Author Archives: luke

Bash / Zsh customization

Posted on February 3, 2021 by luke

AAPL changed the default shell from bash to zsh in either Mojave or Catalina. I ignored that, since nothing they’ve done lately betrays any understanding of Unix. But even after I moved back to bash using chsh, my Mac keeps … Continue reading →

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Developer Fonts

Posted on February 1, 2021 by luke

Here’s a nice directory of developer fonts (monospaced, many with ligatures).

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Early Impressions of the New Administration

Posted on February 1, 2021 by luke

Watching speeches by the new president reminds me so much of Star Trek (the Original Series). Specifically this episode: Note: I am not not NOT saying that anyone in the administration, much less the president, espouses the tenets of nationalism-socialism. … Continue reading →

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Trump’s Exit

Posted on January 13, 2021 by luke

I don’t think what Trump said was a high crime or misdemeanor. But I do wish he would leave office. In fact, I wish he would leave office, and then Mike Pence would also leave office. I’d like Nancy Pelosi … Continue reading →

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Kennedy-Johnson 1960

Posted on November 8, 2020 by luke

John F. Kennedy was elected after a campaign critical of the Eisenhower-Nixon administration’s “Missile Gap,” aided by a friendly press and voting irregularities in Chicago. As it turned out, the gap was illusory, but his campaign required Kennedy to govern … Continue reading →

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Wuhan Coronavirus COVID-19

Posted on June 15, 2020 by luke

This bothers me: if people can test negative and then go into quarantine for 8 days, and only then test positive, that argues for continued extreme social distancing until better treatment and/or a vaccine is developed. But this also bothers … Continue reading →

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colout

Posted on May 25, 2020 by luke

colout is an interesting tool: like grep but different. The idea is to highlight lines (or parts of lines) that match a particular pattern. Sadly, it won’t build in my environment, and I don’t understand python well enough to figure … Continue reading →

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Diff Tools, Redux

Posted on May 24, 2020 by luke

Some time ago, I mentioned here how I like to use colordiff. Well, on a Mac I actually prefer Apple’s FileMerge GUI diff tool, which is is part of the Xcode command line tools, and accessible from the command line … Continue reading →

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File renaming tools

Posted on May 24, 2020 by luke

Long ago, I wrote a utility (brename) that renames a set of files based on a supplied pattern. (Imagine you had an arbitrary set of JPEGs and you wanted to pretend they all came from a digital camera with names … Continue reading →

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Visidata

Posted on May 24, 2020 by luke

I stumbled onto visidata. I’ve got tons of csv files and the ability to view them quickly at the command line is a huge win. But this thing is amazing. Csv files are the tiny tip of a huge iceberg. … Continue reading →

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