Category Archives: scripts

A Better Activity Metric

Posted on November 20, 2023 by dre

Using CPU utilization to measure overall CPU activity is like trying to infer how far a car has traveled by looking at the speedometer instead of the odometer. Continue reading →

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Splashguard of Departure

Posted on February 3, 2022 by dre

Trivia question: what kind of protection should you wear when calling diff from a Shortcuts.app “Run Shell Script” action? You should affix the Splashguard of Departure, ideally with some +charisma to offset the posix misalignment. This is because “Run Shell … Continue reading →

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How to rescue aborted QuickTime Player audio recordings

Posted on February 1, 2016 by dre

Know that feeling when you remember you don’t have your keys while you are closing a locked door? It’s the same feeling as when you use QuickTime Player to record some lengthy audio, and you remember you didn’t stop the recording while you are putting the … Continue reading →

Posted in media, OS X, Pro Tip, scripts, The More You Know, tutorials | Leave a comment

Traffic micro-management: limit network bandwidth used by an OS X process

Posted on August 8, 2015 by dre

Problem: you have some silly uploader app that only knows one speed: maximum. You would love a way to make that app back off so it doesn’t saturate your uplink and badly impact the other things using your network. Previously in … Continue reading →

Posted in OS X, scripts, The More You Know, tutorials | 3 Comments

irssi auto-op your friends

Posted on December 7, 2013 by dre

From the ‘short and sweet’ department, here’s a fast recipe for configuring irssi to automatically op users of your choosing. cd ~/.irssi/scripts curl -O https://scripts.irssi.org/scripts/friends_peder.pl mkdir -p autorun ; cd autorun ; ln -s ../friends_peder.pl If irssi is already running … Continue reading →

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Chasing your tail, and winning! (or: ramdisk soothes latency bumps)

Posted on November 3, 2013 by dre

My 8 drive RAID array is a little weird. Throughput is decent, but latency is kinda bad. This causes World of Warcraft for mac to not be able to keep up when capturing in-game video at high data rates (200+ … Continue reading →

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Gnuplot time-series buckets quickie

Posted on March 16, 2012 by dre

Let’s say you’ve got a log file of events with time stamps; the nature of the events isn’t relevant, and let’s say the stamps look like this: 14/Mar/2012:17:49:34 14/Mar/2012:17:49:34 14/Mar/2012:17:49:39 14/Mar/2012:17:49:40 14/Mar/2012:17:49:41 14/Mar/2012:17:49:58 14/Mar/2012:17:51:46 14/Mar/2012:17:51:46 14/Mar/2012:17:52:56 14/Mar/2012:17:52:56 14/Mar/2012:17:52:57 14/Mar/2012:17:52:57 14/Mar/2012:17:53:16 … Continue reading →

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Mailman members only

Posted on April 17, 2011 by dre

Recently I had occasion to cook up some glue for a Mailman deployment that wanted a privacy and membership management policy that would not be facilitated by the Mailman mailing list software in its current form. We wanted to host … Continue reading →

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Somniac and a UI scripting quickie

Posted on August 4, 2010 by dre

Just about every time I want an AppleScript to wait a second or two during script execution, I instinctively insert a “sleep x” statement, where x is some small number of seconds. Every time, I’m surprised when I test the … Continue reading →

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Cross-application URL cache searching!

Posted on October 27, 2008 by dre

I was out taking a (filesystem) walk, and wandered into /var/folders. Not remembering where / when this came from, I was pleased to find that the hier(7) manpage is aware of this directory, describing it as ‘per-user temporary files and … Continue reading →

Posted in OS X, scripts, The More You Know | 3 Comments