Now and then I find myself automating a simple task that others might find useful as well.
- script:
bib2important_words_list.rb - requires: pdftotext
During my research I gather lots of PDF files of scientific articles and books. My interpretation of what the key terms are in the field do not alway align with the actual key terms that are being used in the field. On the one hand, people from different traditions and generations tend to use (slightly) different terms to describe the same concepts. On the other hand, not being a native English speaker, I think I sometimes have a different interpretation of a term than meant by the authors.
Using ruby bib2important_words_list.rb path/to/source-dir allows me to
generate a histogram of occurrences of words in the PDF files in source-dir.
At the moment, the histogram only includes words that occur at least 10 times.
It does not ignore articles, and other irrelevant words at the moment, but
these are easy to recognize and strip afterwards.
- script:
capture_sreen - requires: ffmpeg
When testing educational software, I often would capture the computer sessions
for later analysis. Running the script capture_screen some_string captures the screen as
a video and saves it in a date-prefixed, some-string-named webm file.
For more information about capturing screen sessions (including audio) see: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Capture/Desktop
I like to keep copies of all my repositories on Github also on my local machines. To automate getting them all up-to-date and on every machine, I wrote a simple ruby script.
Usage:
get_all_github_repositories.rb --username a-name --archive-dir a-dir
Options:
-u, --username=<s> Github username to get all github repositories from
-a, --archive-dir=<s> Directory to place all github repositories in, default is .
-h, --help Show this message
- script:
pdf_to_img - requires: ghostscripts
During my research in history and education, I've collected a lot of PDF files containing either historical documents or students' products. Sometimes I need a (high resolution) raster image file to add to my papers or websites.
Usage:
pdf_to_img input.pdf [output_format [resolution]]
This will convert input.pdf to output.output_format (default format is png)
with given resolution (default resolution is 300x300). For more information
about possible output formats, see
https://www.gnu.org/software/ghostscript/devices.html
TODO: convert one page from a multi-page PDF file
- script:
radio - requires: vlc (other media players will work as well, just adapt the script accordingly)
I like to listen to Dutch public radio. On http://www.npo.nl/specials/digitale-radio you find information about the internet streams. As I got bored copying those urls in my mediaplayer, I wrote a simple script to start up one of the six radio stations.
Usage:
radio [n]
with n, 1 <= n <= 6, the number of the radio station. By default radio 1 is started.
- script:
transcribe.vim - requires: mplayer
While doing historical and educational research, I often made audio or video recordings I had to transcribe afterwards. As it is a hassle to control two application at the same time (editor and media player), I wrote a simple vim script to control mplayer from within vim.
- script:
convert_with_pandoc.sh - requires: pandoc
I write most of my articles and papers by having one input markdown file for each section. To compile the final document and convert to different formats, I wrote this script. However, I also want to be able to convert just one section, i.e., one input markdown file, to different formats when I am discussing only that one section with a collaborator.
Usage:
convert_with_pandoc.sh [format [input]]
Put this script in the directory containing the input files for a document. Adapt the script to convert these input files in order when run with 1 or 0 arguments. Otherwise, if there are two arguments, convert the input file specified to format.