Last week, the Dutch public broadcaster (NOS) decided to “fix” their online teletext offering, there breaking [an old script I had laying around](/2008/july/15/teletext_nl_script/index.htm l). Their new web interface (displaying gifs) can be found here.

After @bdekruijff discovered their newly, hidden text feed, I decided to adapt the old script to this new situation. Thanks to this page I was able to (partially) reconstruct the feed. Most escape sequences are working, I’m still fiddling with finding Unicode chars for the “Contiguous Graphics Set”.

In Perl you have this:

% perl -e 'print "a" x 5, "\n"'
aaaaa

With that you can easily create a separator string consisting out of 60 spaces.

I always missed this in my shell - until now.

In Zsh have the following expansion:

l:expr::string1::string2:

Pad the resulting words on the left. Each word will be truncated if
required and placed in a field expr characters wide. 

See zsh.dotsrc.org. There is also a r: variant which operates in the same way.

I’ve told a few times about how to build a library.

But there a some extra things that must be done before you can call yourself a complete librarian.

1. ID-ing the books you have
2. Storing the information
3. Marking the books
4. Sorting and shelving the books
5. Remembering who borrowed what

ID-ing books

For this I bought a barcode reader that reads the ISBN number of the book’s backcover. With book_get (Perl code) I can retrieve the author, title, genre and year published from Google.