Pragmatism in the real world
When I'm on a Zoom or FaceTime call, I want stop all notifications on my Mac so that I'm not distracted by them and would like this automated. It's not easy to tell when a call is happening, so I simplified the problem to stopping all notifications if the Zoom or FaceTime is running as I only run these apps if I'm on call. To do this, I created two Shortcuts to turn the Do… continue reading.
As usual, at the end of the year, I look back over the photos I have taken and think about the year. This year I have published 1162 photos to Flickr. It has been a good year, seeing friends and family, taking photos, attending conferences all coupled with enjoyable work for a good client. I am pleased to have kept up with taking a least one photo every day as part of my Project 365,… continue reading.
Thanks to Kyle and Lorna, we've moved rst2pdf's development out of the dark ages of setup.py and into uv with pyproject.toml. As a result, I've changed the way I develop rst2pdf locally; these are my initial notes. Set up Python environment Given a clone of the rst2pdf git repository, do this get going: $ uv sync –all-extras This will create a virtual environment in .venv with all dependencies installed. It will also install Python if… continue reading.
I recently discovered the /usr/libexec/corebrightnessdiag command line tool on macOS. In particular, /usr/libexec/corebrightnessdiag nightshift-internal will give information about when the Mac's nightshift settings, including when sunrise and sunset are! $ /usr/libexec/corebrightnessdiag nightshift-internal Night Shift Status { AutoBlueReductionEnabled = 1; BlueLightReductionSchedule = { DayStartHour = 7; DayStartMinute = 0; NightStartHour = 22; NightStartMinute = 0; }; BlueReductionAvailable = 1; BlueReductionEnabled = 0; BlueReductionMode = 0; BlueReductionSunScheduleAllowed = 1; Version = 1; } Night Shift Sunset/Sunrise {… continue reading.
We recently changed ISP to Aquiss who could not have been more helpful with pre-sales and support for the change over from BT Internet. Aquiss do not provide a router, so I removed the BT Smart Hub and put in a Ubiquity UCG-Max and connected it up to my existing AC Pro Ubiquiti access points. Obviously as it was a new provider, I tested the speed with WiFiman on my phone and was surprised that… continue reading.
I recently acquired an Elgato Prompter which acts as an additional screen on my Mac. It does this using DisplayLink and the DisplayLink Manager app needs to be running. A new security feature of the newer macOS versions is that when your screen is being recorded, an icon is displayed in your menu bar. It looks like this and cannot be disabled: Certainly unmissable! This icon is displayed nearly all the time DisplayLink Manager is… continue reading.
I've been playing with different Ethernet network adapters to see if I can maximise the throughput to my Mac as my ethernet didn't seem particularly faster than WiFi. To test the speed, I want to use my internal network only as going onto the Internet will create too many variables. iperf3 is the solution for this. Running the test To run a speed test with iperf3, you need two computers: one to act as the… continue reading.
For some work I'm doing, I have been given access to a Linux box that is part of a legacy production system. The first thing I have done is updated the terminal prompt to include the word PRODUCTION in red, by adding this to .bashrc: export PS1="$(tput setaf 1)PRODUCTION $(tput sgr0)$PS1" The nice thing about doing it this way is that I don't have to worry about whatever is in PS1 already. Not the most… continue reading.
This is one of those posts that I write so that I can look it up again as this information is all over the Internet, but it took me a little while to find what I was looking for. To accept command line arguments in a Python script, use the argparse package: import argparse You can then instantiate a parser and add arguments you want to accept: parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description="Convert a JSON array to JSONL… continue reading.
Earlier in the year, I wrote about updating Flickr metadata using Python. For this script to work, I needed to install the flickrapi package first. I recently came across PEP 723 – Inline script metadata that makes this much easier for single file scripts like my sync-flickr-dates script. Essentially, we can now put a special comment block at the top of the file, before our import statements like this: # /// script # requires-python =… continue reading.
