In het kader van de val van het kabiniet Balkenende-IV heb ik mijn beroemde en beruchte Balkenende-vertaler geupdate met nieuwe zinnen. De achterkant is helemaal herschreven en draait nu op de API (lees hier wat dat is) van de Twol. Je kan dus nu ook zelf je Balkenende-vertalertje bouwen.

I wrote a little shell script that enables you to query The Twol (you know, my little pet project that provides instant information on lots of things) from the terminal (command line interface).

So, now you can do stuff like:

» Translate sentences from English to German (and many other languages)
twol translate en de I would really like a nice cold beer

» Get the weather for virtually any city in the world
twol weather St. Petersburg, Russia

» Check if a Twitter username is still free
twol twitterusernamefree stevejobs

Right from the command line (under Mac OS X and Linux at least :)

You need PHP to run the script. In Mac OS X that’s included out of the box, under Linux you might need to install php5-cli or another package with a similiar name.

Then you can simply:

• download the script
• copy it somewhere in your $PATH
  cp twol /usr/local/bin
• make it executable
  chmod u+x /user/local/bin/twol
• have fun!

Photo credit: *n3wjack (CC-BY-SA)

Read this announcement in Dutch.

I’d like to introduce you to a little project i’ve been working on for the past time. It’s called The Twol and it’s a new way to get all kinds of instant information using a command-line like interface on the web or using Twitter.

How does it work? The Twol works by entering simple commands, either using the interface on the website or by sending tweets to @twol on Twitter. Take a look at the screenshot here below for an example:

Currently there are around 20 commands, that you can use to..

• Get the weather on a random city in the world
• Translate sentences from any language to any other language
• Check if a username on Twitter is still free
• Get an answer to any question from the magic eight ball
• Get inspiration from the Oblique Strategies

If you speak Dutch you might also enjoy some commands from my art site, 365 DAGEN HAY, including dooddoeners, onbegrijpelijke moppen, de Nimweegs vertaler and of course the Wilders citaten generator.

You might ask how this differs from some of the functions from Google. Well, Google always returns search results, which might not be the thing you’re looking for when searching for the current weather in Rome. Furthermore, there are many other commands that might not be the first result on Google. Of course Google search results don’t integrate in Twitter.

In that sense, The Twol is more like the classic command line or an IRC bot, with the difference that you don’t need to leave your browser or Twitter client to get quick information.

Note that when using Twitter, it can take up to 20 seconds to get a reply back. This is a result of the way Twitter works, unfortunately i can’t do anything about that. If it does longer than 20 seconds though, The Twol might be broken. Please let me know so i can fix things :) Of course, the website works instantly.

Of course, this is all still very much in beta so i’d like you to test the Twol and give feedback and what works, what doesn’t work, and what commands you’d like to see added (if you’re a little technical, you might be able to write your own commands in the future). Right now you can already hack a little bit using The Twol’s API.

You can give feedback using the comment form here below, by mailing me or of course by using The Twol itself.

Have fun!