Tools on galvanist

Giving Your Ancient Robot Arm A Storage Upgrade

Thu, 09 Oct 2014 02:06:04 +0000

I’ve been hacking on a Giant Robot Arm at a great hackerspace called sudoroom. I’m doing so under the expert tutelage of an amazing genius or two.

The Enemy

Below you will see the YASNAC FC1 pictured. It is an incredibly slow of speed, minuscule of capacity, short of reliability, and large of footprint external floppy drive. It connects to the various robot brain parts by a standard RS-232 serial connection. That whole giant device is just the floppy drive.

Strip Time Machine ACLs

Tue, 12 Aug 2014 19:55:57 +0000

To strip ACLs from all files in the current working directory, run this:

chmod -R -N .

You might want to do this kind of thing if you’ve restored files from a Time Machine backup by hand, preserving permissions. By default Time Machine backup files have this ACL for everyone:

deny write,delete,append,writeattr,writeextattr,chown

Don’t change your Time Machine volume, just use this to strip the ACLs of files you copied from it.

Fixing bpython's delete

Fri, 21 Feb 2014 00:21:00 +0000

A guy named Shironoo found one solution (which I read in english) to a problem I’d been having with bpython over SSH. Namely that using the delete key ruins the world, or at least kills the current line.

My slightly modified (temporary) solution is to make this change:

in bpython/cli.py:
- in def p_key(self, key):
  - replace if platform.system() == 'Windows':
  - with if platform.system() in ('Windows', 'Linux'):

You can find your bpython install with this kinda thing:

taskpaper2busycal

Mon, 13 Jan 2014 13:53:10 +0000

I’ve created a small command-line utility called taskpaper2busycal for converting TaskPaper todo lists into BusyCal events. It’s incredibly small and easy because it leverages BusyCal’s nice URL handlers and OS X’s “open” command. It’s nice when things just work. You can find it on github (at the link above).

"Delete Above" for Inkscape

Tue, 07 Jan 2014 11:37:20 +0000

Just before Christmas, I created an Inkscape extension called “Delete Above” to help solve a problem that I was having converting a print-formatted map into something more suitable for a GPS app. The extension makes it easier to delete items and everything that appears to be on top of them while preserving what appears to be below. You can find it and more information about how it works on github.

Sort du intelligently

Tue, 22 Oct 2013 17:14:00 +0000

The du command is a nice tool for telling you the disk usage of your files:

$ du *
[...]
1928	system.log
136	system.log.0.bz2
112	system.log.1.bz2
0	uucp
552	vnetlib
[...]

I find that adding the -h flag (which produces more human-readable output) is often very helpful for me:

$ du -h *
[...]
964K	system.log
 68K	system.log.0.bz2
 56K	system.log.1.bz2
  0B	uucp
276K	vnetlib
[...]

Now if I could just sort that…

Direct SMTP Nagios Notifications

Mon, 16 Sep 2013 22:13:18 +0000

If you want nagios email notifications but don’t want to run a local MTA (like postfix, exim, qmail, or sendmail), you’ll need a command-line SMTP client. Such a program can connect to an SMTP server, authenticate, and generate a message based on input arguments and file handles. One such program is sendEmail (note, not “sendmail”).

I found myself wanting to use sendEmail with nagios, and I found these helpful resources:

Task Focus The Dock

Sat, 08 Jun 2013 04:52:00 +0000

The Problem

I was just thinking about my signal-to-noise ratio during coding and I noticed that my OS X dock has lots of stuff in it. I like this stuff. I want to keep this stuff. Also I hate a dock that hides. But I thought this: it would be nice to have an icon to click on that switches the dock between “only show running apps”-mode and normal mode.