A feature I really like about Window 7 (and 8) is the ability to make the desktop cycle through all the images in a given directory structure, perfect for those 1000’s of photos we’ve taken on our travels. Over the last couple years I’ve been using a little script I wrote to extract the current image and copy it into a shared directory in my dropbox. This directory is shared with my wife and we both have a shortcut on our desktops to click when we see an image we like to share those “Nîmes was awesome wasn’t it!

Over the last couple weeks I’ve been playing about with the concept of creating a central page that would be my starting point for reading through various ebooks, notably PDFs. I have collected quite a few PDFs along the way and as they’re not physical, and not piling up on my desk or bookshelf, it can be easy to forget about them. So a page of thumbnails will give a visual reminder of what you’ve not read yet or of a library to access in the future.

As of 19th Oct this site is now running on Octopress/Jekyll. I’ve used Wordpress on and off for many years and have not entirely been happy with bulk of php used nor the editor. Rather than hating on Wordpress, this post is about how awesome Octopress is. For a low volume and rarely changing site like this, it just isn’t necessary to have dynamic page generation at runtime. Even with caching, it is a bit of an overkill.

In addition to the URL Status Check script, I’ve also written a basic script to continuously [ping](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ping_(networking_utility)) a system. Whilst probably not the most efficient nor simplest way to do it, it is achieves the goal of returning the ping result. As an added bonus, it uses a little corner of groovy that most will find useful at some point or another, executing something on the system command line. In Groovy, this is achieved with a simple script like: