super-cooper » computing

Using curl to quickly fetch images from the web

Chad — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 02:02:53 +0000

Just now I had 48 images in a web directory that I needed to download. Being ~~lazy~~ efficient like I am, I wasn’t about to settle for right-clicking on each one and downloading it – oh, the horror. A quick hit on Google, and I found this little gem for curl, which is installed by default on OS X:

curl -O http://site/path/file-[001-048].jpg

Where the files where named file-001, file-002….file-048. curl allows you to bracket the range of numbers. Fetched ‘em all in about 15 seconds. The -O flag tells curl to save the file locally with the same remote filename. Personally, I’ve been a fan of wget on Windows for years, but curl worked great for this on the Mac.

My Google Voice invite arrived!

Chad — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 13:49:47 +0000

Last night I got my Google Voice invite that I’ve been ever so patiently waiting for, and man is it slick. Setup took about 10 minutes total, and my first test of their transcriber went like so:

Which was transcribed to:

Hey moron. Let’s see how good Google Voice. Transport sincere garbage that you’re leaving on their share voicemail. Later.

Hmmm…hopefully Google’s transcribers will improve over time, eh? After all, that’s the reason they are doing this, right?

del.icio.us + Foxylicious = Mmm, mmm good

Chad — Thu, 24 Feb 2005 04:54:56 +0000

I had been reading about del.icio.us for quite a while now, and about how cool it was. Last week, I broke down and gave it a shot. Wow. It’s pretty slick. For those of you out there you haven’t heard of del.icio.us yet, it’s a social bookmarks manager. You get an account (it’s all free), and when you find a site or web page you like, you post it to your del.icio.us account, just like you would bookmark it in your browser. The beauty of this is that it’s all public, you can view your bookmarks from any machine, others can view them, you can share them, you can see who else has the same pages bookmarked as you, you can get feeds of other’s bookmarks, the list just keeps going on and on.

So this got me to wondering. Was there perhaps a way to import all of my existing Firefox bookmarks into del.icio.us so I could have my work and home bookmarks in sync? That would be nice, would it not? So off to our ole buddy Google I went. Well, I didn’t find a way to import bookmarks into del.icio.us, but I did find Foxylicious. And oooh what find it is. Foxylicious is a Firefox extension that syncs your del.icio.us bookmarks into your Firefox bookmarks. And it will do it for you automatically everyday if you want. So now, I just post bookmarks to del.icio.us, be it at home or work, and let Foxylicious update my Firefox bookmarks for me daily. So I actually have all of my bookmarks in three places, one of which is still public. How cool is that? Very cool, I say.

I’m in love

Chad — Sat, 29 Jan 2005 18:42:07 +0000

Her name is mod_rewrite. Ever heard of her? She’s an Apache module, and man is she gorgeous. We first met last year. At first she really confused me and sent me mixed signals. On one minute, off the next; you know, like code or something. Always leaving me wondering “Is this really going to work?” Sometimes, if I do just the wrong thing, everything comes crashing down. It doesn’t take much. But once I figured her out, it’s amazing what I’ve gotten her to do for me. Things like redirects, URL rewrites – I’m getting chills just thinking about it. Oh, but don’t anyone tell my wife about this, she’ll kick mod_rewrite’s ass.

Ooo, Ooo!! A new toy!

Chad — Tue, 16 Nov 2004 22:07:14 +0000

Let’s face it. New toys rule. Especially when they are geeky new toys. We got a new HP DesignJet 800PS 42 inch plotter at work a few months back, and I’ve been dying to use it. Hell, I’ve been so busy with other stuff, I never got around to printing anything on it. But I finally got mapped to it on the network and decided to put her to test with this map (200KB) of mine I made last spring. It has several very large rasters, tons of annotations, and lots of very small text; all good trials for any plotter. I must say, I am very pleased with the results and the speed of this plotter. One thing I don’t like about it is that the paper roll loads from the rear, which is pain due to the fact that our plotter is located in a glorified closet, so you can barely pull the plotter far enough away from the wall to get back there and change the roll. And man, has loading paper into plotters come a long way in the last 5 years. Hell, my 2 year old could load paper into this, if he could only lift the roll of paper. All in all, I’m very pleased with this plotter so far. But then again, I haven’t gotten any cryptic error messages on the front panel yet.

Dual monitors!

Chad — Wed, 14 Jul 2004 21:45:22 +0000

To quote the old man from the movie “A Christmas Story”: “It’s here, it’s here, hot damn it’s here!”

My new second monitor finally got here today! Now I have dual 18-inch LCDs, and it is truly a beautiful thing. Except now I just have figure out how to get twice the amount of work done.

Hhhmmmmm