Andrew Wippler's Sketchpad - Scripts

feeling super productive

2025-09-12T15:55:56.778969+00:00

Since August, I have been updating my digital life, which began with organizing my digital collection of books. I had never truly looked too indepth at Calibre before August 2025, but I am clearly blown away at its capabilities. I feel a bit awkward keeping the library on my desktop computer, but I have a script to periodically backup my home folder to my NAS. Today I finished organizing them in Calibre. I have discovered that I have 458 digital books - I have read 131, and have 135 on my reading list. The remainder are my wife's digital collection and reference material.

I read books for information. Sometimes the information is good, so I highlight it for later consumption. I have build SpeakerWindows</a> as a means to organize those highlights and other thoughts for later use. This past month, I created two importers - readwise and play books. Readwise gathered my highlights from the Amazon's kindle, while Google Play Books sync their highlights in Google Drive. The end result was over 5,000 highlights that needed to be sorted.

At first, I updated 5 a day through a prompts to ChatGPT, but that process was slow. So, I built a script that asked a local LLM to categorize the content of my notes and thoughts. It took about 2 hours to churn through those notes and create relavant tags for all of them. In the end, I am very happy with the results.

I am now motivated to read books as fast as I can in Google Play Books, export them to Google Drive, and import them to SpeakerWindows.

DHCP IP updater

2018-04-04T16:17:19+00:00

This is the script I use to change the DNS record of my home IP when it changes. I have it running once a week and have not noticed a lapse in coverage. If your ISP has DHCP configured correctly, you will receive the same IP address when you are due for a renew. Otherwise you need a script like the one below.

#!/usr/bin/ruby
</span>
</span>require 'aws-sdk'
</span>require 'socket'
</span>
</span>def my_first_public_ipv4
</span>  Socket.ip_address_list.detect{|intf| intf.ipv4? and !intf.ipv4_loopback? and !intf.ipv4_multicast? and !intf.ipv4_private?}
</span>end
</span>
</span>ip = my_first_public_ipv4.ip_address
</span>
</span>unless ip.nil?
</span>
</span>change = {
</span>  :action => 'UPSERT',
</span>  :resource_record_set => {
</span>    :name => "home.andrewwippler.com",
</span>    :type => "A",
</span>    :ttl => 600,
</span>    :resource_records => [{:value => ip}]
</span>}}
</span>
</span>route53 = Aws::Route53::Client.new(
</span>    region: 'us-east-1'
</span>)
</span>route53.change_resource_record_sets({
</span>  hosted_zone_id: '/hostedzone/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX', # required
</span>  change_batch: { # required
</span>    changes: [change],
</span>  },
</span>})
</span>
</span>end
</span>
</span></code></pre>



OpenStack PS1 snippet
2016-12-16T14:00:27+00:00
I have been studying for my OpenStack certification test (the COA) which is scheduled next week. One thing that was painful to keep track of was the user I was using to interface with OpenStack as the rc file you download from OpenStack does not update your PS1 prompt. I came up with the following solution and placed it in my ~/.bashrc</code>:</p>

</span>function parse_os_user() {
</span>    if [ ! "${OS_USERNAME}" == "" ]
</span>    then
</span>        echo "(${OS_USERNAME})"
</span>    else
</span>        echo ""
</span>    fi
</span>}
</span>
</span>PS1='\u@\h \w `parse_os_user` \$ '
</span>
</span></code></pre>