Link parkin’: Awesome macOS Command Line
A curated list of shell commands and tools specific to macOS.
Does what it says on the tin.
Bonus: Awesome Command Line Apps
A curated list of useful command line apps, in celebration of the TUI.
Love me some TUI.
So I’ve taken my iPad out and about, putting TailScale to the test for remote access to a home machine. Results have been somewhat mixed.
First off, that it works at all, making it seamlessly possible to ping all my devices as if they were on a virtual LAN across the worldwide Internet, is impressive. I did manage to get some quality extended remote SSH time on the home machine. I’ve been able to do this successfully multiple times.
But for whatever reason, on one of my trips things went really sideways. Don’t know what happened but I lost access, maybe it was the café Wi-Fi connectivity, and then TailScale was a bit out of sorts. Couldn’t resolve hosts using TailScale DNS for a few moments, then when resolution came back, couldn’t complete connections. I switched to my phone as a mobile hotspot and things were still a bit borked. Quite a bit of teasing potential for a full recovery, but things just never got right. Finally just gave up and went back home.
I’m freely admitting not doing any serious diagnosis, so please TailScale support, no need to ring my number. I’ll be a good customer and attempt an appropriate bug report if it happens again.
Thanks to Simon Willison’s click-app cookiecutter template I’ve
been sucked into GitHub actions. His cookiecutter has Python
testing baked in and GH Actions that leverage that testing turned on
by default. Normally I wouldn’t care, but the repo workflow sends you
email and can badge itself as red when failing, which annoys me
enough that I have to go fix it.
Not at all bad though to get introduced to GH Actions since they seem to be core knowledge for good GH citizenship. Just takes some getting used to while being part of a GitLab CI/CD shop as part of the day job.
Still no plans for me to get back into social media, but I appreciate how deeply Rui Carmo dives into his Mastodon experience:
It’s the quiet week before New Year’s, so I thought it worthwhile to tag some loose notes together and take a snapshot of what I’m doing with Mastodon and how it differs from Twitter. Everyone else seems to be doing it, so why not?
I will admit a slight interest in the technical underpinnings of the fediverse, especially ActivityPub and how information is disseminated.
Plug here for Carmo’s Tao of Mac blog. Great technical information and great writing.
Since I started using an iPad Pro cover, SSH, and screen, this problem has been biting me in the rear:
I have been using GNU Screen for a while now. I usually create multiple new windows (Ctrl-a c) every day. Then I flip back and forth between the multiple screens (Ctrl-a n) or just toggle between the last 2 windows used (Ctrl-a a). Sometimes my finger slips and I hit Ctrl-a x which provides you with a password prompt. This is GNU Screen’s lockscreen function.
Normally you just enter your user password and the screen will unlock. Screen is using /local/bin/lck or /usr/bin/lock by default. This is all fine and dandy if you have a user account password to enter. If you have servers that only use SSH keys and don’t use passwords you will have no valid password to enter. In other words you are stuck at this lock screen. One way around it is to login to the same machine and re-attach to the same screen session (normally “screen -r” if you have only 1 session open). Then kill the session with the lock screen. This is annoying to have to do.
It really is a pain, but it has an extremely simple solution. Basically you disable the default binding for locking and go on about your business.
The next question I have about the Discogs Data is what’s the total
amount to download? An initial step is updating my URL gathering
script to grab the Content-Length header from an http probe of
each url and start generating csv compatible output.
I wanted to know how many distinct data files (checksums and compressed XML data) were referenced from discogs.data.com. This is prelude to trying to do a, extremely polite, crawl of all the files for some longitudinal analysis. So I threw together a little script and learned a few things.
The answer turned out be 782.
Apologies for the extensive quoting, but I don’t think Cory Doctorow would actually mind (too much). Pointing back to a 2021 piece on Medium (full post) and Pluralistic (condensed summary, podcast teaser) entitled The Memex Method. It’s sort of the inspiration for some of the personal content hacking I’ve gotten interested in over the last few month.
Blogging is the process by which I take everything that seems significant and fix it in my memory; the process of explaining why something seems significant for strangers is powerfully mnemonic in exactly the way that scrawling tones in a private notebook isn’t.
…
The fulltext, searchable, tagged database of everything I’ve ever given real thought to is how I synthesize whatever new things snag my attention into longer, more reflective pieces – which go into the searchable, tagged database, too.
…
From Medium Memex, combined with Pluralistic — the solo blog I started after I left Boing Boing — is a vast storehouse of nearly everything I found to be significant since 2001. When one of those nucleation events occurs, the full-text search and tag-based retrieval tools built into Wordpress allow me to bring up everything I’ve ever written on the subject, both to refresh my memory as to the salient details and to provide webby links to expansions of related ideas.
…
Not just because it created a daily writing habit, nor because it helped me organize my thoughts – but also because it is iterative, a way of structuring and auditioning arguments for an audience that refines how to present technical, difficult material.
I’m impressed that simply combining tagging with fulltext search can provide so much creative fuel.
What with the earthquakes occurring in the social media space, quite a few folks are reemerging in the blogosphere. Glad to see these gentlemen (hmmm?) routinely pop up again in my feed reader:
Also have to mention the return of Jason Kottke, kottke.org, who oddly enough I hadn’t ever really cottoned to not being so much into popular culture items. But I’m getting interested in linkblogging and he has always been the epitome of fine linkblogging.
TIL the original Whisper is mostly Python and I was also introduced to Sumana Harihareswara
Whisper, from OpenAI, is a new open source tool that “approaches human level robustness and accuracy on English speech recognition”; “Moreover, it enables transcription in multiple languages, as well as translation from those languages into English.” …
Whisper is an open source software tool written mostly in the Python programming language. Instructions on how to download, install, and run it are relatively straightforward, if you are comfortable running commands in a terminal. It depends on Python, a few Python libraries, and Rust. In case you want to try Whisper but you don’t want to fiddle with installing it on your computer, the machine learning company Replicate is hosting a web-based version of Whisper so you can upload a sound file and get a transcription. But of course then you don’t get the privacy benefits of running it entirely on your own machine.
I will definitely be giving this a test drive during my holiday time off.
Meanwhile, Harihareswara seems like quite the interesting individual. I appreciate her thoughtfulness regarding the ethics of using Whisper. Will be adding her blog to my feeds.
Via Simon Willison
A while back, I was reading about Rui Carmo’s adventures doing development on his iPad Pro. Since I have the same iPad model, I cribbed his recommendation for the Logitech Combo Pro as a cover/keyboard. I haven’t chased Carmo’s development aims but just as a keyboard, the Combo Pro works well.
My singular complaint is that I use my iPad as a reading device a lot, sort of like an overpriced Kindle. When in this mode, the Combo Pro is a little inconvenient. Either the keyboard lays in front, consuming space unnecessarily, or it folds back without providing protection for the iPad screen. Detaching the keyboard to switch modes is a little unwieldy.
However, the iPad Pro is a much more powerful device than a garden variety Kindle. I did not pursue Carmo’s goal of turning my iPad into a full on self-hosted development platform. Instead, I just took the baby step of using it as a tablet terminal for SSHing into remote machines. TailScale has amplified this by making access to my virtual, personal home LAN seamless. Panic’s Prompt is my current iOS SSH tool of choice. I’m creating this post from my iPad Pro, using Prompt and the Combo Pro at this very moment. Next stop is taking this on the road, outside of my home.
Minor tip. For this keyboard, map ESC to the CAPS-lock key. Doubly so if you’re an Emacs user.
Have to take a moment to acknowledge doing my duty as a good open source citizen. Hey it was only reporting a tiny bug (bug: Quote escaping termination failure) in Tim Bray’s Quamina library, but every little bit counts. Also gave me a good opportunity to limber up my issue reporting muscles.
keyring looks like a nice cross-platform Python module for storing encrypted passwords using platform appropriate mechanisms.
The Python keyring library provides an easy way to access the system keyring service from python. It can be used in any application that needs safe password storage.
TIL pimox
Pimox is a port of Proxmox to the Raspberry Pi allowing you to build a Proxmox cluster of Rapberry Pi’s or even a hybrid cluster of Pis and x86 hardware.
Proxmox VE is the thrifty persons VMWare ESXi or an ops-limited persons OpenStack. I’ve definitely enjoyed it at work for managing VMs on just a single node. There’s a stack of RPi 3s on my desk where pimox would be applicable.
Pimox installation doesn’t look to be easy peasy, but at least a manageable, cuddly afternoon with the CLI.
I was browsing around the TailScale blog and bounced over to one of their recommended posts, Remembering the LAN which is really this post. I’m of an age similar to David Crawshaw and can empathize with this sentiment:
The LAN was a magical place to learn about computers. Besides the physical aspect of assembling and disassembling machines, I could safely do things unthinkable on the modern internet: permission-less file sharing, experimental servers with no security, shared software where any one machine could easily bring down the network by typing in an innocuous command. Even when I did bring down the network the impact never left the building. I knew who I had to apologise to.
And his essay answered the question of TailScale’s campfire origin story:
We can have the LAN-like experience of the 90’s back again, and we can add the best parts of the 21st century internet. A safe small space of people we trust, where we can program away from the prying eyes of the multi-billion-person internet. Where the outright villainous will be kept at bay by good identity services and good crypto.
A LAN-like experience across the global Internet. A worthy goal indeed.
Also diggin’ “Software I’m thankful for”. Except for vim, said the Emacs guy 🤣
Link parkin’: Why build an HTTP client into a database? So you can ingest web data directly!
Steampipe tables can do all sorts of surprising things! Did you know, for example, that the Net plugin’s net_http_request encapsulates a full-blown HTTP client?
I don’t think it’s a “trend” but noting that in my feeds, exploiting an HTTP client mechanism inside of an SQL engine is popping up often.
Great piece by Jon Udell via his own blog.
Link parkin’: whisper.cpp
High-performance inference of OpenAI’s Whisper automatic speech recognition (ASR) model:
…
Having such a lightweight implementation of the model allows to easily integrate it in different platforms and applications. As an example, here is a video of running the model on an iPhone 13 device - fully offline, on-device:
Really compact C++ version of a production speech-to-text model. If I can get it to build, I’ll try it against some podcasts to see how things come out. If halfway decent it could become a piece of a comprehensive personal knowledge extraction memex.
Having just completed a collection of Borges short stories, The Aleph and Other Stories, I recently had a lightbulb moment. The brilliance of Ted Chiang’s short story Exhalation (thank you Wayback Machine) partially derives from channeling Borges so much. Deeply philosophical, first person narrative, brutally compact, with a mind bending twist at the end.
Both authors highly recommended.
Speaking of newsletters, a while ago I was trying to recover a web page on password handling in Python (Secure Password Handling in Python) that I had just left in a browser tab. I’ve got a bunch of Chrome profiles, always have multiple Chrome/Firefox/Safari windows open, each with multiple (multiple) tabs open. Due to a couple of reboots and default age limits on browser history it was looking grim on finding that link again. While useful, the page wasn’t search engine optimized enough to come in at the top of Google with the obvious keywords.
Bother.
Then I remembered which Chrome profile likely had the tab. Popped over to the window and pulled up GMail for that account. Hit the GMail search bar with “credentials” and there it is, right in the PyCoder’s Weekly newsletter.
All to say, over time a collection of link newsletters actually represents a significant knowledge base of curated references. The links have been vetted by humans for collection. For many of them, there’s an authored text summary nearby. There’s a timestamp attached, along with other metadata.
What if you grabbed those newsletters out of mailboxes and shoved them into a text and/or semantic search engine? Possibly another component of a personal memex.
TIL a new word, cathect
(transitive, psychology) To focus one’s emotional energies on someone
or something.
* 2013, Carroll E. Izard, Human Emotions, page 193:
Apparently it is possible for an individual to cathect any
person, object, idea, or image. Of considerable importance to
a possible analogy between cathexis and the emotion of
interest, is Freud’s notion that an individual can cathect
thought or thinking as well as attention and perception.
Love it when my vocabulary is expanded.
Courtesy of Masha Gessen in Surviving Autocracy.
I subscribe to a decent number of newsletters, like Python Weekly, that are basically curated collections of links. I want to do more linkblogging and these are great resources but for the following problems:
Sounds like time to get on the hacking bandwagon. One potentially useful hack is that I’m pushing a number of newsletters into a Feedbin mail address and reading them there. I wonder what they look like when grabbed out of the Feedbin api?
Thirty-six works completed for the year, by my current math. If I don’t completely flub my holiday time, I’ll notch forty this annum.
In starting a new Python module for mucking around with the Feedbin
API, I wanted to modernize a little and update to the latest Python
practices for packaging. In particular, I’d been hearing a bit about
pyproject.toml as the way to configure Python build tools. Rogier
van der Greer has an excellent overview:
About three years ago I wrote a blog post about using setup.py to set up your python projects. Since then a lot has changed, mostly due to PEP 517, PEP 518 and the introduction of the pyproject.toml file.
The goal of this file is to allow you to define what build tools are needed in order to build your package – no longer assuming it must be Setuptools. This makes it easier to use alternatives to Setuptools, which means that Setuptools does no longer have to be the one build tool that can do everything.
Nevertheless, I like the feature set of Setuptools, and would like to continue to use it in the foreseeable future. But while documentation for using for example Poetry or Flit together with a pyproject.toml is easy to find, it is more difficult to find similar documentation for Setuptools. So let me help you out.
Link parkin’: sqlite-http
sqlite-http is a new SQLite extension that allows you to create HTTP requests in SQLite.
Think of fetch(), requests.get(), or curl, but entirely in SQL!
Also really enjoy how Alex Garcia created a blog post out of a notebook. Looks like he’s building up quite the collection of SQLite extensions.
C. f. Steampipe
Wisdom from Simon Willison. Coping strategies for the serial project hoarder
This is the most important tip: avoid side projects with user accounts.
If you build something that people can sign into, that’s not a side-project, it’s an unpaid job. It’s a very big responsibility, avoid at all costs!
Almost all of my projects right now are open source things that people can run on their own machines, because that’s about as far away from user accounts as I can get.
I still have a responsibility for shipping security updates and things like that, but at least I’m not holding onto other people’s data for them.
Let me repeat for emphasis “If you build something that people can sign into, that’s not a side-project, it’s an unpaid job.”
Most definitely.
Tailscale is a VPN for the rest of us:
A frustratingly simple VPN
Tailscale lets you easily manage access to private resources, quickly SSH into devices on your network, and work securely from anywhere in the world.
Oddly, while I probably could have put Tailscale to gainful use for quite some time, instead I just admired the technical depth of their blog posts. There’s been a lot of hype, criticism, discussion, etc. but the product seems to be a bit of a hit.
With a few spare cycles I finally decided to bite the bullet and give Tailscale a shot. In the last 24 hours, I’ve installed it on six machines, a mix of Linux, macOS, and iOS. Three are desktops/servers in my home, one’s a relatively stationary laptop, another’s a cloud node, and the last is an iPad. All easy, peasy 5-10 minute installs. The UX is to die for.
Haven’t attempted to use while away from homebase which is the next round of testing. So far, so good.
Once upon a time I noodled around with ZeroTier, which still seems to be chugging along. At that moment, the UX for ZeroTier was nowhere as smooth as Tailscale now, especially the outsourced identity management. I expect ZeroTier has sanded off a lot of the rough edges. The Tailscale folks even consider ZeroTier an admirable competitor.
Link parkin’: requests-cache
requests-cache is a transparent, persistent cache that provides an easy way to get better performance with the python requests library.
Necessary for messing around with the Feedbin api.
So I just recently mentioned how I’m trying to fight off some media FOMO.
And then Cory Doctorow posts about all the books he reviewed in 2022.
Every year around this time, I round up all the books I reviewed in the previous 12 months; both as a convenience for readers and to remind myself that I don’t need to feel quite so horribly guilty about all the books I didn’t review (to those authors: rest assured, I still feel horribly guilty).
I’m already in the hole four titles, one completed, in hand from this list (Chokepoint Capitalism, A Half-Built Garden, The Persuaders, and finished Survival of the Richest ). Now I’m getting excellent blurbs on further material for the library, from a favorite blogger. Definitely eyeing a handful of the nonfiction recommendations and it may be time for me to come back around to Neal Stephenson.
I’m going to swipe from another of my faves, Tim Bray, in a post worthy of discussion here, and say Protect Me From What I Want!!.
TIL jsonpath-ng
A final implementation of JSONPath for Python that aims to be standard compliant, including arithmetic and binary comparison operators, as defined in the original JSONPath proposal. …
This library differs from other JSONPath implementations in that it is a full language implementation, meaning the JSONPath expressions are first class objects, easy to analyze, transform, parse, print, and extend.
And a nice, quick tutorial to go with it.
Here in the states we celebrate a Thursday holiday with food and entertainment gluttony, followed by a Friday of manufactured physical retail (traditionally) consumer gluttony, followed the next Monday with manufactured online consumer gluttony.
And then we try to cleanse the palate with “Giving Tuesday”.
I’ve pretty much trended to flipping the script on those days, although I do love a bit of food gluttony. This year I achieved nothing purchased on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, nor even over the weekend which used to be my consumer gluttony escape hatch. On Giving Tuesday I batched up a whole bunch of my annual giving which usually gets done the last week of December.
Not going to go into all of my charitable contributions, but just wanted to plug supporting membership in the Python Software Foundation. I’ve gotten a ton out of Python over my career and I really enjoy the programming language, so it’s only right I give back a little. I have no idea what benefits accrue from supporting membership but I’m doing my bit to publicize their availability and encourage other Pythonistas to join up.
Some folks at work were waxing ecstatic about how a Pi-hole made such a huge difference in ad blocking. I thought installation would be a little bit more effort than value for my time. Then I found a small window of free time this weekend and thought “what the heck, let’s give it a shot.”
Commonly affiliated with Raspberry Pi devices, Pi-hole is actually quite easy to deploy on an Ubuntu device. After less than an hours worth of work, I had the whole stack up and running. And boy does it make a difference! The screen cap below highlights the amount of ad blockage for just a couple of hours and a few devices.
Sorry I waited so long!
Back in October I had this weird uncharacteristic media buying splurge. Physical or digital it didn’t matter. Novels, novellas, short story collections, graphic novels, pamphlets, didn’t matter. Sports, history, culture, politics, media, tech, didn’t matter. Training sites, news apps, digital long form magazines, didn’t matter.
Some of it was authors I like releasing new books that seem really intriguing. Some of it was recommendations from authors I really like. Some are from authors I know personally. Some of it was second order linkage from references. Some of it was deal sniping and some of it was remainder bin diving. Some of it was stuff I want to revisit. Some of it was material I always thought I should visit.
At this point, I have so much material I’d be totally happy spending every waking hour for the rest of the calendar year reading as much as possible.
Thankfully I avoided any Black Friday urges and didn’t purchase anything. Looking forward to Giving Tuesday.
kerfuffle | kərˈfəf(ə)l |
noun [in singular] British informal
a commotion or fuss, especially one caused by conflicting views: there
was a kerfuffle over the chairmanship.
I abdicated Twitter well over three years ago, but with the recent events regarding the company changing ownership I decided to check in and see how long I’d actually been on the service:
According to Wikipedia, that “Joined February 2007” means my account was established within the first year of the service and 7 months of its initial public launch 😮.
Abdicating was driven by pursuit of “deep work” and avoidance of the cognitive and emotional drain the site represents. I know there are some vibrant, useful, and potentially interesting to me community pockets within Twitter. Good on them, but I haven’t missed it for a moment. There is a somewhat juvenile impulse to jump back on for a one tweet dunk on the order of “Look at me! I bailed before all the shit really hit the fan. What are ya’ll still doing here?!” but I like to think I’ve gotten more mature with age.
There was about 30 seconds where I thought it might be cool to join the fediverse and see where this all might eventually land, but I quickly came to my senses. If I didn’t need what was on offer before why would I need it now?
This adventure was prompted by an article entitled “What happens to sports media if Twitter dies?”. It will likely be my last commentary about Twitter for quite some time.
TIL Twitter Gradient Accounts
Other people on Twitter had noticed them as well and referred to them (usually with irritation) as “gradient accounts,” because many of their profile pictures are not of human faces or anything else, just color gradients. Gradient accounts have usernames that sound like AIM usernames: @f41ryluvrr, @urf41ryg1rl, @moonlouvrr, @newmoonbaby2, @glitteryxhearts. Through their tweets, they identify as overthinkers and dreamers and hot people, and they often profess melancholy and romantic longing. The romantic longing sometimes clashes with casual misanthropy; the all-lowercase disclosures of trauma and malaise are mixed with playful Gossip Girl memes. Their content is more popular than I can possibly explain, and they know it.
Was totally media nerd sniped by this, with thoughts of the Marly Krushkova arc from Count Zero running through my head. Somehow real people participating in a mass consensual hallucination makes it even more Gibsonian.
As in technology for hip-hop DJs. Scratch Cyborgs: The Hip-Hop DJ as Technology may be the best thing I’ve ever run across on Hacker News.
Hip-hop DJ culture provides a rich site for exploring how culture and industry can converge and collaborate, as well as how they need each other to move forward.
The references are just a rabbit hole for this technologist, hip-hop lover, and former amateur club DJ.
And as an MIT alum, how did I not know about the MIT Press Reader? 😧
Two great tastes that taste great together. Jamie Zawinski’s XScreensaver for macOS and Jared Tarbell’s substrate generative art algorithm. Stunningly beautiful on a 27” iMac.
Seeing as how I’ve actually used XScreensaver on 1990s vintage UNIX workstations, and also mostly reimplemented substrate for my own ends, I’m embarrassed to learn substrate has been in XScreensaver since 2004. I’ll blame it on being distracted by the XMatrix digital rain plugin. That’s the one I default to using via XScreensaver. Love the little Matrix Reloaded “Easter egg”. The randomizer feature is looking better though, now that you can make useful subselections of the available screensavers.
It’s been a minute, or two, since we’ve done this. From May to August 15 titles were closed out. That’ll take this year’s total to 25. 40 finished is conceivable.
Lots to get to. Let’s get stuck in.
2022-10-04 Now with even more commentary.
Like many of his other novels, William Gibson’s The Peripheral grew on me after first reading. In late October, Amazon Prime will be airing a TV series adaptation. The trailer looks good, but then again the trailer always looks good.
Yesterday I busted my 434 day music listening streak, dangit! 😢
I hung my listening habit off of my exercise habit, but had a little change up yesterday. Went for a walk in the morning instead of the evening and rushed out the door to meet the daily schedule. Then never got around to picking out a tracklist and firing it up.
Ah well. We go again.
Said the Manchester City fan, heh.
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