This is, in essence, nothing more than a collection of things I've been doing instead of writing for NaNoWriMo 2006. It's procrastination material, but it has yielded some nifty results I think, so I figured I'd share them with the world.
The links at the top of every page of my NaNoWriMo doohickeys will always point at navigable pages that display content below the menu, as on this page. The links below, on this page, lead directly to scripts, configuration files, images, and plain text files instead. Exceptions are made for stuff like the instructions page, which is linked below in exactly the same manner as the menu above.
Included are:
- . . . instructions on how to use the .conkyrc file and wcpercent Perl script to produce effects on your computer as shown in the screenshot.
- . . . a Perl script called wcpercent that runs on a standard Linux setup with bash installed as the default shell. I'm pretty sure it'd run with basically any mainstream shell, but I haven't bothered to test it. The script outputs a percentage value (0-100) that shows how much of 50,000 words you've written so far, as long as you keep a directory (or more than one, as I do) to house files whose contents are supposed to be counted toward your NaNoWriMo wordcount. In addition to all of the above, it's also logging date/time and wordcount stats to a text file that I might use later to generate a progress graph for my own writing. The link at the beginning of this paragraph points at the raw Perl script file -- in most browsers, simply right-click on that link to save the file to your hard drive so you don't have to cut and paste from your browser. Release notes and changelog by version number are available.
- . . . a conky configuration file that makes use of the above Perl script, wcpercent, and the wc utility to generate NaNoWriMo wordcount stats, in addition to some fairly standard system monitoring information for a laptop. Watch the linewrap -- there are some rather long lines, and you'll probably have to scroll horizontally to see it all in your browser. The link at the beginning of this paragraph points at the raw conky configuration file -- in most browsers, simply right-click on that link to save the file to your hard drive so you don't have to cut and paste from your browser.
- . . . a screenshot of Workspace 1 on my laptop with a main aterm editing window open to console-based Vim and two smaller aterm windows for running utilities when needed (like the import command used to grab the screenshot), plus the conky output in the bottom right corner of the screen, using the configuration file and Perl script listed here. The screenshot shows the entire workspace, scaled down to a more convenient size to view in a browser. I also have a close-up picture, cropped so just the bottom right corner of the screen is visible, to show the conky area in more detail. The edges of my aterm windows surround it above and to the left.
- . . . a utility called wczip that takes one or more filenames, or a filename glob (e.g. filename argument with wildcard characters), as an argument. It then replaces every single word in the plain text file with the letter s and writes the modified text to a new file. Verified wordcounts for NaNoWriMo will remain the same, but the filesize will be much smaller than the original and, in case you worry about someone reading or copying the text, it will now be unreadable. NOTE #1: Do not discard the original file if you ever want a readable copy again. There is no way to recover the original text from the modified file. This utility is capable of taking the original filename as an argument and overwriting it, so do not specify the original filename for the output file unless you intend to throw away your readable copy. More about the behavior of wczip can be determined by executing the program with the --help option (e.g. `wczip --help`). NOTE #2: You need a Perl interpreter to use wczip. If you are using a Unix-like system (including any Linux distribution or BSD Unix OS), you almost certainly have Perl. If you are not using a Unix-like system, and have to ask whether you have Perl, the answer is probably "no".
In case you're wondering, I'm using the Sawfish window manager in the above screenshots without a background image (else it would be showing through conky and would be dimly visible through my aterms, since I tend to use transparency effects with my terminal emulators) -- it's just a solid black background. Since those screenshots were taken, I switched to AHWM, and I am not currently using conky.
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