To run a little project (that I’ll describe at some point in the future) I have to run a small web server from my home computer, one that happens to run macOS. More than anything else, this is just a reply of what I did to get it running in case: a) I have to do it again, or b) Someone else can find it useful.
Sign up for dynamic DNS service I signed up for service with dynv6 because I saw it recommended elsewhere and it didn’t look creepy like some of the other options.
CodeRunner is one of my favourite development environments on macOS. I use it for small one-off projects or for testing concepts for integration into larger projects. But in version 4.0.3, jQuery injection in a custom HTML page is broken, giving the error:
It’s probably due to some unescaped bit of code in their minified jQuery, but I didn’t have time to work that hard. Instead I reported the error to the developer an fixed it myself.
As readers of this blog know, I’m an avid user of Anki to learn Russian. I have a number of sources for reference content that go onto my Anki cards. Notably, I use Wiktionary to get word definitions and the word with the proper syllabic stress marked. (This is an aid to pronunciation for Russian language learners.)
Since I’m lazy to the core, I came up with a system way of grabbing the stress-marked word from the Wiktionary page using lxml and XPath.
Custom aliases in oh-my-zsh With oh-my-zsh, you can store custom aliases in multiple (?per application) file under .oh-my-zsh/custom giving them .zsh file extensions.1
¶For example, in my hugo.zsh file, I have:
alias hnewtil="/Users/alan/Documents/blog/ojisan/scripts/newtil.sh" alias gtojisan="cd /Users/alan/Documents/blog/ojisan; ls -l;" Executing inline Python in a shell script It’s possible using the -c command.2
python -c 'import foo; foo.bar()'
https://scottwhittaker.net/posts/oh-my-zsh-custom-aliases/ ↩︎
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16908236/how-to-execute-python-inline-from-a-bash-shell ↩︎
W3schools.com has a CSS library that’s quite nice. I often use Bootstrap; but I like some of the visual features here better. For example, I like their tags because they have more flexible use of colour.
If you want to fetch from a Python dictionary, but you need a default value, this is how you do it:
upos_badge = {'noun': 'lime','verb': 'amber', 'adv': 'blue',} badge_class_postfix = upos_badge.get(value.lower(), 'light-grey') I recently learned about DeepL as an alternative to Google Translate.
Since DEVONthink is my primary knowledge-management and repository tool on the macOS desktop, I constantly work with mechanisms for efficiently getting data into and out of it. I previously wrote about using Hazel and DEVONthink together. This post extends those ideas about and looks into options for preprocessing documents in Hazel before importing into DEVONthink as a way of sidestepping some of the limitations of Smart Rules in the latter. I’m going to work from a particular use-case to illustrate some of the options.
Anki and some other platforms use a particular format to signify cloze deletions in flashcard text. It has a format like any of the following:
{{c1::dog::}} {{c2::dog::domestic canine}} Here’s a regular expression that matches the content of cloze deletions in an arbitrary string, keeping only the main clozed word (in this case dog.)
{{c\d::(.*?)(::[^:]+)?}} To see it in action, here it is in action in a Python script:
Previously, I wrote about adding syllabic stress marks to Russian text. Here’s a method for doing the opposite - that is, removing such marks (ударение) from Russian text.
Although there may well be a more sophisticated approach, regex is well-suited to this task. The problem is that
def string_replace(dict,text): sorted_dict = {k: dict[k] for k in sorted(dict)} for n in sorted_dict.keys(): text = text.replace(n,dict[n]) return text dict = { "а́" : "а", "е́" : "е", "о́" : "о", "у́" : "у", "я́" : "я", "ю́" : "ю", "ы́" : "ы", "и́" : "и", "ё́" : "ё", "А́" : "А", "Е́" : "Е", "О́" : "О", "У́" : "У", "Я́" : "Я", "Ю́" : "Ю", "Ы́" : "Ы", "И́" : "И", "Э́" : "Э", "э́" : "э" } print(string_replace(dict, "Существи́тельные в шве́дском обычно де́лятся на пять склоне́ний.
The AppleScript Safari API is apparently quite finicky and rejects Russian Cyrillic characters when loading URLs.
For example, the following URL
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/стоять#Russian throws an error in AppleScript. Instead, Safari requires URL’s of the form
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D1%81%D1%82%D0%BE%D1%8F%D1%82%D1%8C#Russian whereas Chrome happily consumes whatever comes along. So, we just need to encode the URL thusly:
use framework "Foundation" – encode Cyrillic test as "%D0" type strings on urlEncode(input) tell current application's NSString to set rawUrl to stringWithString_(input) – 4 is NSUTF8StringEncoding set theEncodedURL to rawUrl's stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:4 return theEncodedURL as Unicode text end urlEncode When researching Russian words for vocabulary study, I use the URL encoding handler to load the appropriate words into several reference sites in sequential Safari tabs.
While largely opaque to most users, Facebook and Google massage any links that you acquire on their sites to include data used to track you around the web. This script attempts to strip these surveillance parameters from the URL’s. It is by no means all-inclusive. Imaginably, there are links that I haven’t yet encountered and that need to be considered in a future version. So consider this a proof-of-concept.
The problem For example, I performed a Google search1 for “Smarties”.