Programming

One of the things I sometimes find quite frustrating about vim is that the standard textwidth and wrap options imply assumptions about whether a text-style file (.txt, .md, READMEs, etc.) have “hard” carriage returns (where paragraphs are wrapped with actual carriage returns) or “soft” (where paragraphs are wrapped dynamically by the editor). When you create your own files, you’ll probably have your own preference for which of these you do, but when you are working with files that come from others, it’s very useful to have the ability to quickly switch between them.

If you’re anything like me, you like fzf, you like zsh, and you oh-my-zsh’s z plugin.

However, although the z plugin does a great job of allowing you to switch between frequently-used directories just by typing z *somedirectorysubstring*, it doesn’t really easily allow you to browse those directories, with partial-string search.

I’ve written a zsh plugin which brings together the z plugin and fzf to allow you to easily browse recently used directories at any point on the command line. It’s hosted on GitHub - find out more there.

For some time, I’ve had a Perl script that runs regularly, backing up my Google Reader subscriptions using the standard OPML format:

#!/usr/bin/perl
#
# Usage:
#  backup-google-reader-opml file-to-write-to.opml google.user.name@domain google-password

use strict;
use warnings;

use WWW::Mechanize;

my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new();

$mech->get("http://reader.google.com")
    or die "Cannot reach Google Reader Homepage";

$mech->submit_form(
    form_number => 1,
    fields =>
    {
        Email => $ARGV[1],
        Passwd => $ARGV[2]
    }
)
    or die "Cannot submit form";

$mech->get("http://www.google.com/reader/subscriptions/export");
$mech->save_content($ARGV[0]);

However, I recently wrote another script (this time Python) that then takes this OPML, parses out all the URLs that are tagged with ‘podcast’, and outputs a serverlist file for podget (an automated console-based podcast downloader). This enables me to subscribe to a podcast in Google Reader, and have the podcast automatically added to the download list. The script looks like this: