The month of November has been a month of news. That is new in plural, not information about recent and important events.

New Home and house mates

We all moved together into a new green house, with a new chore wheel and a new pergo floor. It’s quite fantastic, I just need to update my mailing address across the board for the third time in 6 months. My house mates are all sorts of fun, and cooler than peppermint patties.

New E-mail

After 15 years with the same e-mail address, I decided it is time to graduate from my dad’s domain name into my own. My new address is eitan at this-blogs-domain-name.

New Bank Account

I have been getting tired of Bank Of America’s mediocreness, especially when it comes to online services, so I started transfering to BECU, a local credit union.

New Bike

I have a new red bicycle. It’s a real head-turner, which makes me concerned about theft. But I am just going to enjoy it anyway. I have almost completely stopped walking to places since I got it. Capitol Hill is just an 8 minute ride away.

I have been an eMusic subscriber for quite a while, before DRM-free music was cool. It’s always been a bit clunky when purchasing music, you download some weird XML file that is supposed to be handled by their download manager which is a full-blown app. I always ended up downloading the file to my desktop, running a Python script called dromanova.py which would download the MP3s to ~/media, and then import them manually into Banshee.
No more!

It is fun to spend a few hours on small projects that yield immediate results.
I use Tomboy for essay writing, I often need to know how much I have already put down, so I will typically paste the note into a terminal and run wc on it, or I will paste it in to gedit and use Tools->Document Statistics. So here is a new extension called ‘Note Statistics’ and it looks eerily like the gedit tool. Below is a screenshot, screen cast, and git clone URL in that order.

git clone git://github.com/eeejay/tomboy-notestats.git
Browse source on github

I needed a non-interactive way of generating PDFs from websites. I really liked Midori‘s output, so I figured doing the same with the Python WebKitGtk bindings would be easy.
So I created a tool called interwibble, you could get it from my github repo.
There are probably other tools out there already that do the same thing, but I couldn’t find any.
This has been something that I have wanted more than a decade ago, when I thought it would be really cool to have a daily newspaper waiting on your printer every morning when you wake up.