tech drops

Jude Robinson : The single most useful thing in bash

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 23:50:02 +0200

Jude Robinson : The single most useful thing in bash:

A protip by dotcode about unix, cli, bash, and shell.

I knew about `set show-all-if-ambiguous on`, but the rest really bring some magic to the good ol’ Bash.

Possible solution for OS X Mountain Lion SMB connection and disappearing WINS workgroup problems

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 17:23:30 +0200

Possible solution for OS X Mountain Lion SMB connection and disappearing WINS workgroup problems:

I hope this works for you, if you bump into smb problems where the WINS workgroup and NetBIOS name are reset or disappear at reboot.

I fell in love with Keka, an extremely well made OS X app for...

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 02:09:00 +0200

I fell in love with Keka, an extremely well made OS X app for compressing archives. It made me switch to 7z as my favorite and default format. Results are impressive (see picture to compare a file sizes).

Because of the way it’s designed and configurable, it now sits in my Dock and awaits for stuff to be dropped on it, knowing it will do the job right. If I need anything out of the ordinary, I’ll just launch it, and just drop whatever stuff there, after choosing the different format.

It got some fine details right, like the ability to automatically exclude resource forks (.DS_Store) files automatically.

Downloading online videos made (hacker-)friendly

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 01:08:00 +0100

This is my favorite way to download YouTube videos (or Vimeo and much more). Here is the initial setup:

Install `youtube-dl` (via homebrew for OS X)
Set up bash aliases such as these:

alias yt1080="youtube-dl -f 37/46 -o '[%(uploader)s] %(title)s.%(ext)s' $1" alias yt720="youtube-dl -f 22/45 -o '[%(uploader)s] %(title)s.%(ext)s' $1" alias yt480="youtube-dl -f 44/35/18 -o '[%(uploader)s] %(title)s.%(ext)s' $1" alias yt360="youtube-dl -f 18/43/34 -o '[%(uploader)s] %(title)s.%(ext)s' $1"

Now whenever you want to download a video, just type yt1080, yt720, yt480 or yt360 (depending on the desired quality) followed by the url of the video (or just video id) to start downloading the video with a nicely formatted filename. The script will select the mp4 version first, falling back to webm or flv, respectively. Example:

$ yt720 fdJc1_IBKJA [youtube] Setting language [youtube] fdJc1_IBKJA: Downloading video webpage [youtube] fdJc1_IBKJA: Downloading video info webpage [youtube] fdJc1_IBKJA: Extracting video information [download] Destination: [devinsupertramp] World's Most Insane Rope Swing Ever!!! - Canyon Cliff Jump.mp4 [download] 4.0% of 82.25M at 658.52k/s ETA 02:02

How to setup mcrypt for php in OS X

Sun, 07 Oct 2012 01:51:57 +0200

With Homebrew, it’s very easy. Given that you tapped in with Jose Gonzalez’s php repo.

1. Install mcrypt and it’s libraries by typing: brew install mcrypt php53-mcrypt

2. add the content of /usr/local/etc/php/5.3/conf.d/ext-mcrypt.ini to /etc/php.ini

3. restart Apache ( sudo apachectl restart )

Quick tip: Empty a file's contents with the Terminal

Fri, 22 Jun 2012 23:13:00 +0200

> filename

In other words: dump whatever is in front of the “>” sign (nothing) into the specified file.
Comes in handy for flushing files, while keeping permissions.
For a while I was doing rm+touch+chmod, until I found out about this.

Error #1062 - A (somewhat) curious MySQL situation

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 14:00:39 +0200

When I was importing a bunch of records from CSVs into a MySQL database, at some point I ran into an intriguing issue. Totally legit, but still strange in the way it shows up:

#1062 - Duplicate entry '127' for key 'PRIMARY'

How can the AUTO_INCREMENT’ed primary key be duplicated?
My table is pretty straightforward: some varchars, some ints, a couple of dates.

The important detail here is the primary key, the typical id that is generally the first field. Turns out, for some reason I set it as tinyint(4) when I created the table, thinking it would be enough, being the table not supposed to be big. As this table shows, the maximum value for signed tinyint is 127, just like the error message reported. When MySQL tries to increase that value, the field is capped to 127 and it reports the duplication issue.

The solution is to simply set it a bigger cap value. A int will work fine for now.

randomyesusefulno: Helpful tennis ball

Thu, 07 Jun 2012 09:22:50 +0200

randomyesusefulno:

Helpful tennis ball

Avería – The Average Font

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 12:16:17 +0200

Avería – The Average Font:

In the end, I decided to release the font using the SIL Open Font License – which means anyone can use it pretty much however they like – and to include within the family Regular, Bold and Light variants with Italics.

I personally find it to be very good for movie subtitles (and so I set it up in VLC).

Woz on Mac OS price.

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 10:38:00 +0100

From Letters of Note: Apple must make Macintosh a standard:

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has since said:
“The computer was never the problem. The company’s strategy was. Apple saw itself as a hardware company; in order to protect our hardware profits, we didn’t license our operating system. We had the most beautiful operating system, but to get it you had to buy our hardware at twice the price. That was a mistake. What we should have done was calculate an appropriate price to license the operating system. We were also naive to think that the best technology would prevail. It often doesn’t.”

Since I believe this is still true (maybe not in the numbers of multitude as back then) it feels like Woz agrees with me.

Easily delete files that won't get trashed in OS X

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 13:07:32 +0100

Isn’t it annoying when sometimes files won’t just get flushed along with everything else when you’re emptying the trash in OS X? It says that they are in use, even if you’re sure nothing is using it? One solution is to log out and then try again, but a quicker one is:

Launch Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app)
Type rm -r ~/.Trash/<filename>

TIP: use the tab key when you need to type the file name, as it will auto-complete the command for you. You can even start typing the first characters of the name and then press tab.

NB: Be careful with that command. If carelessly used can be harmful to the system.

If your SuperDrive is not working anymore in Lion...

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 00:10:00 +0100

If your SuperDrive is not working anymore in Lion...:

I was already preparing myself to go the closest Apple Center for repairing. Here are the step to fix the issue yourself:

Open System Preferences > CDs and DVDs
Change all the options and revert them back.
Now your drive should work fine.

Nice Lion Touch: Swipe for Dock Exposé

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 18:58:04 +0100

Nice Lion Touch: Swipe for Dock Exposé:

finermac:

Steve Lyb discovered a handy multi-touch gesture for quickly triggering OS X’s Exposé feature to focus on the open windows of a specific app, instead of all open windows.

Simply swipe down on the docked apps.

Here’s to the crazy ones. TextEdit.app (via @hotdogsladies)

Sun, 09 Oct 2011 01:13:04 +0200

Here’s to the crazy ones.

TextEdit.app

(via @hotdogsladies)

Sumatra PDF

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 00:46:00 +0200

Sumatra PDF:

I was sick of Adobe Reader so I searched for a better alternative on alternativeto.net
This one is definitely worth it: blazing fast, super simple.

EDIT: Nevertheless, I had to do this using #C0C0C0 as -bgcolor.

March of the Penguin: Ars looks back at 20 years of Linux

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 21:10:52 +0200

March of the Penguin: Ars looks back at 20 years of Linux:

“Linux and the Internet have together changed human civilization more than any other pair of inventions.”

Eben Moglen

Focusing is about saying no. Also, check out this epic...

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 17:18:00 +0200

Focusing is about saying no.

Also, check out this epic follow-up to the question: youtube.com/watch?v=FF-tKLISfPE

seldo: This is genuinely Microsoft’s idea of a “streamlined”,...

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 20:13:01 +0200

seldo:

This is genuinely Microsoft’s idea of a “streamlined”, “optimized” UI for Windows Explorer. They were so proud of it they wrote a blog post about it.

The post is a sort of masterpiece of crazy rationalization, but I think my favourite part may be this screenshot:

Here, they proudly overlay the UI with data from their research into how often various commands are used. They use this to show that “the commands that make up 84% of what users do in Explorer are now in one tab”. But the more important thing is that the remaining 50% of the bar is taken up by buttons that nobody will ever use, ever, even according to Microsoft’s own research. And yet somehow they remain smack bang in the middle of the interface. The insanity is further enriched by this graph:

Again, this is Microsoft’s own research, cited in the same post: nobody — almost literally 0% of users — uses the menu bar, and only 10% of users use the command bar. Nearly everybody is using the context menu or hotkeys. So the solution, obviously, is to make both the menu bar and the command bar bigger and more prominent. Right?

Microsoft UI has officially entered the realm of self-parody.

Steve Jobs’ Patents

Fri, 26 Aug 2011 22:17:41 +0200

Steve Jobs’ Patents

Icon Ambulance (by Vic Gundotra)

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 14:16:00 +0200

Icon Ambulance (by Vic Gundotra):

One Sunday morning, January 6th, 2008 I was attending religious services when my cell phone vibrated. As discreetly as possible, I checked the phone and noticed that my phone said “Caller ID unknown”. I choose to ignore.

After services, as I was walking to my car with my family, I checked my cell phone messages. The message left was from Steve Jobs. “Vic, can you call me at home? I have something urgent to discuss” it said.

[follow link on title to keep reading]