Well, whilst brevity is the order of the day on E2, I thought I'd share some of my own. My personal favorite instances of brevity are tiny scripts which make my computer do usefull things for me without my intervention — or that stop me getting things wrong...
I like The News Quiz on Radio 4. It's a comedy panel quiz where they answer questions on current affairs in a humorous manner — like Have I Got News For You except without the pictures. Unfortunately, I never catch it on. I'm always busy when it'on on so I miss it.
Now, I'm sure that most of you have used the BBC's Listen Again page, where you can stream programmes you've missed and, indeed, this is how I usually listened to this particular program.
Recently, however, the BBC have started doing podcasts — or MP3 downloads on an RSS feed as we called them in my day — of selected programmes. This is now my preffered way to listen to a couple of other BBC Radio programmes, including Mark Kermode's Film Review from BBC Five Live. Alas, no podcast for The News Quiz. Oh what to do? Surely there's a way to download the stream that exists? Well, yes. But you have to download it at listening speed (in other words, it takes half an hour) an then convert it into a form your MP3 encoder likes and then crunch it into an MP3! Too much work!
Automating this would be a fine thing... So I got out my text editor and hacked together a bit of shell script to do it for me. And now I pass it to you so other Unix-loving News Quiz-listening noders can have the same convinience in their lives. And, of course, a quick change to the script will make it usefull for many other similar situations...
mplayer -noframedrop -dumpfile out.rm -dumpstream \
`curl http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/shows/rpms/radio4/newsquiz.ram` \
&& mplayer -ao pcm:file=out.pcm -vo null out.rm && \
lame out.pcm newsquiz`date +%Y%m%d%`.mp3 && \
rm out.rm out.pcm
Things to note? Well, you'll need an mplayer capable of play RealAudio streams, and you'll need curl and lame of course.