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Random VCDX Tips and Quotes?

by Christian Mohn · Read in about 2 min (219 words)

I needed something to spruce up my desktop environment, and it seems that one of the more popular ways to do that is to display random quotes and such on your desktop. Instead of hooking up to an existing quotes database, I simply made my own.

I have collected a few VCDX related tips and quotes, primarily from the archive Duncan Epping put together of VCDX Tips from VCDX 001 John Arrasjid, but also from the “submissions” I got from VCDX? Give Me a Quote! If anyone else wants their quote/tip/hint added to the database, please let me know!

But gathering all of these in a single location has no real purpose, so I managed to code up a really small PHP script that picks a random quote, and return it with attribution. The output is available at http://vninja.net/labs/quotes/quote.php and should return a random line from the db on each query.

I use this in combination with GeekTool to display a random, changing, quote right on my desktop:

Inside GeekTool, I run the following command to generate the output:

curl http://vninja.net/labs/quotes/quote.php

This  is set to refresh every 120 seconds, as long as I have internet connectivity.

Feel free to use the script to do something similar, or if you have a better idea for it’s usage let me know!

Post last updated on July 11, 2018: Replace cmohn with Christian Mohn as author

About the author

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Christian Mohn works as a Chief Technologist SDDC for Proact in Norway.

See his About page for more details, or find him on Twitter.

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