Seth's Geeky Projects
Nothing is ever really finished, but some things are useful and stable
enough to merit distribution, or at least not to embarrass me. Most
of these are petty little hacks.
Non-Small Things
- txt2html
- txt2html helps you convert plain text documents to HTML. This
is a big hack that makes a medium dent in a huge problem.
- RARB
- RARB helps you decide what a cappella music to buy. There's no
magic software here. We use actual people to review the music.
- Stone Soup Scavenger Hunt
- Like a normal scavenger hunt, but no one is in charge, and the
value of an item depends on how many teams find it.
- Wordsprout
- A fun letter/word game some friends and I made up.
- XMMS Waterfall spectrum analyzer
- Now you can see your music!
- autojot
- Indexes everything you see so you can find it again later.
- PizzaZone
- PizzaZone helps you decide what pizza to buy. Or at least it
did, back when it worked. I've left the site up as a historical
curiosity, but the actual recommendation system is offline for
boring technical reasons. The web site itself is built around a
finite state machine. The recommendation engine used genetic
algorithms, and the objective function involved a simulation of
people taking turns choosing slices until they were full, greedily
trying to maximize their individual happiness according to
heuristics that considered their preferences for specific toppings
as well as a desire for variety.
Minor Hacks
- grepui
- A GUI front-end to grep, intended for use on handheld systems.
- torso
![[link to here]](../meta/flag)
- This is a line filtering utility similar to head
and tail, but it prints lines from the middle of input
files. You give it a starting line and either and ending line
or a total length. It can process multiple inputs, handling
them individually or concatenating them.
- untar
- I hate when I untar something and it spews files into my
current directory. For a long time my solution was to be in an
empty directory. Now I use my untar script. It peeks into the
tarfile (even if it's compressed) and untars it into a
subdirectory if it thinks it's not going to be well behaved.
- tkspools
- A Tcl/Tk mail notification gizmo that deals well with lots of
spools files. Each spool is listed in a separate widget with a
predictable name. That lets you use X resources to easily mess
with a particular spool's appearance and bindings. In my own
configuration, I bind the middle button to bring up the the
right thing my mailer.
- dtmf-decode-single
- A small perl script that decodes a single DTMF tone. That is,
you give it an audio recording of you pressing a button on your
phone, and it tells you which button you pressed. It can't
handle sequences though, only single tones. (For sequences, see
dtmf-decode-continuous.) It
uses sox to do the actual audio processing.
- dtmf-decode-continuous
- A perl program similar to dtmf-decode-single,
but attempts to decode a stream of tones, which is usually what
you really want. The segmentation is a bit flaky, but if you're
in a hurry and don't want to segment the input manually, this
might work.
- bbdb
- (and some other BBDB related utilities)
- butler
- some Lojban dictionary hacks
- make-dict-index
- A Perl script that creates index files for dictionaries suitable
for dictd. This is also in
the Lojban tools listed above, but it's of general use too.
- cdash
Other silly things
- Chrons
- Chrons are metric time. I hate hours:minutes:seconds; I think
that's as stupid as miles:yards:feet:inches. I was once decent at
doing conversions to and from chrons, but that skill has since
atrophied.
- Gnocatan Graphics
- I made new graphics for Gnocatan.
- Discardia calculator