So, as you probably know if you have read my About Me page, I like the comic called Ctrl+Alt+Del, or CAD for short. Well, since I am going on a trip in a few months, I decided I wanted to put a bunch of comics on my Zune for reading on the plane ride. I figured it would be fairly easy, since the Zune supports picture galleries and I can just add them.
I found out there was no really easy way to get all the comics from CAD. I successfully downloaded all the comics from Questionable Content and XKCD using simple scripting techniques, but not CAD. Today I wrote an application in C#, a very basic one, that starts at any comic page on the CAD site, and moves backwards from there, downloading all the comics. I then only needed to rotate them 90° so that they fit the aspect ratio of the Zune properly. So now that I have the entire collection on my hard drive, they are synchronizing to my Zune, as well as the 1st season of the CAD Animation, so I have plenty to do on the flight! YAY. I have attached the C# project to this post for anyone else who wants to do something similar.
Anyway, I highly recommend all of the above mentioned comics, and especially CAD if you are into video gaming and life as a gamer. And definitely check out the animations. As I have season one on DVD and my subscription to season two is in full swing, I can accurately say that they are great. I just wish they were a tad longer than 5-7 minutes.
As for the project, there is a slight glitch: comics with the translation links give it a problem. It is very simple, and there aren’t very many of them. For those, I manually went to the CAD comic page for each one and saved the image. It took an extra 10 seconds per image. Also, I did not include any executable files. You will need to have some flavor of Visual Studio that can handle C# projects. I wrote it in C# Express 2005, but it should work fine in the full version of 2005, or even in the 2008 flavors.
Download the project here -> CAD Ripper
Any questions or comments about it, post them in the comments section of this posting.