od: Not “overdose” nor “olive drab”

Until yesterday I didn’t even know the od tool existed.

Which tells you either I haven’t been paying attention, or it’s just never happened that I needed an octal dump utility. 😕 But at least now the name makes sense. 🙄

You can see the kinds of things od can do in the screenshot above, and the flag options for od are a mile long. I swear it.

And since od can dump to several different output “types” — including human-readable characters — it means it does have some utility beyond spitting out long lists of numbers between 0 and 7.

But mostly I include it because I happen to think very highly of anything out of coreutils … even if it just dumps files to octal. 😐

episoder: Only if you’re serious about TV

I don’t watch TV. I am aware that there’s an invention called television, and on this invention they show shows, but I grew up without it for a long time. As a result, movies are more my thing.

For some people though, television is life, and if that’s you, you’ll love episoder.

episoder manages your preferred form of entertainment for broadcast dates, status and series-episode information. It does this by interacting with that marvelous repository of information called The Intarnet, and retrieving the data you need.

It also is clever enough to search through online television databases and allow you to add shows to your personal collection. So it knows the difference between a show and its spinoff.

Like I said I’m not a huge television fan, and the few I know date back a decade or two. In that sense episoder seemed unjustly slanted toward upcoming shows, and not those long since done.

For example, I could add M*A*S*H, one of the few shows I remember from America a long time ago, but I couldn’t get airing dates because episoder doesn’t seem to work that far back.

No big deal, I will survive.

One major point I need to make: There are two home pages for episoder, one linked above and one at Google Code. The Google Code page is out of date and appears to list packages only up to 0.6.5, which is the version available in Debian.

The AUR version is what I showed here, and there are some very strong differences between those two versions. Pay close attention to which one you install. (I mention this because of the fracas that erupted last time I had some version discrepancies. … 😯 🙄 )

Enjoy, and happy watching. 😉