the workbench

This is where I write about my own projects. From time to time things I create might conceivably be useful to others; such things may also be linked from crazyscot@launchpad and/or from my gitweb repo on this server. (I also maintain a github presence, largely as a backup.)

chiark-cryptdisk

These are helper scripts for encrypted backup media on Debian-based systems. The package is not quite suitable for public consumption (yet?), so you have to clone the repository and build the debian package yourself in the standard way.

(You will need git, build-essential, dmsetup, bsdmainutils, cryptsetup, and chiark-utils-bin. They're marked as depends, so you should be able to let dpkg and apt sort it out.)

CurrentCost rrd monitoring

This is a couple of perl scripts and one module I put together around Paul Mutton's work to read data from a USB-attached CurrentCost CC128 (electricity consumption monitor) and drop it into an RRDtool database.

My version includes minicom-compatible serial port locking and autodetection in case you have more than one ttyUSB device. These are the scripts I use on my Debian server and ought to Just Work on any recent Linux box.

If you want to use these scripts, start by cloning the repo; the README explains what to do with the contents.

find_definition

This is a script I lashed together to open up a new editor directly at the definition of a type, structure, function or anything else that ctags reports.

I use it with vim. With other editors you either need to have ctags support (contributions welcome!) or be prepared to use vi as an external source browser.

pasteurize

A simple command-line normalizer for .WAV files.

(Beware, this is ancient and klunky; it was written in mid-2000 and only reluctantly "fixed" to build with gcc _3_.)

pagemunger-wry

This is a (now abandoned) script for maintaining a photo album on the Web. It's based on the script of the same name in Anthony de Boer's package, but mercilessly carved up for my own devices to add HTML 4 and CSS support. (I used to use it for my photo gallery, but converted to Flickr the other year: why reinvent the wheel?)

rss2irc.pl

This is a virtual newscaster which I run as beeb on chiark's irc server. It largely works, though it's not terribly robust.