I’m moving and have been trudging through craigslist apartment listings daily. I CANNOT stand all the cliché buzzwords, misuse of symbols, and overall bs of realtors.

So, I cooked up a greasemonkey script that gets cuts through the bs and dramatically cleans up the apartment listings.

The post:

$1500/1BR XXXX-LARGE ***** SUPER MINT ***** MUST SEE. WILL NOT LAST 1BR Apt

Becomes:

1500/1Br Large 1Br Apt

ahhhhhhhhh, much better on my eyes.

The actions performed by the script are:

• Replace a whole mess of cliche phrases and buzzwords
• Get rid of all symbols
• Remove repeating spaces
• F I X   S P A C E D   O U T   W O R D S
• Properly Case Every Word

If you missed the link to the script, you can grab it here. It requires firefox and the greasemonkey extension.

Here’s something you don’t see every day. Google was giving me intermittent page errors

Errors usually give a little bit of insight into how sites are being ran. It looks like google is using squid for caching.

The best ideas come from finding something you do all the time, realize you do it, and then automate it.

With me, I discovered that I frequently go to the base domain of a website by going to the URL, highlighting and deleting the junk on the end of the domain name and then pressing enter. I HATE doing it. I also have to do it when websites don’t link to their home page.

So here’s an easy solution. A bookmarklet!

Drag the link below to your bookmarks bar (or in IE, right-click and add to favorites):

Here is the code:

var url = new String(location.href);var re = new RegExp(‘https?://([A-Za-z0-9.-]+)’);var res = url.match(re);location.href=res[0];

Enjoy

I always go through the same three steps to download a file (in tar.gz format)

1. wget the tar.gz file I want
2. untar it
3. remove the original file I downloaded

So I made a bash script that does those three steps in one. Use it the same way as wget (# simple.sh http://path/to/file.tar.gz)

#!/bin/bash 

# change this to whatever extension you'd like to handle
ext=".tar.gz"

# flags to pass to tar
flg="-zxvf"

wget $1

file=`ls -t *$ext | grep -i -m 1 "^.*$ext$"`

if [[ -n $file ]]
then
    tar $flg $file
    unlink $file
else
    echo "Could not find the downloaded file."
fi

You can download it via this link (Remember to make it executable and to change its extension)