Ent: services and tools via email

[crc]

After receiving my peek, I decided to start write a program that would let me get news, weather, and so on when I wanted it. I'm now proud to introduce the result, Ent. This is a free service that provides access to a variety of services through an email interface. The initial services are working reliably:

Lookup a Wikipedia article
lookup article name

Get definitions (from Wiktionary)
define word

Get local weather forecast
weather zipcode or city, state

Track a UPS package
ups tracking number

Get current news headlines and story summaries
news

You can also specify a news source or subtype:
news source

Valid sources: us, world, bbc, nytimes, freshmeat

Obtain the text contents of webpage
www url

In addition, a number of new services are being worked on:

Get quotes related to a word or subject
quotes word

Get the contents of a manpage
man page

Obtain the current time and date across all US timezones
ustime

Get pages from the original wiki at c2.com
c2 page

And the most intensive new service:

Lookup passages from the Bible
bible reference

This also allows specification of a version:
bible version reference

The following versions are provided: AV, ESV, NIV, NASB, NRSV, RSV, WEB, YOUNG.

You can also specify all to lookup the reference in all provided versions. The Bible service also allows for searching for specific words or passages. You can try some of these:

Code: Select all

bible AV 1 jn /Jesus/   list verses in 1 John in the AV which contain Jesus
bible RSV /Jesus wept/  find the shortest verse in the RSV!
bible /Adam/ /Eve/      list verses which mention both Adam and Eve
bible /adam/i           case-insensitive search, finds Adam, adamant etc.
bible RSV /baalmeon/in  finds the name Ba'al-me'on, ignoring the punctuation


To use Ent, send an email with a request in the subject line to ent at retroforth.org. Comments or suggestions for more services are welcome.

[RicL]

Hey Charles,

Thanks for taking the time to register and list your autoresponder script. So far I've only played with the weather portion of your script but it definitely returns more info than weather@getpeek.net

I've been working on similar and wanted google search, news headlines, wikipedia, wiktionary, sports scores and weather at a minimum but of course I've run into licensing issues with some of those. The Google AJAX Search API for example is about as clear as mud, Also when trying to find a weather feed I either run into licensing issues with weather.com/accuweather or have to deal with doing station id lookups from the zip/city provided to use the NWS's data.

I'm going to stick with it but think that I'll use seperate e-mail addys for each service (weather@thinkpeek.com, news@getpeek.com, etc) simply because they could be added to the Peek's contact list and would be more convenient (for me at least).

Ric

[PeekAddicted]

crc,

The ENT service you created is great!! I use it all the time. Thanks for your hard work.

Stephen

[alvaro]

whats the deal with mymobiletoolkit.com ? i've been waiting for them for a while -

anyone know of map and directions via peek e-mail?

-

[crc]

Ent does maps and directions as well (the list in this post is old):

subject: map street, city, state zip
Get a map of a given area

subject: route starting address to destination address
Get directions from starting address to destination address. The word 'to' is important; don't forget it.

[alicel]

For an amazing, comprehensive print-out of key shortcuts and neat peeks:
http://stroud.freehostia.com/peek.html

Thanks ENT!