shards mvr

  • Ian McDonald’s “The Little Goddess” is beautiful, brilliant - a page-turner! From The Very Best of the Best. Apparently, a novella from River of Gods - my next stop!

  • there’s something about meditation, wherein judgement is suspended… which seems notable / useful - to maybe carry into everyday life

  • csvkit to import CSVs in a uniform format

    I’ve really been enjoying the power of csvkit to reliably munge CSVs into a uniform format - regardless the format from the provider (not only the order of columns, but also more complex transformations like whether debits are positive or negative):

    SQLALCHEMY_SILENCE_UBER_WARNING=1 csvsql --no-inference \
--query 'SELECT COALESCE("Transaction Date",""),"=-"||COALESCE("Amount (USD)",""),COALESCE("Category",""),COALESCE("Description","")||"||"||COALESCE("Merchant","")||"||"||COALESCE("Type",""),"Apple Card" \
FROM stdin' \
| csvformat -T | tail -n+2 | sort

    ref: https://csvkit.readthedocs.io/

  • for each Time Machine destination, display: ID, date & human-readable destination

    {
    remvHeaders='s/==+/\'$'\n''/g';
    echo 'Current status of TM destinations:';
    destInfo=$(tmutil destinationinfo | \
        sed 's/^> //' | \
        tr '\n' '\;' | \
        sed -E 's/  +:/:/g' | \
        sed -E "$remvHeaders");
    defaults read /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine.plist Destinations | \
        egrep -v ',$' | \
        sed -E -e ':a' -e 'N' -e '$!ba' -e 's/\n[[:blank:]]+"/ /g' | \
        sed -E 's/^[[:blank:]]+//' | \
        fgrep -e DestinationID -e SnapshotDates | \
        sed -e ':a' -e 'N' -e '$!ba' -e 's/;\n/;/g' | \
        sed 's/( /"/' | \
        while read -r theLine; do
                destID=$(echo "$theLine" | \
                        cut -d\" -f2);
                snapDate=$(echo "$theLine" | \
                cut -d\" -f4);
        echo $destID $snapDate$(echo "$destInfo" | \
        fgrep "$destID" | \
        sed 's/;ID.*$//' | \
        sed -E -e 's/;[^: ]+: / /g');
    done | sort -rn
}

  • wow; I just read my first work by Eleanor Arnason - “Potter of Bones” (in “The Very Best of the Best” anthology) is smart, enchanting, fresh, and I’m looking forward to more!
    refs:

  • open iftop for each (cfg’d) network interface:

    for i in $(ifconfig -lu); do if ifconfig $i | fgrep -v 'inet 127.' | grep -q "inet [0-9]"; then echo $i; fi; done | while read intfc; do osascript -e "tell application \"terminal\" to do script \"sudo iftop -i $intfc\""; done

    (Mac; could be adapted)

  • Partially-formed process, to convert RTF formatting (ex: lists) from clipboard / pasteboard, to paste into Markdown format (ex: git):

    osascript -e 'the clipboard as «class RTF »' | tr -d '«»' | sed 's/^data RTF //' | xxd -r -p | /usr/local/bin/pandoc -f rtf -t markdown

    (for Mac; could be adapted)

  • strange: when adding a link to an (Apple) Notes document: if the URL has a comma, everything up to the comma is silently stripped (permanently; editing the URL afterward, is too late) - one solution is to encode commas (the first time) as %2C

  • brilliant - and beautiful!
    a human “walk” through time, across the earth
    out-of-eden-walk.nationalgeographic.org/media/201…

  • In the story about VT’s US Rep Becca Balint and contributions by crypto-jerk SBF, theVPO has it right: thevpo.org/2023/10/2…
    Sadly, coverage by both VTDigger & SevenDays is uncharacteristically sensationalist - a glaring and concerning shift. What’s up there?

  • $14 / month - and you better believe you’re still the product 🤮
    arstechnica.com/tech-poli…

  • it’s increasingly easy, to feel like the formerly reasonable expectations, of working hard, are now less and less likely to happen, as we descend further into dog-eat-dog.
    so, the choice is between: a) get increasingly resentful; b) temper expectations - while continuing to fix this broken system

  • with piles of books across the place (and devices) I noticed that, depending which pile I find myself at, I’m reading both “The Midnight Kingdom” by Jared Yates Sexton [@JYSexton], and “How to Be an Antiracist”, by Ibram X. Kendi [@ibramxk] - concurrently.
    and, each being seriously grounded in important - and suppressed - history, I find that they’re almost meant to be read together.
    much learning - and much needed.
    which reminds me, that I’ve also been meaning to read Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States”.

    www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/673…
    books.apple.com/us/book/h…
    www.howardzinn.org/collectio…

  • Wow: The Nib is sadly on the way out 😢 - but making all their mags available for free download!
    membership.thenib.com/donate-fr…
    (These folks are amazing - please consider tipping them!)

  • got my first pension check; nice. retiring, is the best (work-related) decision I ever made - LOVING it.
    (BTW: kudos to Cox Auto, for continuing to offer a pension.)

  • Keef, with a great way to look at our obligation to actively make a better world: www.dailykos.com/stories/2…

  • ugh: just after 3am, I got an email that my HSA was going to start charging a fee - per month - after today. so much for that account being - as they so often market it - “my money”. 😟
    “luckily”, I had enough med. expenses to drain the account 😕

  • reminder:
    that thing you opened you phone/computer for - to be immediately distracted by other notifications? do the first thing FIRST - those notifications will still be there.
    (otherwise, you’ll likely forget the first - likely more important - thing.)

  • A sudo softwareupdate --install --all never got past Downloaded. 😕 No prompt (cmd-line or GUI) to restart & nothing in-process (ex: verification). I was watching logs, and saw nothing amiss. Solution was to ^C & run it again - with --restart too.

  • Uninstall is sometimes not so simple

    Drat; I’ve been meaning to try the Smile AppleScript editor, but waited too long, and it’s incompatible with modern macOS - HOWEVER:

    I trashed the /Applications/Smile directory (no uninstaller in there), and then re-opened Script Editor to get back to work - but it hung; never completed startup and showed no error messages. Strange.

    After a bit of debugging, I recalled that when I’d installed Smile - since I luckily already had Apple’s built-in Script Editor app open - the Installer told me it had to quit that first. Interesting - and seemed maybe relevant now.

    So I started hunting for evidence of just what had been installed - likely something conflicting with Script Editor (at least).

    /var/log/install.log did have some info, and so did /private/var/db/receipts - which led to the solution (in my case anyway), which was also deleting these directories:

    /Library/Application Support/Smile
/Library/ScriptingAdditions/FITS.osax
/Library/ScriptingAdditions/Numerics.osax
/Library/ScriptingAdditions/Satimage.osax
/Library/ScriptingAdditions/XMLLib.osax

    After which, Script Editor was able to finish startup - and even showed the unsaved script that I’d been working on. Nice.

  • every once in awhile the Danzinger balance, tips more from the usual woodchuck dry humor, to poignance - which some of us know all too well: https://www.rutlandherald.com/features/weekend_magazine/teeds/image_9a74d4f8-2072-572a-b595-a67fbff38408.html

  • ugh: in a dir within iCloud Drive, replacing a regular file, with a symlink of the same name, apparently breaks sync’ing 😟 - and good luck trying to find that via brctl log -w. (only reason I knew it broke: a periodic check of sync status)

  • oh; weird: if you happen to have /tmp open in a Finder window, brew install wget fails with dir_s_rmdir - apparently due to a “.DS_Store” file, a few levels below /tmp

  • vtdigger.org/2023/04/2…

    these are distractions

    - interim president Mike Smith – confirming he’s all in, on continuing to gut VSU, as soon as the outrage dies down

  • Google - the company whose motto WAS “Don’t be Evil”: arstechnica.com

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