I just recently found out about the /r/showerthoughts subreddit, where people vote on pithy sayings. I thought this might be a fun thing to have to replace the aging and relatively static “fortune” file that I use. I used the Python “PRAW” library to fetch the top entry for the day, and then optionally pass it to the terrific “cowsay” program for formatting.

Here’s the tiny, nearly trivial code, whose code includes an example of the output of “./shower –cow”

[sourcecode lang=”python”]
#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

# a program for fetching texts from Reddit’s /r/showerthoughts reddit.
# _________________________________________
# / The guy who said “Look! Up in the sky! \
# | It’s a bird!” in the Superman intro was |
# \ strangely excited to see a bird… /
# —————————————–
# \ ^__^
# \ (oo)\_______
# (__)\ )\/\
# ||—-w |
# || ||

# Written by Mark VandeWettering, no rights reserved.

import sys
import subprocess
import argparse
import textwrap
import praw

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description = ‘Fetch shower thoughts from reddit.’)
parser.add_argument(‘–cow’, action=’store_true’,
help=’pipe output through cowsay’)
parser.add_argument(‘–cowstyle’, dest=’cowstyle’, nargs=1, default=[‘default’],
help=’style passed to cowsay’)
args = parser.parse_args()

r = praw.Reddit(‘shower’)
s = r.get_subreddit(‘showerthoughts’)

submissions = s.get_top_from_day(limit = 1)

for submission in submissions:
if args.cow:
ps = subprocess.Popen([‘cowsay’, ‘-f’, args.cowstyle[0]], shell=False, stdin=subprocess.PIPE)
ps.stdin.write(submission.title.encode(‘utf-8’))
ps.stdin.close()
ps.wait()
else:
for l in textwrap.wrap(submission.title, 60):
print ("\t%s" % l).encode(‘utf-8’)
[/sourcecode]