These changes are both exciting and bittersweet. I’m psyched about GitHub (peering at other people’s code in such a sexy interface is exciting! really!). I’m a little sad, as well. Putting the scripts on GPL for me symbolized a kind of letting go. It’s not throwing in the towel and giving up on these scripts of mine–I still want to work on them–but I feel that this should have been done a long time ago, if I only knew how loooong it would take me to get updates and new features out. By now, Enth codebase (or any of my other scripts’ codebase) is probably close to monolithic. It certainly looks quite dated! But putting it on GitHub means it’s easier to get changes out, faster, and less of an “event” as it is when I was hosting it.

What does this mean, though? It means if you have a hacked version of Enthusiast (for example) you’ve been wanting to release but couldn’t, you’re free to now, however and wherever you like, as long as I’m credited and it’s released under the same license. You’re now free to offer services to install and configure Enthusiast, as I’ve heard a couple of people doing. You don’t need to ask my permission to do either of the above.

It also means I’m free-er to iterate on my work without needing to bundle them into nice and shiny organized releases. It means that if there are updates, they get out there faster (hopefully!). It means less management on my part, and more coding.

Here’s to more git repos in the future! (Again, if you want to get to the scripts, they will be at github.com/angelasabas.)

Well, I certainly didn’t lose any time setting mine up. It’s always a work in progress–I have a few more ideas that I want to do at some point–but this one works wonders for me.

I’ve noted relevant areas in the Flickr page, but in a nutshell, I have the current date and time on the upper left, along with my machine’s uptime, a calendar for the current month, and events for the next seven days from iCal. I have the currently-playing album/track below that (using Bowtie), my computer’s network status, a check for if my website is up and the ping time to the server, and then my machine’s CPU and memory usage as well as relevant processes.

On the right is my Adium contact list window set as a borderless window, and various desktop shortcuts for the connected drives etc. All files saved to the desktop automatically (like screen shots, or stuff I accidentally save there) are moved automatically by Hazel to one of the three folders (Images, Documents, or Miscellaneous); Hazel will also label the folder red if it reaches a certain size (“clean this folder up omg!”).

The setup

First, a disclaimer: I have no idea why, but when I imported my Geeklets to my office machine, the more complicated shell scripts (like, showing more than the current date) ceased to work. This may be a mix of differences in output and other environmental factors; so you may also need to fiddle with the scripts as you use them.

To create a new geeklet, once you have GeekTool installed, go to the GeekTool preference pane (in System Preferences) and select one of the Geeklet icons and drag it to your desktop. My Geeklets all use the Shell Geeklet type.

Settings will show up in the Geeklet settings window, which you can tweak to your liking. The commands I print out here will go in the Command field of that window, and then you can tweak with the fonts and colors and placement to your heart’s content.

Date, time, machine uptime and events

The simplest command here would be the cal command, for the calendar; you should use a fixed-width font for this Geeklet to line up the columns nicely according to the weeks, or else it will probably confuse you…unless you just want it pretty-like and don’t actually need a usable calendar on your desktop ;)

The next ones would be the actual date. Each of the text (February, 03, Thu, 10:28) are separate Geeklets, although you can certainly combine them if you like. I used separate Geeklets in order to order them the way I wished, as you can see. It’s quite simple–the command is date, plus some parameters.

Uptime is a little more complicated, but it’s basically using the uptime command. I was able to find a couple commands online for machine uptime, but I discovered that once my machine was up more than a day, the actual text did not make any more sense. The actual uptime output for more than a day would be something like:

14:04  up 1 day, 19:25, 2 users, load averages: 2.46 1.84 1.20

But for less than a day, it would be

14:04  up 19:25, 2 users, load averages: 2.46 1.84 1.20

So you can see, I couldn’t rely on the order of the output (delimited by spaces). I set out to do it my way:

uptime | cut -c 11-100 | awk '{split($0, a, "[ mins]*, [1234567890]+ user"); sub(":", "h ", a[1]); sub(" day,  ", "d ", a[1]); print "Up for " a[1] "min"}'

If the above doesn’t work for your machine, you can try fiddling with the command output. What I did up there was to cut the uptime command from to the 11th character (which should be just after the “up” portion) to an arbitrary character position (100…I don’t think my machine will ever be up enough to warrant any longer uptime text); then split the output to two strings using “, [number] users” as the delimiter (where to split, basically); that would result in something like 19:25 or 1 day, 19:25. The rest is just cosmetic substitution (day to d, : to h, addition of min).

The events make use of another script–icalBuddy. It basically gives you a command to run in Terminal to output the contents of your iCal into text output. After installing icalBuddy and making sure that the icalBuddy binary/command is accessible by your system, you can simply run:

icalBuddy -nrd -df "%a" -tf "%H:%M" -nc -eed -ps "| - |" -iep "datetime,title" eventsToday+7

And you have your weekly events :)

Network status

I wish I was cool enough to have done this myself, but I’m not ;) Here is a good post that explains how to do it–along with other Geeklet ideas!

My website check and ping time display I was able to get from somewhere online as well, but I can’t seem to find it anymore. I love it for quick checks to see if my website is actually up and how it’s doing:

Very simply, for the website check itself, this is the command I use:

curl -s whimsical.nu | perl -nle 'print for m:<title>(.*)</title>:'

It basically gets the title of the website (whimsical.nu in this case, replace this with whatever website URL you like) and prints it out, so if something funny happens to the index page, the display will also be wrong. The green button is simply a Geeklet setting to display status feedback image.

The ping time is a separate Geeklet, again taken somewhere online, but slightly modified so I can plug in any URL as a parameter. Create a shell script somewhere (via vim, TextMate, TextEdit, whatever you like) and put this in:

#! /bin/bash
HOST=$1
PING=`ping -q -c 1 $HOST`
if [[ $? -eq 0 ]] ; then
TIME=`echo $PING |tail -1 | cut -d/ -f 5`
echo ${TIME}ms #away from $HOST
exit 0
else
echo $HOST could not be reached
exit 2
fi

And to have GeekTool run it, in the command field just put in:

source /path/to/file www.website-url-here.com

(You can also just make it executable so you won’t need to use source.)

CPU, memory and processes

This one was particularly thorny when I moved it over to my office machine (I’ve yet to fix it there; no time) so take it with a grain of salt. There are many similar blog posts containing the use of top and ps and whatnot with this same information, but for this one I’ve kind of fiddled around with it quite a bit using a lot of the man command ;) and trial and error.

I wanted to have the CPU and memory usage available, as you can see in the first two lines. They’re relatively simple with the use of top. For CPU usage:

top -l 2 | awk '/CPU usage/ && NR > 5 {print $6, $7="usage:  ", $8, $9="user,", $10, $11="sys,", $12, $13}';

For memory usage:

top -l 1 | awk '/PhysMem/ {print "RAM in use: ", $8, $9, $10, $11, " \n"}';

(For my office machine, I had to fiddle with the order of the output, going from $6, $7 etc to $1 and $2…so you may want to check that out if it doesn’t work for you.)

For the processes, I’m using:

top -orsize -FR -l2 | grep '^....[1234567890|PID] ' | grep -v ' 0.0% ..:' | cut -c 1-24,33-42,64-77 | sed "1 d"

I order it via resident memory size (so highest memory hoggers are first on the list) but those with 0% CPU usage at the time the command is run is not shown. Two samples are shown to get the CPU usage, and the extra table header line (since there are essentially two tables in the output) is removed from the top at the last.

For all three, I just chain them together under one Geeklet so that they all line up together, since I didn’t really need to move them all around separately.

Other ideas

There is plenty one can do with GeekTool–I’ve been thinking of showing a text file containing vim shortcuts, for example, so that I can easily familiarize myself with it; or use GeekTool to go through a couple nice photos in a directory and refresh every so often. I had a to do Geeklet using icalBuddy, which I’ve removed; I also had my apache error log on my desktop, but I decided it wasn’t too pretty to have error logs on a desktop ;)

Here are more useful GeekTool tutorials and blog posts:

• Geek to Live: Monitor your Mac and more with GeekTool
• Getting Started with GeekTool
• GeekTool and Bash One-liners
• How to GeekTool your Mac to Awesomeness
• Geeklets

Have fun!

1. Data all over the place. It’s quite unwieldy and confusing! This isn’t just personal data, but machine/application data, too. I have an app sweeper, but sadly I know there will be stuff that one can’t really get out because of ini files and such in wildly different places.
2. Psychological trickery! ;) By reformatting my machine, and needing to set it back up, I’m tricking myself into feeling like I have a new Mac! I’ve been meaning to get myself an iMac over a year ago, but due to financial reasons, I’ve had to push it back again and again. I mean, I can’t even persuade myself to get a new S$200 Macbook battery! (I am currently permanently connected to the power socket now haha.)

As such it made a lot of sense to finally do this.

The process

I have a 1TB backup external drive, half of which (Largo) is my Time Machine backup, and the other half (Piro) is my general data drive. Piro still had a LOT of available space, so I decided I’d just dump all of my personal files on it and sort it all out back later.

Now we come to the OMG YOU MUST DO THIS OR SUFFER THE SAME FATE AS I tip: Back up with Time Machine JUST BEFORE you reformat. Or, OMG BACKUP THE DOCUMENTS DIRECTORY! Yes, I forgot to back up my Documents directory. I copied over whole folders–Sites, Pictures, Music, Resources, Downloads, Library, even majority of my applications, and even remembered to dump my MySQL data. BUT I FORGOT THE DOCUMENTS DIRECTORY. YAY. </sarcasm>

So after doing some backup (heh), and making sure Dropbox had finished all the syncing and is fully up to date, I fished out my trusty Mac OS X install disc, stuck it in the optical drive, and went ahead and wiped my drive and reinstalled OS X. It didn’t take very long–I took a shower in the meantime–and when I came back I was back to setting things up.

I decided here, that I would not let anything back on my hard drive unless I was going to use it. Cleaning up by deleting things is a very long, time-consuming process, and I’m prone to think, “eh, it’s not too bad to keep it there, that’s fine” and end up not doing a lot of cleaning at all. This time though, since nothing is on my machine, it’s clean by default. I’ve copied over/installed quite a few things already, but for the rest, it won’t get back on my machine unless I started looking for it.

The first application back on was Dropbox, especially since I keep quite a few things on there such as Adium logs and Firefox bookmarks, as well as various settings that I could sync up. That took quite a while to update, and I left it to run overnight, along with running Software Update to make sure I’m caught up with OS X updates and whatnot.

This was also a great time to do a lot more syncing to the cloud, and discovering new applications. I already have my .bash_profile and .vimrc files symlinked and synced with Dropbox, but now I also do the same for httpd.conf and php.ini. I also discovered GeekTool, which is absolutely fantastic and geek-squee worthy. It’s also quite a time sink, to be honest–there’s so much you can do with it, from testing things out yourself to researching what’s possible.

A reboot, quite properly

Having a clean machine feels quite invigorating, to be honest! I was having office machine woes last week, which ended up with my machine crashing and actually needing a reformat–but while it was frustrating during the event, it felt quite liberating afterward. And the new year is just the right time to do a bit of digital spring cleaning ;)

I learned HTML in 1998, by viewing source code and trying to replicate what I’ve seen. I built on that knowledge by making my own websites: about myself, about books and series that I loved, communities like the long-forgotten web rings and those cute little adoptable graphics. (Which brings me to another point: I learned to make graphics and some pixel art from those days, too.)

I learned CSS shortly after, as I made websites, starting from the shiny that is absolute positioning and continuing on to learn about fluid layouts, floating, the box model, etc. as I went along. My shrines and cutesy sites made way to personal journals and blogs.

I learned PHP on my own in 2002 or 2003, after I started liking Python for web apps but found it difficult to find an affordable web host with Python–PHP was much more available. I used it for small websites–directories, cliques, and making my own little script to manage fanlistings, which were becoming a big part of what I did online. (I wish I could say I learned SQL on my own, but not really–I took up database courses in college.)

JavaScript, ah JavaScript. I learned bits and pieces, but generally disliked it, until I needed to learn for work; I think a framework certainly makes it easier to wrap your head around, and while JavaScript won’t be in my list of top languages, I do find that I enjoy working with it nowadays–it’s an ongoing process, and I learn more and more as I continue to use it in what I build.

I think it speaks a lot of how learning for yourself, and using it as you learn, is one of the best ways to learn. And this year, I think it’s high time I learn something new again, and use it in something I build while I learn.

I haven’t decided what the new tool will be–a new framework? a new language?–nor the product, for that matter. But I do know that making time for pet projects opened me up to much more than just the enjoyment of creating and building for myself, that it’s something I want to do for myself this year.

So in 2011, I’ll learn and create something new.

• The tried-and-true lipsum.com generator. I’ve been using this for a long, long time. Aside from an explanation of what lorem ipsum is, you get to specify how many words/paragraphs/bytes/lists. Nifty!
• Oh-so-shiny Fillerati. For those who spurn fake Latin, Fillerati allows you to choose or randomizes for you from a selection of classic books. Grabbing your text is easy–hover and adjust the number of words/paragraphs/etc and click to copy either plain text or marked-up text. Shiny, is it not?
• Menu-bar goodness in LittleIpsum. A Mac OSX application that shows on your menu bar and gives you fake Latin at the click of the mouse! Currently only for 10.4 and below, but 10.5+ version in the works, apparently!
• A dashboard widget to Loremify your work. Another shiny OSX tool that functions just with a click of a button.

I know, I know, all those apps were for OSX! Fine. Here is one for you Windows people: Lorem Ipsum Generator. Happy?

Of course, there are a lot of extensions available for Firefox, and there is one for Chrome.

This isn’t really “new” technology, nor are they the first to do something like it. I’ve used similar programs before, most notably one with a cute pig as an icon! (Sadly, I don’t remember what its name was!) Dropbox doesn’t have as cute an icon, but they have adorable stick figures: that counts for something, right?

Dropbox's referral illustration

Like its predecessors, usage is simple: put a file inside the Dropbox folder, and it gets uploaded online. Going on another machine with the Dropbox client application, you also get the file there once the client has finished syncing with the servers.

I used to store just files in it: presentations, source code, and the like. But there’s a lot more to Dropbox, and here are five things I do with Dropbox.

1. Syncing browser bookmarks

I’ve started syncing my Firefox bookmarks across machines using Dropbox. There must be a nicer way to go about this, and I’m sure it’s right around the corner, but this way is just nice for me. I’ve never liked a lot of the bookmark syncing products out there because it hijacks my bookmarks toolbar, which I dislike. This way, it’s just…in the background.

However, there is one caveat here: make sure Dropbox has finished syncing to/from the server before you start Firefox or shut off your machine, as you can end up with inconsistent, conflicted files on your Dropbox and no way to determine which is the right file.

2. Syncing Adium chat logs

Yes, we start to see the power of symbolic links. Syncing Adium logs across machines is done pretty much the same way! The first time I did this, it took a while to finish uploading all of my chat logs, so be prepared to wait a while.

3. Syncing Terminal configuration files

Oh, absolute love. No longer do I have to worry about differing settings between computers–symbolic links and Dropbox has me covered.

[amari@amari ~]
 $ ln -s ~/Dropbox/Data/bash_profile ~/.bash_profile
[amari@amari ~]
 $ ll ~/.bash_profile
lrwxr-xr-x  1 amari  staff  38 Oct  2 16:39 /Users/amari/.bash_profile -> /Users/amari/Dropbox/Data/bash_profile

I’ve done the same for some other config files, like my vim settings file.

4. Syncing Passwords across computers

Absolute godsend, this one. With all the online accounts I have accumulated over the years, it’s a horror trying to remember passwords; so having 1Password worry about password information and syncing is wonderful. I’ve never used KeePass, but I swear by 1Password.

5. Syncing creative work

Creativity does not have a set time: if an idea hits, I like being able to capture it. Being able to quickly write a note, a blog idea, a story snippet and file it away in Dropbox for later is an absolute godsend: two wonderful tools for me here are Scrivener 2 and Notational Velocity, both of which have syncing/saving abilities to external folders.

Scrivener 2 is currently in NaNoWriMo preview mode, as Scrivener 1 does not have this syncing ability built-in (although you can save your Scrivener file in Dropbox, of course). With the new version, you can sync to an external version and specify what format the file would be in so that you can edit it elsewhere and pull in changes as needed.

Notational Velocity is a handy notes-taker, which also has the ability to sync with Simplenote, along with saving/retrieving the notes in plain text format in a specified folder (which is great for syncing via Dropbox).

A parting word

Dropbox is awesome, but remember: Dropbox syncing is done online, and your files are put on the Internet (and versions are kept of it on Dropbox servers). While the syncing Dropbox does is secure, they are still a third party; so bear that in mind before syncing every single bit of your life.

There are a selection of patterns to choose from, and one can change foreground and background colors, canvas texture, pattern image scaling and opacity, and one can even rotate the base image up to a full 360 degrees to suit your customization needs.

One can even sign up and create pattern after pattern, and others vote on how good your pattern is, hopefully becoming the next champion. It’s certainly a very interesting tool with a fun challenge-type game attached to it.

For most of my life, my computer has been a shared family computer, until I got my first quasi-laptop. The first things I knew about computers were how to go to the Games directory in DOS and start games, as well as Lotus Spreadsheet, which I used like a simple text editor. I don’t know what happened to our first computer, but I wrote my first story in there. My older sister laid it out and printed it, just like a real book. (It was only a few pages.)

I started really using the computer at around sixth grade. Still without Internet, the computer ran Windows 98, and I again wrote my stories inside. I started diary files, which I password-protected, and the worst (best?) password I came up with was around 50-70 characters. It was so bad (good) that I can’t open that document to this day.

Our computer room was a mix of the guest room and study, and the computer was on a plain computer desk in one corner of the room. During my third year in high school, we got connected to the Internet, and in late 1998, I started making websites. The guest/study room was soon renovated, but I also went off to college and lived in a dormitory room with my older sister for most of the week. Since I was taking up Computer Science, I carted along the computer that I then shared with my sister.

In our room, the computer was always right next my bed, since it also served as my desk. I went through two desktop machines then, and during my last year in college, I got a portable desktop, an Asus Degatto. We still had the desktop machine in the dormitory room, but I never went back to desktops after that.

Back at home, I would be working in the study, along with my sisters. On the left is a photo of the study–two computers at each corner of the room, with some space in the middle for a laptop (that’s my Dad’s). Later on, I would work be using the right corner for my Asus Degatto, and much later on, I’d move to the mini-loft at the top of the study. This is my Degatto in the corner:

In mid-2007 I moved to Singapore, and my mom helped me settle in and buy furniture. On the left is my workstation, and you can also see my bookshelf (there are a lot more books on it now). I transitioned to using a MacBook, and the widescreen LCD you see was added early 2008. External drives are on the shelf above the LCD, as well as a few more odds and ends. The whiteboard, I use for quick notes and reminders, such as the $6 I owe a friend (pictured). You can click on the photo to get to the Flickr page, which has quite a few more notes on the picture itself.

In about two month’s time I’ll be moving to another house, and my computer setup will likely change, but not by much as I’m bringing my furniture with me. I wish I had more computer photos from way before. :/

For a good while I thought Hazel was not going to be very useful for me, as my Downloads folder is organized using Speed Download 5‘s rules, and I also had AppZapper for cleaning up application files.

However, firing up Speed Download for downloading a small document sometimes feels a bit overkill, and that’s where Hazel works for me. I can even set custom rules for various file types, like when I download SQL backups:

I can send the SQL to a specific folder (here, my database backups folder), and rename it to include the timestamp when I downloaded. Absolutely cool :D

Additionally, firing up an extra application (AppZapper) to delete applications is an additional step, when I can just hit Command+Delete and have Hazel tell me if she wants to delete other application-related files.

The $21.95 Hazel is definitely worth it, especially if you don’t have any of the other applications that manage your folders for you. It’s a great addition to the MacUpdate Parallels bundle, and complements the bundle well.

This is the first review of a series of reviews I plan to do on the applications included in the currently-running MacUpdate Parallels bundle. For the full list, please see my original MacUpdate Parallels bundle post.

Typinator expands/replaces abbreviated text as you type, in any application, and I have to say it’s a really nifty tool. Like what its demo shows, you can create any sort of abbreviation in it and once you hit the space bar, Typinator will replace that abbreviation with “the real thing”.

Pros

One very interesting use of Typinator is for auto correction, which is the reason Typinator is very visible to me. They have an abbreviation set for common typographical errors done for English, French, Dutch, and another set from TidBITS, apparently, which contains gems like “appreachate” translating to “appreciate” and “apperatus” to “apparatus”.

It’s a good tool for programmers, too. A good example is when you’re writing out quick code for debugging, like below:

If you notice, in the expansion field, the value has “{^}” in it, like so:

echo '<pre>'; print_r( {^} ); echo '</pre>';

That tells Typinator where the cursor should be placed. So once I type debug printr $var anywhere, it gets expanded while I’m typing $var and $var ends up at the right place. This will definitely save a good bit of time for those tedious repetitive tasks.

It had just tried to expand that text I put up top. A quick Cmd+Z usually fixes it, but naturally not if there is no such function in the application I’m working on.

Additionally, I liked that when you’re typing out your abbreviations, Typinator tells you if there’s a possible clash with other rules already present in any of your sets, like below:

Cons

It might get better when I’m more used to it, but the half-a-second pause where your abbreviation gets highlighted and then expanded can be rather distracting. Also, I initially planned to load my Terminal aliases to Typinator, but after using a few, I think I will stick with editing .bash_profile for the small stuff.

Typinator also does not have a menu bar even when its window is visible and active, which was disconcerting. Everything is under the Action icon, if you’re looking for it.

I’ve yet to notice if Typinator’s bundled auto correction sets get in the way of typing in another language, but so far it’s behaving pretty well. This shouldn’t be a very big problem, since you can easily go in and change the sets any way you wish. Don’t worry about removing an abbreviation from the bundled sets; if you want to start over, you can just delete that set and add it again.

Conclusion

Typinator, originally at $29.99 for the single license, is a useful application. I wouldn’t say it’s worth the whole bundle, but in conjunction with other applications, it complements them well and is useful in that “running in the background and doesn’t mess with your work” kind of way.

Would I buy it for $29.99? Maybe not, but I suspect this one of those applications which, once you’ve used it for a year or two, you might buy for that price in the future. Way to go for creating need ;)

This is the first review of a series of reviews I plan to do on the applications included in the currently-running MacUpdate Parallels bundle. For the full list, please see my original MacUpdate Parallels bundle post.