Use Pandora ? you'll want Pianobar

I love Pandora.com, it provides me the majority of my new music selections/artists. The problem is that pandora has a few usability issues (with good reason). Pianobar is a command line tool that will login to pandora, grab your playlists, and play any one you want. And it has a feature that makes it all worth it- infinite skips.

Here is the install site:
https://github.com/PromyLOPh/pianobar

Install it, I have it on every machine that I listen on, its awesome.

The following is the output of the menu command that outlines a lot of what the prog does;

+ love song
- ban song
a add music to station
c create new station
d delete station
e explain why this song is played
g add genre station
h song history
i print information about song/station
j add shared station
m move song to different station
n next song
p pause/continue
q quit
r rename station
s change station
t tired (ban song for 1 month)
u upcoming songs
x select quickmix stations
b bookmark song/artist
( decrease volume
) increase volume
= delete seeds/feedback


as you can see, it is versatile.

Google Ruby Script

My friend coded this for our team. It will take a google search query, and parse out the returned URLs one on a line. It comes in handy for scripting recon on a client. Obviously you need the nokogiri gem installed.

#!/usr/bin/ruby
require 'rubygems'
require 'nokogiri'
require 'open-uri'

# Perform a google search
# Add numbers in increments of 10 to the array to search more pages
[0].each do |num|
doc = Nokogiri::HTML(open('http://google.com/search?q=' + ARGV[0].to_s + '&start='+num.to_s))
puts "Scrubbing Google for good-ness"
doc.xpath('//h3/a[@class="l"]').each do |link|
temp = link.attribute("href")
puts temp
end

end

I hope you find it useful...

Organizing my /gif

I have accumulated MANY gif files over the year. The problem is a gif can both be static or animated. I wanted all my animated gifs in one folder. After a little research on wikipedia I discovered that the original gif specification didnt allow for animation. Gifs that animate have a header containing the value "NETSCAPE2.0". Knowing this, it was trivial to sort animated vs static gifs. As shown in the following bash one liner:

mkdir animooted_gifs; for i in *; do if head $i | grep 'NETSCAPE2.0'; then mv $i animooted_gifs/$i; fi;done

Lol, i was creating this nice long script that would do checks and verifications and all that crap...meh...one liner ftw...

A little explanation:
A search through wikipedia taught me that animated GIFs should contain a certain header value: "NETSCAPE2.0". The bash line, searches for all files in a directory, greps the file for the header NETSCAPE2.0 and moves the file to animooted_gifs directory. If it doesnt detect NETSCAPE2.0, it moves on to the next file.

Running the unix util "file" on the gif doesnt yield much. As you can see below, a static gif and an animated gif report the same properties (obviously the size will be different since they are two different gifs):

gifs/1266641860129.gif: GIF image data, version 89a, 1003 x 1217
gifs/1245733506951.gif: GIF image data, version 89a, 375 x 375


BUT, if you run strings through the files you will see something different:

$ strings 1245733506951.gif
GIF89aw
33 84...

$ strings 1245733506951.gif
GIF89aw
33 84
...
NETSCAPE2.0
...


If you have been paying attention, you will know which file is the animated one (hint, its the 2nd one).

NOTE: Some files are constructed in a retarded way for some reason and don't have the NETSCAPE2.0 header even though they are animated. I have found this to be a rare exception to the rule. In any case, my one-liner should sort the vast majority of the animated GIFs into the correct location.

SSH Escape Sequence

If i'm SSH'd into a box and lose my internet connection, the ssh session will most likely just hang there like a retard. SSH has an escape sequence similar to telnet's ctrl+]

hit enter
then type ~.

That will close the ssh session and return you to the shell. ~? will return a help menu with different escape options that SSH accepts. the list is below:
Supported escape sequences:
~. - terminate connection (and any multiplexed sessions)
~B - send a BREAK to the remote system
~C - open a command line
~R - Request rekey (SSH protocol 2 only)
~^Z - suspend ssh
~# - list forwarded connections
~& - background ssh (when waiting for connections to terminate)
~? - this message
~~ - send the escape character by typing it twice
(Note that escapes are only recognized immediately after newline.)

Now you dont have to lose your terminal window! yay!