Abusing the command line
26th March 2004
If you’re running OS X, try this:
say -v Kathy `curl --silent http://api.technorati.com/getinfo?username=simonwillison | grep ’<inbound' | sed -e 's/ <//' | sed -e 's/inboundblogs>/Simons blog has /’ | sed -e ’s/<\/inboundblogs>/ inbound blogs and /’ | sed -e ’s/inboundlinks>//’ | sed -e ’s/<\/inboundlinks>/ inbound links/’`
Your computer should read out to you my Technorati inbound blogs and inbound links, extracted from the Technorati web API. Parsing XML using sed is a nasty trick I picked up from this O’Reilly article; speaking the output of a command using the ’say’ and the backtick shell operator was my moment of inspiration for the day.
More recent articles
- Mr. Chatterbox is a (weak) Victorian-era ethically trained model you can run on your own computer - 30th March 2026
- Vibe coding SwiftUI apps is a lot of fun - 27th March 2026
- Experimenting with Starlette 1.0 with Claude skills - 22nd March 2026