Random Leave It to Beaver

A random episode of (wut!?) from a handy keybind: C'tarl+Alt+Space.

Mostly wholesome (I mean, come on, it's from the 1950s and you may have to get past a coupla things, you'll be pleasantly suprised, though), full episodes of hilarity for when your desktop needs a laugh and you need something... BAM, random Beave. You didn't even know you needed it.

What a time to be alive.

Also, if you wanted, you could goto MadCarter's for a random shot of the Beave in your browser, same mechanics, randomly plays an episode from archive.org.

What it is

• rltb.sh - grab one random episode URL from the playlist and play it - it's the shuf, man, put to good use, WOOT!
• beaver.m3u - the playlist: all 240 archive.org episode URLs (public domain)
• update-playlist.py - rebuild the playlist from archive.org (handy to run every so often; see below)
• install.sh - one-command install, works on any desktop environment
• uninstall.sh - removes everything it did

Install (on the target machine)

Download the folder, then:

./install.sh

That's it. When it finishes, C'tarl+Alt+Space plays a random episode.

The installer:

• Assumes nothing - creates ~/bin if it's missing and adds it to your PATH
• Drops rltb.sh, the playlist, and the updater into ~/bin
• Wires C'tarl+Alt+Space for whatever window manager / desktop you actually run: Openbox, i3, Sway, XFCE, GNOME, MATE, KDE, or generic xbindkeys. If it can't tell, it prints the exact binding to set manually.
• Reloads your WM/DE so the keybind is live the moment it finishes
• Works user-level only - no sudo, no root files touched
• Never changes anything without keeping a *.bak-randomlitb backup, so nothing is ever lost

The media player: mpv if you have it (recommended), otherwise it falls back to xdg-open and your default video handler.

Update the playlist

Archive.org occasionally moves or renames files. Every so often, run:

~/bin/update-playlist.py

It re-fetches the series index from archive.org and rebuilds beaver.m3u to match (same 240 episodes, atomic write - never a half-written file). Use --check to just see how many episodes it finds without writing anything.

So much handy.

Uninstall

./uninstall.sh          # removes the keybind, restores backups
./uninstall.sh --purge  # ...and also removes the installed files

Options

Both scripts support --dry-run (show what would happen without changing anything) and --help.

./install.sh --dry-run
./install.sh --no-m3u     # install without shipping the bundled playlist

Why

Some tools make your desktop faster. This one makes it happier.