Look what I found in Dollhouse. A Penguin!

Lately I have had to preview a lot of JSON files. Apple’s QuickLook is a great feature for that, but, unfortunately, the base OS X doesn’t come with any QuickLook plugin for JSON. After a quick search online I found a free plugin that works fairly well. Not only does it preview the contents of the file, it pretty prints and supports folding. So, here is my shout-out to quick look JSON

There is also a website, quicklookplugins.com, dedicated to QuickLook plugins.

Sometimes I have to send Microsoft Word documents to other people that might not have MS Word or not have the fonts that I used. PDF seems an ideal format in these cases but I did not want to pay for the full-fledged Acrobat to get this ability. So, I started looking on the internet for a free PDF printer and found two good options.

1. CutePDF Writer
   • I ended up choosing this because it outputs a little better image quality than the BullZip PDF Writer. The down side is that the file will be a little larger than the BullZip output.
   • This puts a producer property of “GPL Ghostscript 8.60”.
2. BullZip PDF Writer
   • This seems like an excellent PDF writer but I noticed that the image output wasn’t as fine as the CutePDF writer but the output file size was smaller. For my needs the image quality was important so I went with CutePDF but if you are looking for smaller size then this is a very good option.
   • This also puts a producer property “Bullzip PDF Printer / www.bullzip.com / Freeware Edition (not registered)” which CutePDF does not.

I generally don’t upgrade my Cygwin installation as often as some of the other software that I use, but yesterday I upgraded it and found a surprise.

Every time I would start Cygwin, it would give me several “: command not found” lines and syntax errors. After I got a chance to look into the problem, it turned out to be a very simple one. Basically my ~/.bashrc and ~/.aliases were using the dos line ending, instead of unix. Given that fact, all I had to do was:

1. Open these files in vim

2. :set fileformat=unix

3. :wq

4. Restart cygwin

What do you know, the errors are gone!

Check out this cygwin announcement If you are curious about the details.

As a “prosumer” I have liked the Ubiquiti equipment because it’s not too expensive and at the same time provides advanced functionality that I like to tinker with. After switching to an EdgeRouter, I recently swapped one of my two access points with the UniFi nanoHD access point. The EdgeRouter works independently, but the UniFi HD provides a lot more options when controlled using the UniFi Controller. For this, I had a Raspberry Pi 3 lying around so instead of getting the UniFi Cloud Key, I decided to set up the controller on the Raspberry Pi.

I work from home most of the days and generally keep my office door closed to keep distractions to a minimum. I also tend to be on video and audio calls quite a bit. When I am talking on the calls, then it is easy for my family to know not to come in, but when I am listening, then they obviously cannot tell. There have been times when I am on video calls and have had a family member walk in, not knowing. Those can be awkward at times.

Now, what does this all have to do with the Raspberry Pi? In addition to the Raspberry Pi, I also had a 2.8″ Adafruit PiTFT lying around that I did not end up using in another project. I was planning on having the Raspberry Pi running all day for the UniFi Controller anyway, so why not give it another purpose? So, I decided to create a small digital sign that I could control remotely and put it outside my door for people to know what I was up to. Overkill? Why, yes it is, but it was also fun. Actually, the real overkill would have been this solution running on a rechargeable battery! I called this the “Entriway.”

I have recently been looking at using Ansible for managing some Windows-based web servers.  Fortunately, I was able to get the authentication configured properly, but as soon as I got to downloading PHP, the Ansible win_get_url module started behaving oddly.  It downloaded some other files as I would have expected, but it would download the PHP distributable as a 1KB file.

Read full post… “Ansible/win_get_url downloading 1KB file?”

I am excited about the Internet of Things (IoT) phenomenon that we have been going through over the past few years.  Some old timers might even bring up X10, from who knows how long ago, but for my generation, I feel like the Nest thermostat was really the intro of IoT to the mainstream.  I see the value of IoT devices and I have a few IoT devices at home myself.  This list has only grown over time.  There are two major concerns with IoT devices that are always in the back of my mind: 1) Security, and 2) Privacy.  I will focus on Security for this post.

Read full post… “A Big Concern with IoT – Security”

I have been looking for personal task tracking systems for a while.  I ended up trying a few of the expected ones like simple lists in OneNote and Wunderlist.  I was hoping to find something that was simple to get started with, but also had enough features to make it effective.

Read full post… “Asana for Personal Task Tracking”

2015-11-22: Actually, looks like I was wrong. /usr/local is NOT protected by System Integrity Protection. I am leaving this post here just for reference, but your user should be able to overwrite and change files in /usr/local. To fix the original issue run: brew link --overwrite postgresql

OS X El Capitan introduced System Integrity Protection (SIP) that broke a lot of programs which required system level changes. If you do any type of postgresql development and use homebrew then likely /usr/local/lib/libpq.5.dylib is outdated. This could result in errors like the one below…

Read full post… “psycopg2 on El Capitan”