Macos on traviscj/blog

macos log command

Thu, 23 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

My work laptop has been randomly shutting itself off. I came across this stackoverflow post, it said to run

log show \
  --predicate 'eventMessage contains "Previous shutdown cause"' \
  --last 24h

which, for me, returns

risksys  ➜ log show --predicate 'eventMessage contains "Previous shutdown cause"' --last 24h
Filtering the log data using "composedMessage CONTAINS "Previous shutdown cause""
Skipping info and debug messages, pass --info and/or --debug to include.
Timestamp                       Thread     Type        Activity             PID    TTL
2019-05-23 11:29:01.874486-0700 0xaf       Default     0x0                  0      0    kernel: (AppleSMC) Previous shutdown cause: -128
2019-05-23 11:44:49.786722-0700 0xaf       Default     0x0                  0      0    kernel: (AppleSMC) Previous shutdown cause: -128
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Log      - Default:          2, Info:                0, Debug:             0, Error:          0, Fault:          0
Activity - Create:           0, Transition:          0, Actions:           0

This, combined with these MacOS Shutdown Causes paints a pretty bleak picture: I’ve got RAM issues :-(

Useful homebrew formula

Thu, 01 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Last week I was telling Paul about things I have brew installed on my work laptop. I pulled a full list as I was doing some upgrades and stuff this morning.

Glancing over it a bit, here are some of my favorites/most usefuls:

autojump for a usage-adjusting cd – given a partial string it just goes to the most-used directory with that prefix. I have autojump aliased to j to shorten it up even more.
colordiff to make diffs/grep/etc nicer to look at in the terminal.
coreutils/dateutils is nice because it installs the GNU versions of a lot of standard linux commands like du and ls and date that work a bit strange/differently on OSX.
jq is amazing — lets you query JSON objects.
ledger to manage bank balances in plain text.
newsbeuter to subscribe to RSS feeds.
osquery lets you do SQL-like queries to find out about the system it’s running on (sharvil did a bunch of work on it, actually…)
terminal-notifier to pop up notifications from terminal/cron jobs.
tmux to have long-running terminal windows without having terminal windows open.
watch instead of “some command”+uparrow+enter+uparrow+enter+….
wget as shorthand for “curl http://xyz/tuv.json > tuv.json” (old habits…),
youtube-dl for downloading youtube videos.

don't poll

Wed, 15 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000

A while ago, I wrote down a list of clever life rules in my day-to-day notebook. One of them was “don’t poll”. To say a bit more about it, don’t spent time waiting for things to finish and checking them constantly.

A more concrete example: I find myself running terminal commands that take ~5 minutes, and then wasting ~5 minutes watching them. This is pretty stupid. So what I have started doing instead is run something like

$ some_long_command
[ ... scroll scroll scroll ... ]
[ ... waiting for it to finish ... ]
[ ... give up ... ]
terminal-notifier -message "some_long_command done"
[ ... go do something else ... ]

Then, later I see a notification:

launchd as cron crash course

Fri, 08 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

insert

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
        <key>Label</key>
        <string>com.whatever.five_after</string>
        <key>ProgramArguments</key>
        <array>
                <string>echo just ran > /tmp/whatever_five_after</string>
        </array>
        <key>StartCalendarInterval</key>
        <dict>
                <key>Minute</key><integer>5</integer>
        </dict>
</dict>
</plist>

into $HOME/Library/LaunchAgents/com.whatever.five_after.plist

If you call a script in the ProgramArguments section, remember to make it executable and define the script properly.

Run

launchctl load $HOME/Library/LaunchAgents/com.whatever.five_after.plist
launchctl start com.whatever.five_after

Can also run every N seconds with

<key>StartInterval</key><integer>N</integer>

Can also check the status with

some setup notes

Sun, 27 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

zsh

Zsh is an amazing (mostly) drop-in replacement for bash.

On OSX, just run

> brew install zsh

You also want to install oh-my-zsh.

I went a little crazy with plugins. My list is:

plugins=(autojump brew git git-flow gnu-utils gpg2 osx textmate zsh-syntax-highlighting history-substring-search)

SSH

I ssh a lot. So I have a bunch of host entries in my .ssh/config file. Each looks like:

Host [shortname]
     Hostname [hostname]
     User     [username for hostname]
     IdentityFile [my home directory]/.ssh/[id_rsa file for this host]

You also need identity files for hosts you use. I tend to use a different one on each host I connect to; some might consider this overly paranoid. Probably it’d be better to use 1 key but only for a shorter period of time. In any case, you need to use

Numerical Development on OSX (in the Command Line)

Mon, 19 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been working on C implementations of my research projects, which can of course be a perilous project. I’ve found some tools that make it hugely, hugely better.

Homebrew

You can’t do a list like this without mentioning homebrew. You want homebrew instead of MacPorts or Fink or bailing twine and chewing gum or whatever else you were thinking about using. Just do it: You can find the homepage at brew.sh or just install with:

Integrating Sparrow and Aperture/iPhoto

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

In my recent quest to take on digital photography, I’ve been using Apple’s Aperture to store download my pictures and do basic manipulation on them. It’s been working great, except that emailing is a pain because Apple hardcoded the email clients to:

Apple Mail.app
Eudora (really!?)
America Online(!?!)
Microsoft Entourage
Microsoft Outlook

while I’d prefer to use Sparrow, a lightweight client that Sharvil got me hooked on a while back. Rather than continue to use Mail.app to send pictures via email, I found out that Aperture actually uses some AppleScripts to do the actual sending of the email. That got me thinking: I just need to change the script to mail using Sparrow, instead of Mail.

VirtualBox and HRD/JT65

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

One of the semi-frustrating aspects of the state of computing and ham radio is the unavailability of some software packages on OSX. In particular, I’ve been interested in experimenting with JT65 and also wanted to use my Yaesu FT-857d’s CAT cable to program memories and also try out HRD. (I should add–I’ve tried the JT65 stuff and some Yaesu memory programmers, but wasn’t satisfied with the Linux setup for those. I’ll probably look into getting them working more later, but for now, this article.)

Getting GnuPlot to compile on OSX

Thu, 27 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I misunderstood an officemate’s question yesterday and set out to compile gnuplot. Stock GNUPlot will fail to compile on OSX due to an incompatibility in the readline library. So when you compile, let GNUPlot know to use the one included:

> tar xzvf gnuplot*
> cd gnuplot-4.2.39
> ./configure --prefix=/usr/local --with-readline=builtin
> make
> sudo make install

Spaces setup

Tue, 25 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

My workflow is probably pretty specific, but I figured I’d document it for people looking for ideas on how to set it up. This one seems to work pretty well for me.

. Terminal: for running stuff on my and other computers. . Textmate: writing mathematics, programming code, etc . Mathematica, MATLAB, and Papers . Mail and Adium . Firefox, Chrome, Safari . iTunes and VLC

I have this arranged in a 3×2 grid, such that Textmate is top center. From there I can navigate to terminal, math programs, and Firefox directly(control-{left,right,down}). It takes two navigations to get to communication programs and entertainment, which is good for concentration while working.

Happy Birthday to Me, Pt. 2

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

As always, a picture’s worth a thousand words:

Minor OS X Shell Shortcomings

Sun, 19 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

In spite of the fact that a lot of people seem to loathe the colorized ls functionality, I sortof grew up on it(so to speak). OS X, by default, does not have this functionality(well, at least, GNU’s –color option never works). I figured the quick and easy way to solve this was to install coreutils, but I found another option. It appears OSX included a version of ls that works with ls -G. The coreutils one is (by it’s virtue as a GNU tool) probably more feature-driven, but realiasing it as

Firefox PDF on OSX

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

June 3 was a fantastic day, though I didn’t know it at the time. The reason? My biggest bitch about Firefox has finally been fixed. The big problem is that Firefox’s OSX program has the default behavior of saving PDFs to Desktop and starting Preview with it. Which isn’t a huge problem, except that if you download the file several times, it just downloads a file with -N appended. This is sortof a pain because in college a lot of teachers call files hw5.pdf, which means that I pretty much have to go to the website each time, or look through about 5 files each time.