Tag Archives: howto

Pulling free and open weather data

posted on 22 September, 2017 also tagged , , , ,

When I decided to add realtime weather effects to @choochoobot, I knew there were a few qualities I wanted to find in a data source. Ideally I would find something free and reliable that didn’t require me to agree to many developer terms or sign up for an API token. Google shuttered its undocumented Weather […]

HOWTO: Diff PDFs pixel-by-pixel on the command line

posted on 1 September, 2015 also tagged

There was a major order in the Uber class action case today: the class was certified, which means that the suit can be on behalf of 160,000 drivers, instead of just the handful putting their names on the documents. Big deal! Then a few minutes later, the court issued an amended version of the order, […]

HOWTO: One big file from a YouTube playlist

posted on 25 August, 2015 also tagged , ,

In celebration of the 40th anniversary of the release of Born To Run, I decided to watch Cory Arcangel perform his classic Glockenspiel Addendum. He’s posted videos from a 2008 concert to YouTube, so it should be no problem, right? Well, the version he posted is in eight parts. Fine for YouTube, but I don’t […]

HOWTO: Graph your GPG keyring

posted on 5 February, 2014 also tagged ,

We had a keysigning party at work today, and after it finished a few of us were looking for a way to visualize the newly increased signature density. It turns out the best tool for the job is called sig2dot, which is available in the Debian repositories (and as a Perl script on its homepage). […]

HOWTO: Create an animated gif from a video with command line tools

posted on 22 October, 2012 also tagged , , ,

Sometimes I see a few seconds of a video I’m watching and I think that it’d make a great animated gif. But because I don’t always have access to a bunch of graphics software, and because I might be using my Ubuntu or OS X box, it’s nice to have a process that works with […]