These are the programs and scripts that I have written - or adapted - to make my life easier and my computer more accessible to me. You are free to download and use any of them that you think would be of assistance to you.
I have also provided some notes which you should read if you want or intend to use any of the scripts or programs available here.
Some of the software itself is already available here if you want to have a look, but I haven't adapted it much for more general usage yet.
General Software
This software should work with anybody who runs Linux and has Perl and Festival installed, with only very minor tweaking.
- Talking Clock Available
- To help with my tendancy to loose track of time, I made a talking clock that tells me the time in a very "understandable" format. For example instead of "4:16pm" it will say "About a quarter past four in the afternoon". And instead of just showing the information on my screen, where I will forget to look at it, it uses a speech synthesizer to actually "say" the words every half an hour (it sounds a bit like Stephen Hawking's speech computer, if you've even seen him on TV). Because I also forget what day/date it is a lot, I set it up so every so often it also says the date.
- Disk Space Monitor Available
- I don't have a huge big disks drive because I can't afford it, and sometimes bits of it get full and I don't notice right away when its getting close to full. This little utility checks all the partitions except the CD-ROM drive (which is always full) every hour and when they are getting too close to full, it speaks a warning telling me which bit of my drive is getting full and how full it is getting.
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- Medication Reminder Available
- Uses Festival to announce when my medication is due, in a range of different sentences, and then again 10 minutes later to ask me if I've taken it.
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- Talking and Singing Alarm Clock Available
- TODO
- fetchlj - an RSS2email handler Available here
- Lets me collect content from websites I frequent, and LiveJournal pages I like to read, but read them all in my email box. I find email a lot easier to read than webpages with their strange colours and strange fonts. I didn't write this tool, but I helped with a lot of the bugfixing etc.
- Spam Checking And Deleting Scripts
- TODO
- Procmail
- SpamAssassin
- Razor
- ColourLog Available
- TODO
- Symlink monitor/fixer Available here
- I just use a freely available program called symlinks and run it weekly
through crond.
TODO - explain setup. - Deborphan Available as a Debian package
- This program finds packages that have no packages depending on them - that means that unless they're programs I actually use then I can safely delete those packages. I run it via a cronjob every month and check the results.
- Findall Available
- TODO
- m Available
- TODO
- Mailman Junkmail Remover Available
- TODO
- Audible.com Catalogue Tracker Available
- Keeps track of which books are new in the catalogue for Audible.com talking books site. I run it via a cron job every week.
Heavily Customized Software
This software depends quite a lot on having the same configuratin that I use on your system. It should not be a big job to adapt the software to work with other programs, but you would need to know about programming in Perl to do it.
- New Mail Announcements Available
- TODO
- Expanded New Mail Announcements (Vapourware)
- TODO
- Computer Backup Scripts
- TODO
- Backup Checker Available
- TODO - speak_backup/speak_pilot_backup
- Mail Sorting
- TODO
- newlists Available
- Creates semi-automatic procmail mailing list screening from a short
file.
TODO - write config explainer - reprocess Available
- Runs a mailbox through procmail again, good to do to your junkmail folder after you altered the junk-catching scripts, or if something went really wrong.
Palm-Pilot Related Software
This software works with my Palm Pilot or the data saved from my Palm Pilot in some way. It would be able to be adapted to work with other databases, though, if the time were available.
- Talking and Singing Alarm Clock Available
- TODO
- Pilot Backup Daemon Available
- I have a PalmPilot which I use a homebrewed backup daemon based on Pilot-Link which means I just put the PDA in the cradle and press the HotSync button and it backs up everything.
- Palm Pilot Backup Scripts Available
- When the Palm Pilot backup runs, first it downloads all the databases from the Palm that have changed since the last backup. Then it takes the main four databases and "unpacks" them into text files that I can access easily on Linux. I don't "synchronize" the Palm as such, because I use the computer side as a read-only way of accessing the data. Because I'm in console mode 99% of the time, and there are no tools for console mode that let you access and alter the data, this is really the only way to go. These tools are packaged up together as 'pilotdbunpack'.
- Pilot Backup Checker Available
- TODO
Software Specific To My Services
This software only works with the specific services I subscribe to. If your setup is sufficiently similar, though, you might be able to adapt them for your own use.
- Bandwidth Usage Checker for Internode ISP Available
- This one I didn't write myself but it's done in Perl like the others. It's available here and it tells me how much bandwidth I used up and how much is left, both in real amounts and percentages of my total (it looks like this). I have a cron job set up that emails the information to me 4 times each month, so I have an idea if I have plenty of bandwidth left or if I have to be careful and not download big programs or something. I can also run it manually any time I do a big download to check.
- Bank Balance Checker Available
- A small script, set up for the Australian Westpac/Bank Of Melbourne bank, that downloads the details for all my accounts (it looks like this) and emails me the information it got. It is set up to in cron to run every Sunday in the middle of the night, so I know how much money I have when I write the shopping list for Mondays, plus on the 29th of every month so I can make sure my credit card is paid off by the end of the month. I can also run it manually any time I want to make a purchase or just if I forget how much money is in the bank, to check.
Please Comment!
If you have any ideas of other things I could usefully add to this page, or change to make it easier to use, then either leave a comment (others will be able to read it) or if you like, feel free to email me (this will be private between you and me) and make your suggestion! I love getting comments and email and they often help me to make my sites better and better.
