Search the OSR

Google offers a feature called custom search, which allows you to specify a list of sites to search. I created an OSR Search for dozens of old-school blogs and forums.

Dice roller bot

I wrote a dice roller bot for GoogleTalk (or, really, any Jabber/XMPP chat server). Here's the README.txt, and here's the dicebot.rb script. It seems to work pretty well, but let me know if you find any bugs.

Fix scans in Judges Guild PDF's

This is mainly for my own reference, but some of you might also find it useful. The RPGnow PDF's of original Judges Guild products—like the Ready Ref Sheets—were made from low-contrast grayscale scans. They read OK on screen, but don't print cleanly. If you have a Linux box (or any OS with a recent ImageMagick version) this command will produce a cleaner printing PDF:

convert -density 300 -brightness-contrast 0%x90% JGld-ReadyRefSheets.pdf readyrefsheets-contrasty.pdf

That grinds my machine to a halt for several minutes, so you might want to lower the priority level of the process with nice. If you have an older version of ImageMagick, you may be able to achieve similar results using the -contrast-stretch option instead of -brightness-contrast. If you have a better way to achieve similar results, I'd like to know. Thanks.