Author Archives: luke

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 →

Posted in Life | Tagged , | Leave a comment

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 →

Posted in Life | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

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 →

Posted in Life | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

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 →

Posted in Technology | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

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 →

Posted in Technology | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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 →

Posted in Technology | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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 →

Posted in Technology | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

pipx

Posted on May 24, 2020 by luke

I’m not a python person. But some interesting CLI utilities are written in python, including eyeD3 and visidata. Enter pipx – it creates little (huge?) pip sandboxes for your different utilities, so you don’t have to worry about one breaking … Continue reading →

Posted in Technology | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Duff – duplicate file finder

Posted on May 24, 2020 by luke

I’ve got this folder called vast/todo/t.temp that’s got a 100 GB of stuff from old computers in it. Typically, I just copy stuff there and tell myself I’ll get back to it. There are 61,287 files, none less than a … Continue reading →

Posted in Technology | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Extracting Text from Word DOCX files using Pandoc

Posted on May 24, 2020 by luke

Back in the day, I would use antiword to extract the text from a Word .DOC file. But it only understands DOC. Over the years, more and more Word files have been using the “open” (ha ha) DOCX format, which … Continue reading →

Posted in Technology | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment