Ojisan Seiuchi

EC: An Environment Canada data plugin for Indigo

May 30, 2016

Environment Canada

Indigo is a well-known home automation controller software package for Mac OS X. I’ve written a plugin for Indigo 6 that allows you to create a virtual weather station from Environment Canada data. If you live in Canada, this will be a useful way of using weather data in your Indigo rules. For example, you could use wind and temperature data to adjust your irrigation schedule.

You can download the plugin from its git repo. After downloading the files, you’ll just need to configure them as a plugin. To do this, create a new folder and rename it EC.indigoPlugin. Copy the Contents folder that you just downloaded. Right-click on the EC.indigoPlugin bundle and Show Package Contents. Paste the Contents folder here. To install in Indigo, double-click the bundle file.

Using Python and AppleScript to get notified if a site is down

May 19, 2016

Programming

I manage a handful of websites, like this one. Having built a few on other platforms, such as Drupal, I’m familiar with the dreaded error “The website encountered an unexpected error. Please try again later.” On sites that I don’t check on frequently, it can be an embarrassment when people begin emailing you with questions about the site being down.

I wrote the following Python script to deal with the problem:

#!/usr/bin/python

import urllib
from subprocess import Popen, PIPE

RECIPIENT = "[email protected]"
URL_TO_CHECK = "http://www.example.com"
ERR_MSG = "Your website is down."

def sendMessage(message):
	scpt = '''
	tell application "Messages" to send "{0}" to buddy "{1}" of (service 1 whose service type is iMessage)
	'''.format(message,RECIPIENT)
	args = []
	p = Popen(['osascript', '-'] + args, stdin=PIPE, stdout=PIPE, stderr=PIPE)
	stdout, stderr = p.communicate(scpt)

try:
	fh = urllib.urlopen(URL_TO_CHECK)
except IOError:
	sendMessage(ERR_MSG)
else:
	# handle database type errors from Drupal sites
	site_content = fh.read()
	target_str = "The website encountered an unexpected error. Please try again later."
	if site_content.find(target_str) != -1:
		sendMessage(ERR_MSG)
	else:
		print "No error"

I run this as a scheduled job using launchd and as long as I have a Messages-capable device with me, I’ll get notifications of issues with the site.

Indigo 6 is a popular home automation controller software package on the Mac. Extensibility is one of its main features and it allows users to add a range of features to suit their needs.

Using Python scripting, users can create plugins that provide extended functionality. These plugins can provide a custom configuration UI to the user. Since the documentation around a particular feature - dynamic lists was lacking, I’ve written up my approach here.

Hazel and DEVONthink make a great pair as I’ve written before. Using AppleScript, it’s possible to take the import workflow even further by tagging incoming files automatically.

Use case

I download a lot of mp3 files containing pronunciation of words in a language I’ve been learning. I keep a record of these words and tag them appropriately using my hierarchical tagging system.

I’d like to download the files to a directory on the desktop. Keep them there for a few minutes until I’m done working with them, then import the file to DEVONthink Pro Office, tag the file there and delete the original.

I’m a fan of using metadata to classify and file things rather than declarative systems of nested folders. Most of the documents and data that I store for personal use are in DEVONthink which has robust support for metadata. On the email side, there’s MailTags which lets you apply metadata to emails. Since MailTags also supports AppleScript, I began to wonder whether it might be possible to script workflows around email processing. Indeed it is, once you discover the trick of what dictionary to use.

YouTube comments are some of the most offensive on the web. Even serious videos attract trolls bent on inscribing their offensiveness and cruelness on the web.

Here’s one method of dealing with YouTube comments. Treat the comments block as an advertisement and block it.^[There are other ways of avoiding YouTube comments. I’ve used ViewPure but it’s hard to find content that way even though they seem to be working on making it more seamless to get from YouTube to ViewPure.]

The spaced repetition software system Anki is the de facto standard for foreign language vocabulary learning. Its algorithm requires lots of performance data to schedule flashcards in the most efficient way. Anki displays these statistics in a group of thorough and informative statistical graphs and descriptive text.

However, they aren’t easily available for the end-user to export. Thus, the reason behind the companion projects AnkiStats and AnkiStatsServer.

The premise is that you can run your own more extensive experiments and statistical tests on the data once you have it in hand. A bit of technical expertise is needed to get it operational but if you are up to it, clone the github repos above and go for it.

I have a number of AppleScript applications that need to run at odd times. These maintenance tasks often attempt to run while the computer is sleeping. Particularly those that rely on UI scripting do not function during this period.

This most flexible way of dealing with this is to manipulate the power management settings directly via the pmset(1) command.

The variety of options available using pmset is staggering and beyond the scope of this post. Here’s what I do to wake the computer up at specific times so that scheduled AppleScripts can run:

After waking up this morning with my mouse locked onto the Anki icon in the dock and trying to figure out how to get Activity Monitor up and running so I could force quite my Automator application that I described yesterday I figured it was back-to-the-drawing board.

I’d like to have used the Accessibility Inspector to manipulate the PyQt objects in Anki’s windows, they aren’t exposed in a may that you can script them. But System Events rules all.

While working on a project to automatically collect statistics on my Anki databases (stay tuned…) I worked out a system for scheduling synchronization from my desktop OS X machine.

Prerequisites

LaunchControl is a GUI application that lets you create and manage user services on OS X
Anki is a spaced repetition memorization software system

The solution relies on Automator. Normally, I don’t care much for Automator. It has too many limits on what tasks I can accomplish and workflows created with it are often fragile. However, in this case, we take advantage of its workflow recording feature. We’re going to record the process of opening Anki, selecting the profile to sync, then quitting Anki. This sequence of events ensures that the database on the local system is synchronized with the remote version.

EC: An Environment Canada data plugin for Indigo

Using Python and AppleScript to get notified if a site is down

Dynamic UI lists in Indigo 6

Import and tag with Hazel and DEVONthink Pro Office

Use case

Using AppleScript with MailTags

Using AdBlock Plus to block YouTube comments

Introducing AnkiStats & AnkiStatsServer

Waking the computer to allow AppleScript to run

An easier way to automate synchronization of Anki profiles with AppleScript

Scheduling synchronization of Anki databases on OS X

Prerequisites