Now, to get back to work on that OTHER thing I was working on before I got distracted by this thing.

Jebus.

Columbo has always been a hero of mine, and the sad death of Peter Falk at the age of 83 left me hugely upset. With very little deliberation a few weeks ago, I decided I needed to have some tangible memento of him. Pretty much as far back as I can remember, I wanted to be Columbo. He showed that you could be a hero without violence – sometimes all you needed was a brain.

I finally got around to getting the videos, so here they are!
If you hit play on both at the same time, you should be good to go – either that, or go here and let youtube doubler take care of (basically) everything for you.

In a previous post I talked about creating a load of image thumbnails by running a custom script. Each time you added a new image to the directory, it would be necessary to run the script again.

Suppose that the images and thumbnails are being kept on a remote server – transferring the images from your local machine to the remote machine using scp might be one way you could do it, but if what you really want to do is have your remote folder in sync with your local folder, then it rsync is probably the tool you’re after.

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rsync -rv local_image_folder/ you@your_remote_server:~/path/to/remote/image_folder

now you only have to worry about keeping your local folder in order, and your remote one will be happypants.

When I’m going to sleep, I usually need something to listen to. The Chumby has a usb socket in the back which allows you to stick a thumb-drive in there and play mp3s off it. As much as I love the portability of thumbdrives, sometimes you just want to be lazy efficient and sit on the couch transferring the relevant mp3s from your laptop to the chumby.

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scp some_audio_file.mp3 root@DuncChumby:/mnt/usb

I hacked together a little script to do this for me:

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#!/usr/local/bin/python2.6
 
import Image
import os
 
PICDIR = './pics'
THUMBDIR = '%s/thumbs' % PICDIR
ratio = 0.8
THUMB_W = 125
THUMB_H = int(ratio * THUMB_W)
THUMBSIZE = (THUMB_W, THUMB_H)
 
#1 - delete everything under /thumbs
all_thumbs = os.listdir(THUMBDIR)
remove_count = 0
for thumb in all_thumbs:
    thumbpath = '%s/%s' % (THUMBDIR, thumb)
    os.remove(thumbpath)
    print 'removed %s' % thumbpath
    remove_count += 1
print 'Removed %d thumbnails' % remove_count
 
#2 - for each image in the pic directory, generate a new thumbnail
all_files = os.listdir(PICDIR)
jpgs = [file for file in all_files if file.endswith('.jpg')]
 
for jpg in jpgs:
    original = Image.open('%s/%s' % (PICDIR, jpg))
    thumb = original.resize(THUMBSIZE, Image.ANTIALIAS)
    thumbpath = "%s/%s" % (THUMBDIR, jpg)
    thumb.save(thumbpath)
    print "wrote %s" % thumbpath

now whenever I rsync image files from my local machine to my webserver, I can just run the script, et voila!: thumbnails ahoy!

on the source machine, in the appropriate directory:

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python -m SimpleHTTPServer

and then on the destination machine:

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wget -r veronica:8000

• I weigh 180lbs right now – could definitely lose a few! Aiming to be below 170.
• I’ve wondered at Lisp from afar. Let’s see if I can learn it and do something non-trivial.
• I’ve had a website idea stuck in my head for a while. Let’s see if I can Django it together.
• Should really start writing some music again. Aiming for at least one (GOOD) song.
• Be a bit more arty again – paint something.
• Blog more.

That’ll do it for now.

This is unacceptable.

The following did the trick though.

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for fname in *.JPG
    do mv $fname `basename $fname .JPG`.jpg
done

Needed to copy all the music off my phone into my music directory. The directory structure on my phone was Album_name/music_file – I didn’t really want that.

This command finds all the mp3s in/below the current folder and copies them to ~/Music.

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find . -name *.mp3 -exec cp {} ~/Music/ ';'

Seeing as this was all done over USB on a bit of an old phone, it was (is – it’s still going.) hugely slow.

This allows me to see how many mp3s are in the Music directory – so I can more-or-less keep track of progress.

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watch "ls -la ~/Music | grep mp3 | wc -l"

fun times.