February 2012
24 posts
5 tags
xType
A typing shortcut expansion1 utility for OS X.
It doesn’t quite match the mighty TextExpander feature for feature, but the essentials are there. Definitely worth checking out (it’s free) if you aren’t already wedded to one of its rivals.
Mac App Store
Apologies for the ungainly phrase—I can’t think of a snappy way to describe these things. ↩
3 tags
movgrab →
movgrab is a downloader for all those pesky sites that insist you use a big fat browser that runs flash in order to see their content. It’s a command-line app written in straight C.
4 tags
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multicd →
multicd.sh is a shell script designed to build a multiboot CD image containing many different Linux distributions and/or utilities.
5 tags
Barnowl →
BarnOwl is a curses-based IM client forked from the ktools owl project. BarnOwl currently supports Zephyr, AIM, Jabber, IRC, and Twitter and aims to be easily extensible and customizable through a Perl plugin interface.
4 tags
WatchFileShuttle makes it easy to upload files to your server via FTP or SFTP. You can drop files on the Dock icon, have FileShuttle upload screenshots automatically, and upload the contents of your clipboard with a command key combo.
Mac App Store
2 tags
3 tags
easystroke →
Easystroke is a gesture-recognition application for X11. Gestures or strokes are movements that you make with you mouse (or your pen, finger etc.) while holding down a specific mouse button. Easystroke will execute certain actions if it recognizes the stroke; currently easystroke can emulate key presses, execute shell commands, hold down modifiers and emulate a scroll wheel.
3 tags
YOUURLS →
YOURLS is a small set of PHP scripts that will allow you to run your own URL shortening service. You can make it private or public, you can pick custom keyword URLs, it comes with its own API.
Complete with fancy stats reporting, and an API.
4 tags
tmsu →
tmsu is an application that allows you to organise your files by associating them with tags.
This works in an interesting way: you tag your files at the command line, then work with them via a virtual filesystem, in which each tag appears as directory.
5 tags
mitmproxy →
mitmproxy is an SSL-capable man-in-the-middle HTTP proxy. It provides a console interface that allows traffic flows to be inspected and edited on the fly. mitmdump is the command-line version of mitmproxy, with the same functionality but without the frills. Think tcpdump for HTTP.
2 tags
Tmuxinator →
A utility that helps you set up and manage complex tmux sessions.
2 tags
inunico.de →
Quickly search for a unicode characters by entering its name (or something close to it).
See also
Copy Paste Character
Glyphboard
Thanks, Steffen!
2 tags
xtract →
Designed for file manager integration, Xtract decompresses and extracts archives, and can also list archive contents. By default, an archive is extracted into a subfolder of the same name.
Xtract also works on the command line—use the -n flag to suppress the GUI.
2 tags
Launch Center
Launch apps and trigger actions from a quick, easy to use app! Call a friend, start an email, send a text, post to Twitter, turn on a flashlight — get to where you’re going faster than ever before.
I’ve been using Launch Center as a simple launcher and scheduler, but with a bit of tinkering and some tricks with app URLs the app becomes a genuinely powerful utility.
See Dave Caolo’s...
4 tags
Squeezeit →
A command line tool for minifying Javascript and CSS, written in Python.
Via HN.
3 tags
Hence →
As of coreutils version 8.15, the date command supports hence, as in:
date -d ‘2 years hence’
Not earth-shattering news, perhaps, but as a huge fan of both the word hence and the software package coreutils, this makes me unreasonably happy!
Via Pixelbeat.
2 tags
Isolator →
Isolator is a small menu bar application that helps you concentrate. When you’re working on a document, and don’t want to be distracted, turn on Isolator. It will cover up your desktop and all the icons on it, as well as the windows of all your other applications, so you can concentrate on the task in hand.
4 tags
privoxy →
Privoxy is a non-caching web proxy with advanced filtering capabilities for enhancing privacy, modifying web page data and HTTP headers, controlling access, and removing ads and other obnoxious Internet junk. Privoxy has a flexible configuration and can be customized to suit individual needs and tastes.
I can’t believe I haven’t posted about privoxy before: I’ve used it for years to...
2 tags
Bear CSS →
Bear CSS is a handy little tool for web designers. It generates a CSS template containing all the HTML elements, classes & IDs defined in your markup.
3 tags
4 tags
Glue →
Glue is a simple command line tool to generate CSS sprites.
Turns a directory of image files into a sprite with accompanying CSS.
Via pb
6 tags
stormfs →
Mount Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage or Eucalyptus as a local filesystem. (Support for Dropbox and Rackspace Cloud Files is planned, too.)
January 2012
61 posts
2 tags
2 tags
rdiff-backup →
rdiff-backup backs up one directory to another, possibly over a network. The target directory ends up a copy of the source directory, but extra reverse diffs are stored in a special subdirectory of that target directory, so you can still recover files lost some time ago. The idea is to combine the best features of a mirror and an incremental backup.
2 tags
Skim →
Skim is a PDF reader and note-taker for OS X. It is designed to help you read and annotate scientific papers in PDF, but is also great for viewing any PDF file.
Via Giles Turnbull
2 tags
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d →
Generate good-looking documentation for your app from a folder of Markdown-formatted files.
4 tags
id3shit →
id3shit is a commandline based id3 editor that sucks a little bit less than the alternatives. It can read, write and strip tags, rename files based on the metadata and that’s about it.
Unfortunately named, but very simple to use, eg.:
id3shit -w artist Prince
2 tags
3 tags
webfs →
This is a simple http server for mostly static content. You can use it to serve the content of a ftp server via http for example. It is also nice to export some files the quick way by starting a http server in a few seconds, without editing some config file first.
4 tags
Convert Bookmarklets to Chrome Extensions →
4 tags
3 tags
clipodder →
A small simple cron-friendly podcast downloader, with support for arbitrary user defined media types (pdf, html, etc…)
See also
Bashpodder
2 tags
SpaceFM →
SpaceFM is a multi-paned tabbed file manager for Linux with built-in VFS, optional udisks-based device manager, customizable menu system, and bash integration.
A fork of legacy PCManFM.
2 tags
broom →
broom is a simple utility that helps developers regaining disk space. It recursively looks for projects inside a directory and cleans them by removing build artifacts, optimizing version control system files, etc.
broom cleans up after make, python, ant, mvn, gradle and git
3 tags
iTerm2 and tmux Integration →
It’s not quite ready for prime time—you’ll need to build a patched version of tmux, your ~/.tmuxrc probably won’t work and tmux windows open as iTerm windows, not tabs—but well worth keeping an eye on.
5 tags
MPD and Apple Lossless on OS X
Today I noticed that loads of songs were missing from the mpd library on my Mac. It turned out they were all encoded in Apple Lossless/ALAC format, which mpd can’t play unless you build it with ffmpeg support.
Here’s how to get mpd with Apple Lossless support on a Mac running Mac OS X Lion, using the Homebrew package manager:
If it’s not installed already, grab ffmpeg:
brew...
4 tags
autokey →
AutoKey is a desktop automation utility for Linux and X11. It allows you to manage collection of scripts and phrases, and assign abbreviations and hotkeys to these. This allows you to execute a script or insert text on demand in whatever program you are using.
4 tags
jutil →
Submitted by Tim, who says:
A suite of small commands to make it easier to search, shape, and display JSON at the shell. No more mindless greps!
3 tags
Filr →
Filr is a compact application that allows you to quickly and easily rename, tag, and comment on files. It works a bit differently than most tagging apps: when a group of files is opened, Filr presents each one individually rather than as a group. It’s great for sorting through groups of potentially unrelated files.
Supports OpenMeta, so it’s compatible with Spotlight and lots of...
2 tags
python-windows-tiler →
A small simple tiler for Windows written in Python, using the pywin32 modules.
‘Tiler’ as in window management.
2 tags
most →
MOST is a powerful paging program for Unix, VMS, MSDOS, and win32 systems. Unlike other well-known paging programs most supports multiple windows and can scroll left and right.
The split windows are especially handy when viewing long files on small screens.
4 tags
csvkit →
csvkit is a suite of utilities for converting to and working with CSV, the king of tabular file formats. csvkit is to tabular data what the standard Unix text processing suite (grep, sed, cut, sort) is to text.
Update: typos corrected—thanks, David!
2 tags
zsh-completions →
This projects aims at gathering/developing new completion scripts that are not available in Zsh yet. The scripts are meant to be contributed to the Zsh project when stable enough.
Having used zsh for a few years, it always comes as a bit of a shock when I can’t lazily autocomplete a command or argument—this does a great job of plugging the gaps.
3 tags
submarine →
Submarine is a command-line program for searching and downloading the right subtitles for movies. Subtitles are searched based on movie file hashes and downloaded from online subtitle services. Downloaded subtitles are automatically renamed and saved next to corresponding files.
4 tags
Shush →
Shush is a static noise generator, useful for calming babies, blocking out unwanted noises, or just adding a bit of static to your life, if that’s what you’re into!
I find white noise (and pink noise) incredibly calming—discovering that it’s commonly used to soothe unhappy babies is a little worrying! More on Shush from developer Daniel Jaikut.
Mac App Store
4 tags
scmpc →
scmpc is a client for MPD which submits your tracks to Last.fm.
It runs as a daemon, and seems to be more stable/reliable than rival mpdscribble.