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Calvin and Hobbes Search Engine

michaelyingling.com

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Re: Calvin and Hobbes Search Engine

#161

Post by iggldiggl »

dsr_ wrote: post #5

It has some duplications. Search for "goons". 10 comics will show up. The first and last are actually the same one.

I don't know if this explains all the duplicates, but at least that particular example is due to Bill Waterson's sabbaticals: The last result from May 21, 1994 lies within the period of his second sabbatical – April 3 through December 31, 1994.

For those two periods, Gocomics is simply filling the gap by repeating earlier strips (and I think the same thing happened during the strip's original newspaper run, too). So if you didn’t knew about those sabbaticals (or forgot about them), it's easy to accidentally include those duplicate strips if you were to just blindly process everything between November 18, 1985 and December 31, 1995.

Re: Calvin and Hobbes Search Engine

#162

Post by iggldiggl »

tim333 wrote: post #138
dmitryminkovsky wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh okay that makes a lot more sense. Thanks so much, I'd been wondering.

Incidentally the GoComics series starts from 1985/11/18 https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1985/11/18 and runs to 1995/12/31 https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1995/12/31 and then loops back to the start. To convert today date in GoComics to the original subtract 10955 days. I wasted quite a lot of time figuring that.

And Bill Waterson took two sabbaticals (May 5, 1991 to February 1, 1992 and April 3 to December 31, 1994), which Gocomics is filling up with repeats, too.

Re: Calvin and Hobbes Search Engine

#163

Post by erk__ »

vfinn wrote: post #124

I'm studying Spanish, so I made a little script that fetches Calvin & hobbes cartoons in both Spanish and English and then converts each strip into bilingual strip with ImageMagick. It works well enough (>99%). #!/bin/bash for i in {1..1000}; do x=$(date +'%Y/%m/%d' -d "$i days ago"); z=$(date +'%Y-%m-%d' -d "$i days ago"); wget https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbesespanol/$x -O $z-es; wget https://www.gocomics.co…

A bit unrelated, but I have been working on a bot that fetches comics mostly Garfield from go comics, and the 32 char url you get back does not seem random, but I have not yet been able to figure out how it is formed.

Re: Calvin and Hobbes Search Engine

#166

Post by vfinn »

erk__ wrote: post #163
vfinn wrote: post #124

I'm studying Spanish, so I made a little script that fetches Calvin & hobbes cartoons in both Spanish and English and then converts each strip into bilingual strip with ImageMagick. It works well enough (>99%). #!/bin/bash for i in {1..1000}; do x=$(date +'%Y/%m/%d' -d "$i days ago"); z=$(date +'%Y-%m-%d' -d "$i days ago"); wget https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbesespanol/$x -O $z-es; wget https://www.gocomics.co…

A bit unrelated, but I have been working on a bot that fetches comics mostly Garfield from go comics, and the 32 char url you get back does not seem random, but I have not yet been able to figure out how it is formed.

I was gonna say you're nuts, but it seems there's a some kind of pattern, so sorry about that :D. These are the filenames for three different Calvin & Hobbes cartoons from Feb 8 to Feb 10. 24 hex similarity, so... you need to reverse 32 bits?

145afe502d7601393f0c005056a9545d.jpg

126fdbc02d7601393f0c005056a9545d.jpg

163e6fa02d7601393f0c005056a9545d.jpg

It could be some kind of combined hash for date + comic + service.

Re: Calvin and Hobbes Search Engine

#167

Post by udit99 »

Out of curiosity, I looked up the original data source for the search and found this: http://www.s-anand.net/blog/the-calvin-and-hobbes-search-tak... . I think he deserves as much credit as the guy who created the search engine.

TLDR: Some guy manually transcribed every single Calvin and Hobbes strip only to get a takedown notice and remove it.

Re: Calvin and Hobbes Search Engine

#169

Post by Anthony-G »

every wrote: post #165
Anthony-G wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The preview functionality has been removed to avoid copyright infringement. :(

Try this instead: https://www.comicsrss.com/

Thanks. That brought me to https://www.comicsrss.com/rss/calvinandhobbes.rss
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