Tagged: Free and Open Source
I wanted to write 100 posts in 2021, and I am nowhere close to that. I tried to look at the posts by year and see how I have performed over the years. Of course, I could have done that manually by looking at the year archive count or running a query on the database. But recently, I have started using Xidel, so why not use it? :)
So It’s in my nature to convert everything to a web-service. The biggest reason is that you can call a web service from anywhere, and it’s easy to share the processing power and logic with anyone who has access to a web browser or curl and nothing else.
As you would know, I scrape a lot of web pages as a Data Archivist at DataMeet. I usually use BS4 for this, and it’s beautiful, simple, and works. But often don’t want to write a python script to do that, and I need a simple tool to get data out of HTML.
I like to read a stanza of Vachana every day, and I generally visit Vachana Sanchaya to do that. They have a widget ಇಂದಿನ ವಚನ aka Today’s Vachana. Which picks a random(?) Vachana and shows it to you on their home page. But then its not fun to visit the site everyday. So I wrote a script so it appears on my Desktop.
I have been doing longer screencasts these days. Some of them are for private consumption, and some are public. I am yet to master it fully. But I have come a long way. These are the tools that have helped me.
JBang, once installed, allows you to run any java file like a script. Superbly helpful if you want to hack something quickly. It can also install the same as app or binary so it can be found on your PATH. So you can forget about jbang and just run the app.