A useful script: copytoclipboard

Another quick tool I figure I'd share. Made this one a while ago. When you're doing stuff on the command line and you need to copy something for a desktop app, you end up having to select text on your terminal screen. Well if it's a big text file, you have to copy, paste, scroll to the next part, copy (make sure you didn't copy any part twice), paste, etc.

Well, copytoclipboard takes standard input and puts it into the gtk clipboard (haven't tried this on KDE).

#!/usr/bin/env python

import sys

import pygtk
pygtk.require('2.0')
import gtk

c = gtk.Clipboard()
c.set_text(''.join(sys.stdin.read()))
c.store()

For instance, to paste this code, I went into my terminal and typed:

cat copytoclipboard | copytoclipboard

and pasted the results here. For a less confusing example:

uptime | copytoclipboard

lets me paste this:

17:42:14 up 3:23, 2 users, load average: 0.35, 0.39, 0.41

EDIT: Or I could just do a google search and find that xclip already exists. Oh well.

EDIT2: No, xclip seems to be its own thing. I just tried it, doesn't seem to work with gtk. I guess I still win!

"New Music" script

I just thought of a script (can't test it at work so I'll actually write it later, but it'd be only a few lines long). Would work thusly:

Desktop>newmusic britney_spears_leak_trance_remix.ogg ~/music/various/

It would act like mv, just move the song over to the "various" directory, but it would also add a symlink to

~/music/new/

That way, I'll remember to give it a listen. And when it's no longer novel I can just delete the symlink. Otherwise this crap gets accumulated on my Desktop. Maybe happens to you too.

Maybe it could be made into a Nautilus script or something, but that seems a bit more tricky if you're dealing with drag n drops.

Making new twitter followers marginally more convenient

Well, one tiny annoyance that I just randomly decided I felt like itching - I get a handful of emails from twitter saying so-and-so is following me. Usually it's somebody I'm not interested in, but on occasion it's a friend. What annoys me is that I have to open their profile to see. I'd prefer to see the bio and their last few tweets in the email itself. Would help me decide much faster. Well, I've started on a real hack of a solution. It should make it a little less annoying:

http://gist.github.com/304335

Look it over. If you trust it, run it on a command prompt (works on Linux, all I can say). It asks for your gmail password. It opens browser tabs for all the twitter accounts that have followed you that are still in your gmail inbox.

Now, I'm making some wild assumptions about the emails that Twitter is sending us (namely that the first Twitter url is the profile in question), so this may not open up everything correctly. Especially if Twitter changes the email. So, I also open up a tab with a gmail search for all those emails. You can look it over and confirm that it opened up the right tabs, plus this helps you archive them right away.

If it doesn't work, do this first:

https://www.google.com/accounts/DisplayUnlockCaptcha

I guess it tells Google that your computer isn't engaging in any anti-human activities. I had to do it.

I may eventually have it generate an html page with all the useful info right there, so you can look it over quicker. I'll also look for a way to have a GUI password entry thing, so you won't need a cmd prompt. Or, you know, if any of you Open Sourcerers want to do it yourself and send back the update, that would be great too.

Ping!

Pinging is the act of sending ICMP packets to another device, and waiting for a response. It's a good way of seeing if we're online, or if the hopeful recipient is online. It is prevalent enough that it's become slang for contacting someone, to see if they're around and listening. And it's gone beyond that; I just realized that Google Wave's use of "Pinging" someone makes it official in a way.

But even in the ICMP packet sense, it was in a sense a slang usage. From Wikipedia:

"Mike Muuss wrote the program in December, 1983, as a tool to troubleshoot odd behavior on an IP network. He named it after the pulses of sound made by a sonar, since its operation is analogous to active sonar in submarines, in which an operator issues a pulse of sound at the target, which then bounces from the target and is received by the operator. (The pulse of sound in sonar is analogous to a network packet in ping)."

Here's the other half of the story. I always feel inclined to theme my computer. Really put some life into it. I thought of a really silly idea, and a great way how to do this today while sitting at the Skylark.

So here's where it all comes together: Noisy Ping (for lack of better name)

When you set this up, ping will emit a sonar sound. And if you get a response, you will hear a subdued version of the same sound.

Code licensed under WTFPL, sound was from a creative commons site, so it's under Sampling Plus 1.0. Don't sue me if a whale tries to mate with your computer. Or if my program does something bad (though I promise I didn't mean to do anything bad, and that I'm running this on my own computer).

This was sortof hacked together, because frankly I have better things to do than to do this "properly", but I did my best to make sure that the python script relayed ping's inputs and outputs and kill signals faithfully (though I have a failsafe SIGTERM, followed by SIGKILL, at the end). if you have any suggestions on how to make this more safe, less crash prone, more portable, etc, please feel free to send me a better version.

And hell, it's sortof useful too. If you're pinging something and you don't want to watch the terminal to see if you get anything back.

So there you go.

What about a "rabbithole" paradigm for all GUIs?

I'm watching a presentation on Zimbra, and I'm noticing that the interface is really busy. I can begin to see why it must be a pain in the ass to set up and maintain (as I've heard). I know I'd hate to have to use it. Where I currently work, as I would imagine is the case at most large businesses, you have a million different services that you can use, a couple of which you have to use, and a couple which you may want to use (the latter group will vary by person or group). A whole lot of things just don't get used by your group, but you keep hearing about it from the company above, it keeps showing up in your web interfaces, and it's just annoying.

A couple posts ago I mentioned an idea of a "rabbithole paradigm" for configurations. What if you did the same thing for your whole GUI?

You start with a big button that says Zimbra. You click on it and get three buttons called Communication, Collaboration, and Settings. You click Communication and you get your email, chat. Click Collaboration you get file sharing, Wiki, etc. Settings gives you GUI settings and Account Settings, each of which gives you more things. Everything is completely straightforward, if cumbersome, as to where you should find them. Certainly no settings or shortcuts that you don't need are in your main interface.

Well, that would make things a lot less confusing, and a pain to get to the services you need, because you have to go all the way down the rabbit hole to get to them. But, as you decide to use them, they would get added to your front page. This includes configuration too, I suppose, as I mentioned in my other post. That way, you always have exactly the services and settings you need and know how to use on your front page and in your menus.

Backing up stuff from websites.

Ok so if I'm going to give in and start being a social media whore, can I at least back up my info? I know my friend Kevin was telling me that "open websites" let you can grab all your info from their DB. I wonder how possible that is for other sites. Could I, say, back up my Twitter contacts? My google reader feeds? My delicious links? (yet to join the latter two). I can concede that these outside sources know what I'm doing and what I'm interested in and who my friends are and where I live, but I don't like depending on them to keep my data.

I should start by setting up IMAP for my Gmail account, sheesh...

What about a "rabbithole" paradigm for configuration GUIs?

You get very basic settings on the main screen, but there's a button for things a bit more advanced. The screen that follows that button has categories, and each category again has buttons for things slightly more advanced. You go as far down the rabbithole as you feel comfortable. You could have everything be configurable, but it's not a choice between a Fischer Price toy and an Airplane Cockpit.

And, and I think this is a kicker here, you save which buttons you clicked, which screens you edited. So you sortof have your own customized config GUI. It's tailored to each user for whatever they feel comfortable with.