Computing – Page 2 – Rob Allen's DevNotes

Automatic OCR with Hazel and PDFPen

I have a useful scanner as part of my networked HP printer that will scan directly to a shared directory on my computer. Once there, I want the file to be renamed to the current date and the document OCR'd so that I can search it. To do this, I use Hazel and PDFPen and this is a note to ensure that I can remember to do it again if I ever need to! Firstly,… continue reading.

Posted on 11 January 2017 in Computing View all 9 comments

Using Phive to manage PHPUnit

I recently came across the Phive project and have had a play with it. Phive is part of phar.io and is intended to manage development tools such as PHPUnit in preference to using Composer's dev dependencies. The main advantages of Phive are that it uses the phar file of the tool and only keeps one copy of each version rather than downloading a new copy into each project. How it works Phive stores one copy… continue reading.

Posted on 4 January 2017 in Computing Leave a comment

SSH keys in macOS Sierra

Now that I've upgraded to macOS 10.12 Sierra, I noticed that SSH required me to enter my passphrase to keys every time I used them. This was a surprise as it's not how 10.11 El Capitan worked. This is how to fix it. Firstly, add your SSH key's passphrase to the keychain using ssh-add -K ~/.ssh/id_rsa (or any other key file). You can now use your SSH key without re-typing the password all the time… continue reading.

Posted on 27 December 2016 in Computing View all 5 comments

Using CharlesProxy's root SSL with home-brew curl

Once I installed Homebrew's curl for HTTP/2 usage, I discovered that I couldn't automatically proxy SSL through Charles Proxy any more. $ export HTTPS_PROXY=https://localhost:8888 $ curl https://api.joind.in/v2.1/ curl: (60) SSL certificate problem: self signed certificate in certificate chain More details here: https://curl.haxx.se/docs/sslcerts.html curl performs SSL certificate verification by default, using a "bundle" of Certificate Authority (CA) public keys (CA certs). If the default bundle file isn't adequate, you can specify an alternate file using the… continue reading.

Posted on 7 September 2016 in Computing, PHP Leave a comment

Notes on keyboard only use of macOS

It's been a while since I could use a trackpad without pain and even longer since I could use a mouse or trackball. Currently I use a Wacom tablet as my mouse which works really well as long as I don't use it too much. Fortunately, keyboard usage doesn't seem to be a problem (yet?), so I try to use only the keyboard as much as possible on macOS (née OS X). These are some… continue reading.

Posted on 6 June 2016 in Accessibility, Computing View all 3 comments

Installing 32 bit packages on Ubuntu 14.04

This had me stumped for a bit, so I've written it down. If you have a 64 bit version of Ubuntu and want to install a 32-bit package, you simply add :i386 to the end of the package name like this:

$ sudo apt-get install libstdc++6:i386

1	$ sudo apt-get install libstdc++6:i386

However, this didn't initially work for me as apt-get couldn't find the package:

$ sudo apt-get install libstdc++6:i386
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
E: Unable to locate package libstdc++6
E: Couldn't find any package by regex 'libstdc++6'

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$ sudo apt-get install libstdc++6:i386

Reading package lists... Done

Building dependency tree

Reading state information... Done

E: Unable to locate package libstdc++6

E: Couldn't find any package by regex 'libstdc++6'

It turned out that my installation only had the 64 bit architecture configured which you can tell by running:… continue reading.

Posted on 30 November 2015 in Computing View all 7 comments

Git submodules cheat sheet

Note: run these from the top level of your repo. Clone a repo with submodules:

    $ git clone git@bitbucket.org:akrabat/dotvim.git .vim
    $ git submodule update --init

1 2	$ git clone git@bitbucket.org:akrabat/dotvim.git .vim $ git submodule update --init

View status of all submodules:

    $ git submodule status

1	$ git submodule status

Update submodules after switching branches:

    $ git submodule update

1	$ git submodule update

Add a submodule:

    $ git submodule add git://github.com/tpope/vim-sensible.git bundle/vim-sensible

1	$ git submodule add git://github.com/tpope/vim-sensible.git bundle/vim-sensible

Update all submodules to latest remote version

    $ git submodule update --remote --merge
    $ git commit -m "Update submodules"

1 2	$ git submodule update --remote --merge $ git commit -m "Update submodules"

Update a specific submodule to the latest version (explicit method):

    cd bundle/vim-sensible
    git pull origin master
    cd ../..
    git add bundle/vim-sensible
    git commit -m "update vim-sensible"

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cd bundle/vim-sensible

git pull origin master

cd ../..

git add bundle/vim-sensible

git commit -m "update vim-sensible"

Remove a submodule:

    edit .gitmodules and remove this submodule's section
    $ git rm --cached bundle/vim-sensible
    $ rm -rf bundle/vim-sensible
    $ git commit -m "Remove vim-sensible"

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edit .gitmodules and remove this submodule's section

$ git rm --cached bundle/vim-sensible

$ rm -rf bundle/vim-sensible

$ git commit -m "Remove vim-sensible"

or

    git submodule deinit bundle/vim-sensible    
    git rm bundle/vim-sensible
    git commit -m "Remove vim-sensible"

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git submodule deinit bundle/vim-sensible

git rm bundle/vim-sensible

git commit -m "Remove vim-sensible"

Docs: Manual page on submodules Git book chapter on submodules LornaJane's guide to submodules

Posted on 24 February 2015 in Computing

Routing specific traffic to the VPN on OS X

I have a client that requires me to use a VPN when connecting to their servers. I use OS X's built in L2TP VPN to connect, but don't want all my traffic going that way. To do this, I unchecked the Advanced VPN setting "Send all traffic over VPN connection" in the Network preferences and then created the file /etc/ppp/ip-up like this:

sudo touch /etc/ppp/ip-up
sudo chmod 755 /etc/ppp/ip-up

1 2	sudo touch /etc/ppp/ip-up sudo chmod 755 /etc/ppp/ip-up

The file itself is a bash script that runs various /sbin/route commands… continue reading.

Posted on 14 November 2014 in Computing

Provisioning with Ansible within the Vagrant guest

I've been setting up a Vagrant VM for use with some client projects and picked Ansible to do this. Firstly, I played with the Ansible provisioner, but found it a little slow and then I realised that Ansible doesn't run on Windows. Rather than migrate what I'd done to Puppet, Evan recommended that I look into running Ansible on the guest instead and provided some hints. This turned out to be quite easy. These are… continue reading.

Posted on 28 October 2014 in Computing

Git push to multiple repositories

I have a couple of projects where I need to push to more than one repo all the time. I have been using this command line to do so:

git push origin && git push other-remote

1	git push origin && git push other-remote

However, I recently discovered that I can create a remote that points to more than one repository using these commands:

git remote add all git@github.com:akrabat/projectname.git
git remote set-url --add all ssh://example.com/path/to/projectname.git

1 2	git remote add all git@github.com:akrabat/projectname.git git remote set-url --add all ssh://example.com/path/to/projectname.git

I now have a remote called all that will push to both repositories! There's no automatic way to go the other way and fetch… continue reading.

Posted on 16 October 2014 in Computing

Category: Computing