Fritz Stelluto

A CLI task I find myself doing often with sed

In my last post I ported my existing blog to SvelteKit, to get to used to it. Now I am going to build a new version from scratch, using markdown and tailwind. I will use Matt Jennings's excellent SvelteKit blog template as seed.

Building a static website with Sveltekit and markdown is hard going at first. But just when I was about to give up I stumbled on some blog posts and boilerplates that helped me crack it. I may still switch to Astro later though

I copy audiobooks from CDs to USB sticks to play them in cars and random device like old radios. But often those devices play the files out of order. Reordering files in FAT USB sticks is harder than I thought. Luckily, a chap by the name of Boris Leidner has written a useful tool for that.

Prettier autoformatting screws up Django html templates in Visual Studio Code. For example, it puts tags on the same line when they shouldn't be. The fix is pretty simple and involves a couple of different formatting extension.

There are many different ways of doing it; my favourite involves using pyenv

I have recently switched to Thunderbird from Gyazmail, the obscure mail program I have been using for years. Here are some setup tips that worked for me

One can easily make OS X read out text from the CLI with the say command. But what to do when it gets stuck and stops working?

I got myself one of these ergonomic mice, connected it to my Mac and configured the extra buttons. I like it

If you are used to React's Styled Components, assigning CSS values dynamically in Svelte can be baffling at first.

I wanted to play with state machines and requestAnimationFrame in vanilla JS, so I came up with the idea of a simple countdown clock.

Apple Music / iTunes "helpfully" adds ratings to songs for you, based on the ratings of the other songs in the album. This messes some of my smart playlists up. Only Applescript will get rid of those ratings

All the OS X apps I use - for when I need to reinstall a new machine.

Time Machine does its own backup magic, but sometimes you just simply want two identical copies of the same hard disk. For that rsync is the way to go

If you try to use Google Chrome on a small window on a laptop, perhaps because you are comparing two web pages side by side, swiping left or right doesn't move the page around, but it jumps to the previous or next page. Here's how to prevent that on OS X.

You know the story. You try to do npm install hipster-package on OS X and you get a whole load of errors; the easy way out is to just use sudo npm install. Everyone, however, keep saying how that is bad idea. But how do you make npm work without sudo? It's quite simple actually

tidy is a command line tool for formatting XML and HTML. Also available as a Visual Studio Code Extension

Software updates can be quite tedious - you have to click a lot of buttons, then get into the Apple Store etc. But you can avoid all that by running it from the command line.

OS can sometimes take forever to resolve hosts setup on my local machine. Here is how I solved it.

Yosemite updates Apache to 2.4. A couple of things stopped working from my previous installation, including autogenerated directory listings. Here's how I got them back.

Storing your CLI config files (.bash_profile and all the rest) on github makes sense - as a backup, but also to compare and learn.

Sometimes you need to install an older version of a package with Homebrew. Here's how I installed version 1.7.10 of Subversion

Sometimes you need to copy your local version of a project under subversion to a new location, without all the .git stuff. Here's a couple of ways of doing it.

Extended attributes store extra information about files in OS X. They replaced resource forks. Sometimes those extra hidden files confuse peripherals (e.g. mp3 players) that were not setup to deal with them. Here are some terminal commands to handle them.

To make a quick voice recording with OS X: open Quick Time Player, under the File menu there is a "New. Audio Recording" entry. It automatically saves .mov files in your Movies folder, which you can then open in Audacity or the editor of your choice.

To have a $ in your replace strings in Javascript regular expressions, it needs to be escaped with another $

title some words will change the title of your cmd shell in Window
The title will be `some words` instead of `C:\Windows\system32\cmd.exe`. Handy if you have a few of them open and can't tell them apart.

Assorted ImageMagick commands for combining images

I used to do a lot of Google Apps Script (GAS) programming, but Google's never seemed to interested in that product so I gave up. Here I document a simple boilerplate project so that I don't forget how to do it.

It isn't immediately obvious, but Evernote offers advanced search operators.

Where to put unix based scripts on a Mac without them getting in the way? Simple: create a bin folder in your home directory, and add it to the path:
export PATH=~/bin:$PATH

Running the status command in the command line version of subversion returns a list of files with a one letter code in front of each file name. Here's a list of those one letter codes and what they mean.

In OS X, PDF files can be concatenated manually using Preview. But if you are happy using Terminal there's an easier way, thanks to a Python script installed by default in /System/Library/Automator

Looking for files inside an archive, without having to extract them first using Apple's Terminal.

Finding files that were changed in the last day, sorted by size, using Apple's Terminal

Rar is a popular archive format on the web. When I need to unarchive several rar files at once, I use RarLab's command line tool. Here's how