Monthly Archives: June 2013

Automatically Pop Up Steam Key

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Now that I’ve got steam, I get to be constantly pestered by e-mails sending me keys with which to identify that I am myself. To save a few steps in this annoying, repetitive process I wrote a tiny bash script which finds the key in an e-mail from steam and uses zenity to pop it up on my screen, then added a filter in Evolution Mail to mark these “steam verification” messages as read and pipe them to the pop-up script. This allows me to copy the key with a double-click and paste it into steam with a middle-click, without having to poke around in my mail client for the e-mail and the place where the key is mentioned in it.

In the hope that it saves someone else from this irksomeness, here’s the code for the script:

#/bin/bash

# Displays a pop-up showing a Steam activation key piped to it by a MUA.
# In the e-mail the steam key is wrapped in <h2> tags
# Author: Sion Le Roux <sinisterstuf@gmail.com>

# read e-mail from pipe
while read -r line; do
    # find <h2>
    buffer=$(echo $line | grep 'h2')
    if [[ ! -z $buffer ]]; then
        #strip surrounding <h2> tags
        steamkey=$(echo $buffer | sed -e 's/<\/\?h2>//g')
    fi
done

# display the steam code in a pop-up
zenity --info --title="Steam Key" \
    --window-icon="/usr/share/pixmaps/steam.png" \
    --text="<tt><big><b>$steamkey</b></big></tt>"

Packaged Tomboy add-ins for Arch Linux

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The wiki-like note taking application, Tomboy, maintains a list of user-written add-ins on its website, almost none of which were available in the Arch Linux repositories. Recently I learnt how packages are created for Arch Linux and read up on the standards, so I ‘adopted’ an ownerless add-in package from the Arch Linux User Repository and packaged 6 more.

Finally, I created a meta-package called tomboy-extras which contains nothing but depends on all the working Tomboy add-ins (tested on my laptop) in the AUR, to easily install all add-ins at once. I created a gist on GitHub for each package’s build script and made a repository containing the meta-package’s PKGBUILD file and each gist as a git sub-module named after the package name. The README file in tomboy-extras’ git repository contains links to the gists for the add-ins’ PKGBUILDs so that they can be found easily.

So, if you would like to contribute to one of them, feel free to fork the relevant gist, or leave a comment there, and if you would like to contribute to tomboy-extras itself or have an add-in included, just fork tomboy-extras and send a pull request; I’ll probably be adding more add-ins to it myself already. Also, if you do use any of these packages, please give them a vote on AUR so that we can see how many people use them. If they’re popular, they may be included in the official repositories, who knows!