Category Archives: scripts

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 →

Posted in development, OS X, Pro Tip, scripts | Leave a comment

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 →

Posted in bit bucket, scripts | Leave a comment

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 →

Posted in games, media, scripts | Leave a comment

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

get notified!

Posted on September 7, 2008 by dre

Mac OS X makes extensive use of a variety of event notification mechanisms, as described here. One such mechanism is documented in the notify(3) man pages, and it is these types of libnotify notifications that are the focus of this … Continue reading →

Posted in development, OS X, OS X Server, scripts, tutorials | 1 Comment