Monday, November 13, 2006

lab 66 - useful tools


lab 66 - useful tools


This is a light lab about writting some useful day-to-day tools, mainly language and music playing tools.

gask is a simple script for doing searches with google, which is nice when you want to consult something while writting a text, it returns the output in textual form so it can be used/plumbed etc.

the next tools are for rapidly looking definitions in english/spanish/... on a dictionary, and they're handy when you aren't a native speaker.

trgg (translate google) allows you to translate between any pair of languages that are supported by google, the usage of the command is trgg 'sl|dl' text, or |trgg 'sl|dl' where: sl: is the source language (by default english) dl: is the destination language (by default spanish)

while dorg does a search on the dictionaries using the services of site,

drae is is an interface to the "Real Academia de la Lengua" dictionary, so you can consult the meaning of spanish words.

And last but not least there's the google's define: keyword, that looks on the web for definitions of the arguments provided.

For interacting with google's services HTTP POST request support is needed, we can find it in webfsget as in the google-api lab, but we can also get it from hget.c and incorporate it to webgrab with a [-p post] option. That's the aproach followed.

oggplay, madplay and audio, those three scripts are used to play music in the mp3 and ogg formats, for writting them i've needed to modify wav2iaf(1) and auplay(1) to work with data piped to it's standard input and write the result to it's standard output. And last audio is a small utility to query/set the parameters of /dev/audioctl. With this tools it's very easy to set up a few plumbing rules, to handle music files.

Update: Added a rsscheck script to check updates in and google-code by default.


lab 66 code

1 comment:

Abhey said...

Seems slightly pointless to run madplay and then to pipe audio back into auplay. Though I can situations where it might be useful to decompress audio on another computer and play it back locally. I use shell file2chan like this :
load file2chan
{file2chan /chan/mp3 {} {fetchwdata} }| os madplay - &
then I export that /chan/mp3 directory and can play back music by copying mp3s onto it.