Pragmatism in the real world
My favourite tool for working with APIs is curl, though I recognise that lots of people like HTTPie and seem very keen to tell about it every time I mention curl… With curl, I particularly like using the -i switch to view the status line and headers too without the additional cruft of -v: This generates an output that looks like this: $ curl -i https://api.joind.in HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Wed, 04 Oct 2017 09:51:46… continue reading.
As I add more and more of my own script targets to my composer.json files, I find that it would be helpful to have tab autocomplete in bash. I asked on Twitter and didn't get an immediate solution and as I had already done something similar for Phing, I rolled up my sleeves and wrote my own. Start by creating a new bash completion file called composer in the bash_completion.d directory. This file needs executable… continue reading.
I use rst2pdf to create presentations which provides me with a PDF file. When it comes to presenting on stage, on Linux there are tools such as pdfpc and on Mac there's Keynote. Keynote doesn't read PDF files by default, so we have to convert them and the tool I use for this is Melissa O'Neill's PDF to Keynote. This is a GUI tool, so I manually create the Keynote file when I need it… continue reading.
I like to use Finder in Column mode (⌘+3). i.e. this view: One feature of this view is that you can resize all the columns to fit by alt+double clicking on the move handle between each column. There doesn't appear to be a keyboard shortcut for this operation though, so I created one using Keyboard Maestro. Keyboard Maestro can move the mouse around the screen and click with it which is exactly what I need.… continue reading.
I've written before about how I tend to use my Mac via the keyboard as much as possible to minimise pain in my arm. Possibly the best application on macOS to facilitate this is Shortcat which enables me to point and click at any UI element in any native Mac app. I rely on it a lot and it makes nearly every app I use accessible to me. Recently, Slack updated their desktop app so… continue reading.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
