As part of my ongoing effort to clean up all my old computer hardware, I finally organized all my video games for donation, and used a cheap barcode scanner to take inventory.
Newer versions of Microsoft Word (in particular, Office 365) will no longer open older .DOC files. If you want to convert these to the current supported .DOCX format (especially if you have a batch of files to convert), LibreOffice is a good option. LibreOffice is free open-source software and you’ll get the benefit of doing everything on your computer. There are a lot of online services which advertise converting these files, but for anything personal or confidential I prefer keeping everything local.
LinkChecker is a utility written in Python for scanning and checking web page links, usually used for finding invalid or outdated pointers which need to be updated. The LinkChecker project is in a bit of flux right now because the original project (GitHub wummel/linkchecker) has gone completely quiet and presumably the original author is no longer interested in maintaining it. Luckily there is a new group of volunteers rallying around a new fork (GitHub linkcheck/linkchecker) The project has a variety of packaged downloads, but they are not all updated yet from the newest source tree. On my Mac system I…
Here’s a collection of useful command-line notification tools for Mac developers. I’ve been using these for long-running build jobs or other tasks which I’m waiting for. The three methods I describe here are voice audio, system notifications, and SMS text messaging. Voice Audio Voice audio is built into Mac OSX and available from the command line with the say utility. To learn the various options, refer to the say man page (or locally just man say). In the simplest case, just give it a text string to read aloud: $ say “hello” Run this at the end of a build…
I was sad to see this week that Yahoo! Pipes will be closing soon. Pipes launched in early 2007, so it had a pretty good 8+ year run. People created some pretty crazy mashups with Pipes. For me the simple ability to combine RSS feeds with some simple logic was very useful (for example: 2014 Tech Advent Calendars). I also recently created some Stack Overflow feed tools for work which will have to be recreated in Python or something similar. The news was part of a broader product update from Yahoo: Q2 2015 Progress Report On Our Product Prioritization. Also…