PyRadio

Despite the Internet, radio hasn't died. Millions of people still listen to live transmissions broadcast across the airwaves every day, and many more have transitioned to radio packets broadcast across the Internet without really thinking about it. There's something unique about radio that shouldn't be allowed to die in the age of infinite distraction. Aside from listening to local broadcasts, one of the best things about old school radio was using a cheap shortwave tuner to listen to channels from hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of miles away. There used to be many of these channels, and there still are, compacted into a half twist of the tuning dial. Listening often became a voyage of discovery, and while Internet radio has removed much of the chance of random listening, it hasn't replaced the joy of listening to something different. This is where PyRadio can help, because there can't be many Internet radio players that offer Commodore 64 rock remixes from an Internet radio station as a primary playback source.

PyRadio is a command-line Internet radio player with a great feature if you have MPV, MPlayer, or VLC somewhere in your path for audio playback. When first launched, you'll see a simple list of curated stations, easily selectable using the cursor keys. Press the space bar to start playback, or if you're after the true shortwave experience, press r to start a random station. Pressing ? will open the pop-up help shortcuts, so you never need to remember which keys do what. In particular, there are plenty of configuration options. You can load your own playlists, for instance, but there are also several built-in light and dark themes from which to choose. Thanks to this and its low resource usage, PyRadio is perfect for dark nights under the bed sheets, tuning in to pirate radio stations from the other side of the globe.

Project Website

https://github.com/coderholic/pyradio

Relive the glory days of shortwave radio with the austerity of a command-line Internet radio client.

Batch image processor

OpenResizer

Sometimes, you need something simple to do a simple job. You don't want to learn an arcane command-line trick or download a full-featured application to use only one of its features. You want one tool that does exactly what you need and nothing else. OpenResizer loads a selection of images and lets you save resized versions of those images, either with new file names or in a different location. It's the kind of batch image processing conundrum that was solved a long time ago, but there's never been a perfect or memorable way of doing it. OpenResizer couldn't be simpler to use, and the user experience consists of three tabs from left to right. The left tab holds the lists of images you wish to process. These can be loaded individually, or from a file requester that thankfully supports multiple selections. Only PNG, JPEG, and BMP formats are supported, but that should be enough for the majority of uses. The second tab holds the options for customizing the conversion, while the third tab handles the output file names for your converted images.

For a quick and easy conversion, you simply import the images you want converted and click on Save to Folder to choose a destination. Your images will be converted without any further configuration, but if you look a little deeper, especially on the Options tab, there are lots of neat additions to help with the conversion. If you double-click an image in the list, for example, you'll see a before and after image of what the conversion will do, and the Options tab includes the ability to scale by percentage and by pixels. If you're processing a huge number of images, you can also take full advantage of however many cores your CPU has or restrict the processing to a single core if you'd rather use the remainder of your CPU power watching YouTube. It is a simple job, but it can't be done much more effectively.

Project Website

https://jobinpy.com/

There's even a Windows version of OpenResizer if you get stuck converting old family photos on your parent's Windows 95-era PC.