nick, nick_ and nick__ as many IRC clients auto-append underscores if the primary nickname is already in use when connecting. Obviously you can set these alternate nicknames to almost anything you like in a decent client.

Some folks also group a "vanity" nickname or two for whatever reason. To keep these active, people do the "nick shuffle" (/nick newnick, /nick oldnick) all the time:

People who forget the occasional nick shuffle may end up losing a grouped nick because it became inactive. While freenode staff try to contact people before dropping linked nicks, there are occasional prunes of "old data" from the services database. And then nobody can really ask upfront.

So before the next big purge comes up, I wrote a small bash script that logs into a nickserv account and cycles through the linked nicks. A few friends and me have used it successfully for many months now.

Grab a copy of keepnick (2.4kB) and drop it into /usr/local/bin.

Keepnick expects to have an accountname, the corresponding password and then a sequence of linked nicks given on its command line.

Something like

/usr/local/bin/keepnick accountname passw0rd linked_nick linked_nick_ vanity_nick MyOtherNick

should work.

For regular use, you need to set up a cron job to call keepnick e.g. every week. So put something like the following script into /etc/cron.weekly/keepnicks_irc or create a corresponding crontab entry for keepnicks_irc if you do not have the convenient cron.* directories set up:

#!/bin/bash
#
# run keepnick for user(s) irc account(s)
# intended to be run from cron, e.g. through /etc/cron.weekly
#

KEEPNICK="/usr/local/bin/keepnick"
# better safe than sorry
PATH="/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin"
export PATH

$KEEPNICK accountname1 passw0rd1 linked_nick1 linked_nick1_ linked_nick1__
$KEEPNICK accountname2 passw0rd2 linked_nick1 linked_nick2_ linked_nick2__

You should see keepnick in action now every week like this:

What happens here is that the IRC services package tells you, keepnick has just authenticated to your account and will now shuffle through all nicks you asked it to. The big advantage is that is does this outside of channels, so not annoying any users. The cron job should make sure you don't forget the nick shuffle anymore.

Making sure your bash supports network connections

Stock bash will support network connections but on Debian and old (=pre-karmic) Ubuntu that capability was disabled at compile time.

If you need to check whether your bash is compiled with network support, type cat < /dev/tcp/time.nist.gov/13 into a bash terminal.

In case that gives you a RFC-867 time string, you're all fine. If not, re-compile your bash with --enable-net-redirections.

Now for something more advanced (but entirely optional):

Continue reading "Keeping IRC nicks active"

zip2dir (expand a zip to a directory of the same name)

nospam@example.com (Daniel Lange) — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 23:51:40 +0200

I needed to expand a lot of jars (Java zips) and other zips of various names into directories of the same name for each file. With 6,239 files of which some are jars, some other zips and many xml and other filetypes all not properly identified by a file extension, this gets a bit too much to do manually.

So:
Finding candidates for these is easy with find . -type f.
The file is most probably a zip archive if the first two characters are "PK", good old Phil Katz' signature. A friendly head -c 2 checks that.
All combined with some rudimentary error checking:

#!/bin/bash
# There is little data security here, so know what you're doing.
# All risks in using this code are yours. It moves and deletes files quite stupidly.
# (c) Daniel Lange, 2009, v0.01, released into the public domain
if [ $# -ne 1 ] ; then
echo "Error: $0 expects exactly one argument, a (fully qualified) path/to/a/zipfile"
exit 1
fi
if [ ! -r $1 ] ; then
echo "Error: file does not exist or no read permission on $1"
exit 2
fi
if [ ! -w "$(dirname $1)" ] ; then
echo "Error: cannot write to directory of $1"
exit 3
fi
if [ "$(head -c 2 $1)" == "PK" ] ; then
mv $1 $1.tmp
mkdir -p $1
unzip -d $1 $1.tmp
rm $1.tmp
else echo "$1 is not a zipfile"
fi

Download available here (1KB).

Typical usage:

find . -type f -print0 |xargs --null -n 1 zip2dir

This will expand all zips under the current directory.
Leave the zip2dir out for a dry run (xargs will just print to the tty then). Look at the -exec switch when digging around a bit more into what find can do for you.

Updated Greasemonkey script for Xing

nospam@example.com (Daniel Lange) — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 23:45:37 +0200

Xing has just updated it's image-thumbnails naming "algorithm" once again:

You'll now find thumbnails named /2f1127fe2.3144098_s2,2.jpg, so including another component like <comma><digit> added to the name. Thus the Greasemonkey script linked from my article Greasemonkey to enlarge Xing pictures needs to have it's main regex amended:

Change \_s(1|2|3)?\. to read \_s(1|2|3)?(,\d)?\. in three places in the script.

Or download an updated version here. I hope "louis" will update the version hosted at userscripts.org, too.

Updates

02.05.2008 As Xing adds multi-digit numbers to the thumbnails now (like /7553bd445.4550412_s2,10.jpg), you need to replace \d with \d+ in the above regex. The linked Greasemonkey script is updated.

16.11.2011 And again the URLs changed. This time appending a pattern like ,4.57x75.jpg. The linked script again was updated. If Scriptish and the auto-updating in Greasemonkey mature, I'll add auto-updating to the script file via the @updateURL parameter.

13.05.2012 The Xing layout is still changing as they Ajaxify the site more and more. Currently the Xing XE is probably the best working enhancement to see Xing pictures in a recognisable size.

Greasemonkey to enlarge Xing pictures

nospam@example.com (Daniel Lange) — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 23:30:00 +0100

I use Xing to manage some of my business contacts and even some friends have profiles there as well.

The default size of contact's pictures displayed on one's Xing homepage is 18x24px. On a higher dpi screens, you can thus barely recognize the person shown. As there are multiple sizes of all images available, it's pretty easy to just take (for example) http://www.xing.com/img/users/d/f/1/f34814409.5648827_s1.jpg, remove the _s1 and see a 140x185px version of the picture.

Greasemonkey, a Firefox extension to run user specified scripts on selected pages that you visit, can automate this with a nice script from user louis to download here. Or my updated version here.*

So, everytime I now hover my mouse over a tiny Xing thumbnail, it will show the "full resolution" version of the image. Simple, efficient.

Update

* Xing changed it's image naming scheme a bit, so one needs an updated Greasemonkey script for all images to work again. Link inserted into the article text ("Or my updated version here.")