Scripts

I run a variety of systems including a couple which are running Debian stable. This means that packages (although stable) are often not as current as I’d like. To help get around this I started using prebuilt binaries directly from the upstream projects when they are hosted on GitHub. But this created a new problem - how to keep them up to date.
This article introduces a shell script designed to automate the process of downloading and updating binary files from GitHub repositories.

It has been a while since I first posted my version of bashpodder (a console-based podcaster in a single bash script)

Since then a bunch of small fixes have been added to the script to better handle ‘odd’ rss feeds and also to clean up the output.

The configuration of the script now sits in the file ~/.bashpodder Inside this file you can specify where the logs go to and where the files download to (makes it easier to run the script automatically)

For a recent project I wanted to add music.

Being that I am not musically talented in any way I figured the best way to do this was to generate the music from a midi file.

To help with this I wrote a converter that would take a MusicXML file and output an include file.

It simply reads the XML and outputs an array where each note is stored in two uint16 values - the first is the note name as a defined in pitches.h (ie NOTE_C4), the second is the duration in milliseconds. The entire array is stored in PROGMEM so as to not use up too much ram on the AVR.

A few days ago I installed a new disk in my laptop to replace the existing small one. Being the careful person I am I backed up the important data and then migrated the contents from the old disk to the new one via rsync. Everything worked well and I was able to boot into the new disk right away without issue. That is until I went to update the podcasts I listen to.