Tag Archives: cloud

groove-dl: Jumping the shark

I was tempted to skip over groove-dl because my list of stream ripper tools is starting to devolve into a tool-per-service array, and when things become discrete and overly precise, I start to fall toward the same rules that say, “no esoteric codec playback tools.”

I can’t complain too loudly though, because things like gplayer and soma are past titles that were more or less constrained to one site or service, and suddenly chopping off a portion of The List wouldn’t be fair.

But it wouldn’t be a terrible disservice, since most of what I was able to discover about groove-dl is encapsulated in that screenshot. Follow the command with a search string, and groove-dl will return a list of matches and the option to download a song.

Very straightforward, but also very rudimentary. Beyond the first 10 results, there’s no apparent way to continue through search. groove-dl itself doesn’t have any command flags that I could find; in fact, using -h or --help just pushed those strings through as search terms. Entering a blank line just brings groove-dl to a halt. Entering an invalid character causes a python error message. And yet entering a number beyond the list (like 12 or something) starts a download of some unidentified tune that matched your search, but wasn’t shown on screen. Go figure. $:\$

groove-dl will allow you to pick multiple targets though, and does use a generic but informative download progress bar to follow your selections. I can’t complain about that. And I see that there is a graphical interface, and it may be that there are more functions available to you from that rendition, than in the text-only interface.

But overall, with such a narrow focus and a narrow field of options and wide array of ways to confound it, I think there might be other, better utilities around for pulling tracks from Grooveshark.

groove-dl is in AUR but not Debian. If you try to install it, you’ll also need python-httplib2, which wasn’t included in the PKGBUILD. Happy grooving. 😉

bitpocket: Your in-house drop box

I have three i686 machines at the moment, all three of which are running Arch. One acts as a wireless relay to the other two (thanks, create_ap), and shares its wired connection with the two others.

It also is set up to sync itself against the Arch repositories once a day, and then I manually rsync between the other two and share the downloaded updates. This saves me the drag of triple-updating machines, since my in-house wireless connection is considerably faster than the wired line.

Anything leftover or specific to one piece of hardware — like video drivers — gets downloaded normally, when a specific machine does its update.

I do end up doing some double-back synchronization, from satellite computers to the central hub. That’s more of an insurance measure or to make backups of individual packages that were downloaded to specific machines.

All that rsyncing back and forth relies on sshd of course, and it gets a little tedious having to re-enter passwords on every rsync, but I don’t know if there’s anything to be done about that. It’s the nature of the beast.

I thought perhaps working a little bit with bitpocket might give me some ideas, since bitpocket is intended as a do-it-yourself Dropbox-style network storage tool, built upon the mighty rsync.

It did and it didn’t. bitpocket runs into much the same issue as I had, where I needed to supply a password four times — actually five — to get the proper access across the network and update the master folder on the central machine.

I don’t hold that out as a fault of bitpocket though, since whatever setting or configuration I’m after to solve my own problem isn’t bitpocket’s responsibility. I shall pursue that independently.

bitpocket itself is rather useful, and very easy to set up. Supply a proper folder and identity for your server machine, create a folder for a corresponding copy on the client, and just call bitpocket from that folder. bitpocket can check for updates, synchronize new files, delete old ones and generally handle everything as it should be done.

bitpocket has some other features that are nifty, such as the ability to tell you what will be updated (in other words, what changes exist since the last sync) and delete protection, where it moves “deleted” files into a hidden folder, in case you make a mistake.

If you already do fairly regular rsyncs against a master machine, or if you just want to streamline the process of keeping work folders up to date, I can see where bitpocket might improve upon a long chain of rsync commands.

In my case, I really need to find out how to authenticate rsync without being prompted each time, and follow through with that. (Edit: I figured it out, thanks. I just needed to generate an id_rsa.pub key, and move it over to the server. 😉 )

sncli: For cloud-based to-do lists, and more

About a month ago, Eric sent me a note about sncli, which works as a command-line interface to Simplenote. I’d never used the site before, and I have some reservations about using cloud services for all but the most mundane of data, but I’ll try anything once. Especially if it has this much color:

And true to form, sncli kept the online version up-to-date with my changes. Quite quickly too, I might add. Simplenote had my changes from sncli online before I had clicked on the tab.

And no, I don’t really wash the fish. The fish washes himself, constantly. 😉

As I can see it, from what I’ve learned about Simplenote and from working with sncli, the real value in this is the ability to access to-do lists and reminders from devices other than your old 133Mhz Pentium laptop. I don’t have a smartphone (only dumbphones) but if I did, it would be nice to see those lists update between sncli and the web interface and the mobile phone.

sncli itself has more to love than just the color scheme. Off the bat it’s easy to see how it works, and if you’re a fan of the vi-ish control scheme, navigation will appeal to you immediately. You can add a note with “C”, edit one in your $EDITOR with “e”, sync with your online account with “S”, and so forth. Easy to use and remember.

Provided you have a Simplenote account, you can configure sncli with little more than your account name and password. Add those to .snclirc and you’re ready to go … keeping in mind that those are stored in plain text.

That would be only one of my very few suggestions for sncli at this point: Find a way to manage an encrypted password, perhaps along the lines of how gcalcli handles it. Considering gpg is available on just about every system out there, it should be an easy dependency to fulfill.

My only other observation is that the command to view a note in a pager jumps straight to less, while my $PAGER is set to most. Perhaps that could be an option. Oh, and maybe add arrow keys for navigation. Some people will expect that. 😉

I like sncli a lot — particularly for the easy setup, good use of color, excellent use of screen real estate, near-immediate synchronizing with the online service, intuitive commands and onboard help. … Oh heck, what’s not to like? Well done. Have a K.Mandla gold star: ⭐ 😉 Enjoy!