As the "final commit" mentions, 387 days and 330 commits after the I started, tvnamer and tvdb_api are at a point where I'm happy to release "version 1.0"!

tvnamer is probably of most interest, it's an automagical TV episode renamer, turning files from "some.show.s01e01.hdtv.blah.avi" to "Some Show - [01x01] - The Real Episode Name.avi", using information from thetvdb.com

To install, simply do..

Something I always missed from Foobar2000 is the option to "Stop playback after current song"

For some reason it never occurred to me it would be trivial to write an AppleScript to mimic this for iTunes..

tell application "System Events"
    set cur_app to name of the first process whose frontmost is true
    set visible of process cur_app to false
end tell

I want to run the unittests verbosely, so you can see which test is running (the function name, or if you have a one-line docstring, it displays that), instead of the usual "..E..F." output.

There are two ways, the first is to construct a test-suite using TestLoader, pass it to TestTextLoader(verbosity=2):

suite = unittest.TestSuite([
        unittest.TestLoader().loadTestsFromTestCase(test_tvnamer.test_name_parser),
        unittest.TestLoader().loadTestsFromTestCase(test_tvdb_api.test_tvdb)
    ])
# for one test, you can do:
# suite = unittest.TestLoader().loadTestsFromTestCase(test_name_parser)

Whenever someone complains about a new version of a bit of software, my general response is "you don't have to upgrade".

For example, complaints about Vista can generally be countered with "Well, Windows XP still works fine.."

Where this argument entirely falls down is when an upgrade is forced, but there is pretty uncommon (online portions of video-games, instant messaging applications)..

/alias figlet /exec - -o echo $0-| figlet -w 60 | awk -F% 'function randint(n){return int(33+n * rand())} {printf("\x03%s%s\n",randint(12),$1)}'</pre class='code'>

Combining the joys of shell scripting, figlet, irssi colour escape codes and two different kind of escape sequences, you can achieve the following...

There was a post on Lifehacker entitled "Five Best Sites to Stream TV". Useful. I'm always looking for a "legal" alternative to torrenting TV shows. DVD's are okay, but considering you can fit thousands of episodes on a harddrive about the size of a single DVD, it seems like there should be a better solution, one that doesn't involve quite so many slices of plastic sitting on a shelve..

Oh. Importantly, I live in a country that isn't America (currently Australia).. Lets see how "best" these are for us damned Foreigners..

Hulu.

I didn't really mind when The Escapist added the adverts at the end of the Zero Punctuation videos. It was pretty unobtrusive, and advertised their own content. Fine.

Then "Yahtzee" changed the intro away from using appropriate, fair-use, copyrighted music, to a flashy-random-ZP-graphic title sequence. That annoyed me because I really liked the intro/outro songs (I can't think of Bioshock without thinking of The Beatles - Octopuses Garden..), and the new music/graphics are completely unfitting, and kind of boring..

Then there was adverts for Zero Punctuation at the end of Zero Punctuation. That was just stupid.

SELECT count(DISTINCT postkey) as post_count, membername FROM members, posts where members.memberid = posts.postauthorid GROUP BY membername ORDER BY post_count DESC

Posting that query is mostly for archival purposes. Basically this.. fun little query counts the number of unique posts by each user, from a MySQL database.

The posts table has postkey (the unique identifier) and postauthorid, the members table has a membersid column (relates to postauthorid) and membersname (the human-readable member's name).

Pretty simple to do, but regardless here is a copy-and-paste'able set of commands that should work on OS X/Linux (if you have the Apple Developer Tools installed, or the build-essential package on Ubuntu):

cd /tmp/
curl -O http://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.6/Python-2.6b3.tgz
gunzip Python-2.6b3.tgz
tar -xf Python-2.6b3.tar
cd Python-2.6b3/
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/python2.6
# lots of lines ending in "... yes" hopefully
make
# will take a while, no errors
sudo make install
# enter your password, as it requires root access to put files in /usr/local/
# lots of stuff flies by..
sudo ln -s /usr/local/python2.6/bin/python2.6 /usr/local/bin/python2.6
sudo ln -s /usr/local/python2.6/bin/2to3 /usr/local/bin/2to3
# this puts python2.6 into your $PATH</pre class='code'>

That will install python2.6 into /usr/local/python2.6/ and symlink the commands python2.6 and 2to3 into /usr/local/bin/

While this isn't exactly the normal sort of NF article, this took me hours to work out.

I have a bunch of gigs recorded on an Zoom MRS-1608 recording desk. Until recently to capture/edit the recordings, I recorded the master-output via a Line-in connector on an iMac (into Soundtrack Pro). This worked fine, but all the levels were set on the desk, and mixed-down to a stereo output, which means to change the levels, you have to capture the song again. And there is no way of adding effects to specific channels and so on..

The solution should have been simple - Zoom have an application called "Audio File Manager", an extremely buggy and broken application that (should) take the recordings via USB, or a CD and convert each track to a .WAV or .AIFF file (which can then be edited in any audio application)