Download Files from Dropbox Programmatically with R

Here is a usefull snippet that I stole from qdap::url_dl to download files from my Dropbox to the working directory.
Argument x is the document name and d the document key.

dl_from_dropbox <- function(x, key) {
                        require(RCurl)
                        bin <- getBinaryURL(paste0("https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/", key, "/", x),
                                            ssl.verifypeer = FALSE)
                        con <- file(x, open = "wb")
                        writeBin(bin, con)
                        close(con)
                        message(noquote(paste(x, "read into", getwd())))                        
                        }
# Example:
dl_from_dropbox("GViewer_Embeds.txt", "06fqlz6gswj80nj")
shell.exec("GViewer_Embeds.txt")

PS: Also see this R-package for interfacing with Dropbox

Embedding Google Docs and Google Viewer

..Here's a short example of the usage of the Google Viewer and Google Docs embeds (see here). If you want to embed a view of any file on Google Drive/Docs you can do this by putting a pdf preview (the file could be in any format, see first example, which is a Google text document) in an iframe or, in the case of spreadsheets, the speradsheet itself into an iframe.

The second embed below shows the latest outcome of an online questionnaire and in the speradsheet that holds the result the new answers to the questoinnaire are updated every 5 minutes after refreshing the view. So, you can, i.e., make an online questoinnaire with a Google form and display the results like below. With a little tweaking of the parameters, which I obviously haven't done yet, the result would of course be more visually appealing.

If you try for one of your files you just need to replace the id/key in the URL..

The Result:

VBS Shutdown Timer

When running time comsuming processes I often wish to shutdown automatically after a given time. There are several applications on the internet but I was not really happy with the ones I found. So, I put together a really small VB-Script which in fact does the job perfectly.

Dim Shell : Set Shell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")

argument_t = inputbox("Time in Seconds:", "Shutdown", "3600")

Shell.Run "C:/Windows/system32/shutdown.exe -f -s -t " & _
          argument_t, 0

MsgBox "Press OK if you want to cancel the Shutdown..", _
       vbInformation + vbOkayonly, "Cancel Shutdown"

Shell.Run "C:/Windows/system32/shutdown.exe -a", 0

I put the vbs file on my disk and a shortcut to it on the Desktop. You can choose the time until shutdown with an input box.