scripting News and Articles

You can use a dead-simple solution based on HTML pages containing the REFRESH metatag instead of a full-blown URL shortening application.

An Android device is ideal for snapping photos of receipts, handwritten notes, and white board drawings.

While there are several word count extensions for Google Chrome and Chromium (which is currently my browser of choice), none of them seem to be able to handle text selection in the File Thingie's text editor. So I hacked my own shell script that solves the problem.

If you want to add a dash of GUI goodness to your Bash scripts, you have several options. You can use Zenity or Kdialog to quickly add simple dialogs and message boxes to Bash scripts. However, both tools are rather limited, and for a more complex GUI design you might want to give YAD a try.

bitpocket may not rival dedicated file syncing services like Dropbox or Wuala, but this neat tool has a few important advantages. For starters the entire solution consists of a single Bash script which uses the good old rsync tool to perform its syncing magic.

A simple web server running on your Android device is a perfect solution for ad-hoc sharing and publishing files and documents, which can come in handy in many situations. You might be thinking that you need a dedicated app for that, but you can actually roll out a simple web server using a Python script containing only four lines of code.

A plain text file acting as a scratchpad can come in handy in many situations. You can use it to store text and code snippets, links, and other useful stuff. But copying and pasting text fragments into a text file manually is not the most sensible way to go. A simple script based on the AutoKey utility can solve the problem.

If you host your own blog or any Web-based application running on the Apache/MySQL/PHP stack, you should have a backup system in place for keeping data stored in MySQL databases safe.

When it comes to dowloading photos from a storage card and organizing them in the process, Rapid Photo Downloader is just the ticket. But if you prefer to do that from the command line, here is a simple Bash script cobbled together by yours truly.

The humble nano text editor can be a rather handy distraction-free drafting tool, but now and then I need to look up words and their definitions in WordNet. To do that, I tweaked a simple Bash script I stumbled upon on the Stack Overflow Web site.