Recording lectures with a USB digital voice recorder left me with a lot of obscurely named files. Naming them according to what the lecture subject was by hand would have been very time consuming. I wrote a script to take an ical calendar file and match up recordings from the device with events on the calendar.

Given an input and output directory and a path to an ical calendar file (may be at a remote URL to use with Google Calendar or similar) the script will copy files and rename them according to corresponding events. Where there are multiple (or no) events occuring around the time of the recording, the script will name the recording as ‘uncategorised’.

It needs the icalendar module to run. The script can be downloaded here. See also the GitHub page.

It’s not limited to organising voice recordings and could be used to label any files with calendar events based on their modification timestamp.

This script exports dates from an ical file, I needed it to put them into a spreadsheet. You need the icalendar module for this.

Here is a small script I’ve written which seeks to improve Amazon product pages by including postage and packaging in ‘used and new’ prices. The prices including delivery are automatically updated whenever you visit a product page.

Updated: Now also gives the option to show prices including delivery in search results.

Examples

Once you click through to the 'used and new' page itself, prices including P&P are shown too.

Install instructions for Firefox

1. Install the Greasemonkey addon
2. Restart Firefox if necessary
3. Go to the Userscripts.org page and click ‘Install’ at the top right of the page

Install instructions for Chrome

1. Install the Tampermonkey addon
2. Go to the Userscripts.org page and click ‘Install’ at the top right of the page
3. Click ‘OK’ twice in the dialogs that appear

Notes

It’s very untested, having not existed for long.

The script is currently not functional for Amazon.jp or Amazon.cn.

Neither I or the script are in any way affiliated with Amazon.com, Inc. All trademarks and copyrights are property of their respective owners.

Github repository (report bugs here)

Here is a way to reload/refresh the current web page in JavaScript, removing any query string parameters in the process:

window.location = window.location.pathname;

This preserves protocol selection (HTTP/HTTPS) and is more succinct than the existing methods I found on Google. Note that this will remove the fragment as well (#part).

More information about the location object

Unfortunately I lost this article when I lost the database for my old blog. I noticed the link is still generating quite a bit of interest from the superuser question and I have been emailed about the page. I am currently away so don’t have time to try and completely rewrite the article, but here is what I said to the person who emailed me as a rough guide:

Roughly, I ended up creating an image of the disk with dd in linux and then created a VMWare Virtual Machine. I then modified the configuration file (.vmdk IIRC) for the virtual machine to make the virtual disk descriptor map to the dd image I’d created (information about how to do this is on google, you just want to ‘redirect’ the disk descriptor to go to your image rather than the empty container vmware creates). Sometimes you have to fiddle with the SCSI/IDE controller type to get the virtual machine to boot without blue-screening.

Hope this helps.