I made a CLI interface for the Microsoft Academic API so you can search for papers, download them, and generate HTML from a collection: https://github.com/mila-iqia/paperoni

I'm using it to automatically collect papers published by members of the research institute I work for, it's working pretty well.

I also made a small utility to sync folders on-demand on my different machines: https://github.com/breuleux/synecure

Most of the work is done by a library called bsync that someone else had written, which itself uses rsync, but I'm quite happy about the interface I made. By default it syncs home-to-home, so you don't have to specify both the source and destination directories. You can just type "sy -r remote" in ~/whatever to sync it to ~/whatever on the remote.