Mothers day hacks

Firstly Happy Mother’s day to my mother.

Google is, as usual, busily releasing doodles. Today, the doodle takes you through a Rube Goldberg -esque sequence, giving you four decisions to make along the way. Each decision gives you one of three different choices, and at the end, a unique drawing is displayed. I expect:

3 * 3 * 3 * 3 = 81

different permutations. At the end of the process, you can print your image. I got directed to:

https://www.google.ca/logos/2013/mom/print/3311.html

which suspiciously has a four digit filename composed of three’s and ones. Inspecting the file in firefox shows that the main image url is:

https://www.google.ca/logos/2013/mom/hdcards/3311.jpg

with a similarly suspicious “3311”. I decided that I wanted to see all the permutations without having to refresh google’s page. Jumping to a terminal, and using some bash expansion magic:

$ cd /tmp
$ mkdir hack1
$ cd hack1/
$ wget https://www.google.ca/logos/2013/mom/hdcards/{1..3}{1..3}{1..3}{1..3}.jpg
[snip]
FINISHED --2013-05-12 07:07:22--
Total wall clock time: 1m 23s
Downloaded: 81 files, 138M in 1m 19s (1.75 MB/s)

I am pleased to see that 81 files have downloaded, and that they’re all unique:

$ md5sum * | sort | uniq | wc -l
81

and all png’s:

$ file * | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq | wc -l
1
$ file * | head -1
1111.jpg: JPEG image data, EXIF standard

Now I can very easily browse through the images with eog, and select my favourite.

Hope this has been instructive,

Happy hacking,

James

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May 12, 2013
307 words

• technical