dasquadr.at - geek stuff

dasquadr.at Geek Stuff

There is a Debian swoosh in the Lake Geneva, the local penguins seem to like it.

ABC Tools: abcplaylist

abcplaylist.sh generates a playlist from your ABCs. The output is a list of titles along with the first bars of music in ABC syntax (also taking care of upbeats, thus always e.g. two full bars of music are printed). Versions for 2 oder 3 bars: abcplaylist2bar.sh, abcplaylist3bar.sh
I need such a tool because I never know what to play, when asked unexpectedly or - even worse! - at the start of a session. The script is probably also useful to create lists of titles for bands or similar.

Usage: Makes a playlist containing all */*.abc files (i.e. seeks one directory deep)

A title for the entire document is set to content of ./title.txt if present.
To be listed, a file abc-dir1/chapter.txt containing a chapter name (e.g. "Mazurkas") must exist in each directory.
ABC files may include a comment in the form "%location:Bookname \n Number, page" ("\n" is a line break)

The output of the script can be redirected to an ABC file (abcplaylist.sh > playlist.abc). I suggest using abcm2ps (free download) and then psnup -2 playlist.ps > playlist2.ps to print two pages on a sheet.
The number of bars displayed can be easily adjusted in the script

Here is an example showing 2 bars (plus the upbeat if present).
Update (11. 4. 2008), Bug fixed: Key displayed was the last key used in the notes. Now, the first key is used for the entire line in the playlist (quick hack).

sortabcs

sortabcs.sh, a bash script for sorting ABC music files by the "X" header field. (Others use e.g. BarFly for that.)

Running some hardware under Linux

The Epson Perfection 3490 Photo flatbed/transmitted light scanner, using sane. The (simple) trick was to get the firmware binary file off the installation CD. It's a cheap A4 scanner for documents, photos and film, with an optical resolution of 3200 dpi, connected with USB 2.0.

Misc

The GNU Emacs Reference Card (version 21) formated to three columns, on two landscape A4 pages, as PDF.

resize.sh, a bash script using convert to resize images, sensitive to picture orientation. (I.e. resizing e.g. 1024x768 for landscape or 768x1024 for portrait pictures.) Simple, quick and not very dirty.
Example: resize.sh *jpg *png.

rotate.sh, a bash script using convert and exifgrep, to rotate images physically, based on their EXIF tag. Simple, quick and also not very dirty.
Example: rotate.sh *jpg *png.

ogg2ogg, a bash script using oggenc to convert OGG music to smaller (lower quality) OGG files, preserving ID3 tags. New file name: file_q[quality].ogg. Also works on directories. Made to stuff more music - being archived at unreasonably high quality for a portable player - to the OGG player.
Example: ogg2ogg -q 3.2 -r ./ogg-directory /mnt/usbstick/music/newdir.

pm2bib.sh, a bash script for converting PubMed (i.e. Medline) references copy/pasted from the search results list to BibTeX format (the way I like it).
Usage: Run pm2bib.sh and paste the three lines of text for a single reference from PubMed's search result list.
pm2bib.sh accumulates entries in tha file ./pm2bib.bib and asks if it should append the entry to the bibliograpy data base (msp.bib, as specified in the script as ENDFILE).

Note: I refuse to take any responsibility for any damage to data or systems that may be caused by the scripts which are offered for download here. The use is on your own risk.