I’ve been a bit disappointed with my “Free time” projects for a while. I’d really like to put more time into them but I can’t seem to get motivated to do so. Nonetheless, occasionally I’ll go into a flurry of activity.

One of the most interesting ways I think I can make out-of-band projects reasonable is to make their scopes less “epic”. One good way of doing that is to create utilities.

And the best way, I’ve found, to create utilities is to create software that does what you need, and make it available for others. This was the reasoning behind “Recoder” which I’ve Written about before. Basically, I found I had a annoying issue that could be automated. In that case, I had a bunch of FLAC audio files, and I wanted to put them on my MP3 player which doesn’t support FLAC files. I also wanted to do it as quickly and easily as possible. Thus, that project was born, which I was able to successfully use (in the original command line incarnation) with no issues.

In those posts I provided the program and the source code within a ZIP archive, however as anybody knows that is only a good way to deploy final versions. As I’ve come to use the program for different purposes I’ve come to change or revise the program, so I’ve uploaded the source code to a Github Repository.

Some other ideas I had for programs primarily for my own purposes that could be useful include a command line clipboard that can save data to the clipboard or pipe data from the clipboard. The idea being that one could copy an image file to the clipboard for pasting into a paint program without having to load the file in the paint program, or you could copy files directly from the command line for pasting into an explorer window.