log.nikhil.io

twelve things tagged “utilities

Cowsay! 🐮

I love me my cowsay. It’s a lovely amusement that greets me every time I open a terminal session. People typically use it with the fortune command but my cow moos a random developer excuse. I generate that using this bash function and this invocation: command -v cowsay >/dev/null 2>&1 &am…

OpenCore Legacy Patcher allows you to run the latest macOS (Monterey) on your old Macs

For day-to-day things, a 10-year old MacBook Air is perfectly adequate (except, maybe, if you’re trying to read an article on the Des Moines Register’s or KCCI’s websites without using a PiHole…)…

pup is a delightful little command-line utility that lets you parse HTML

Think jq but for HTML/DOM. If you wanted to get all the post titles on this log, curl -s -o - https://log.nikhil.io/ | gunzip - | pup "header > h2 > a" text{} Lovely stuff.…

“entr” provides a nice interface to inotify

Saved me a ton of time with small project I’m working on right now. Looks like it’s written in C.…

Docsify is a Markdown-based documentation generator.

It’s very simple and clever. This is an example of what’s rendered from this giant Markdown file 💙…

Single-binary Compilers for Node

Nexe and pkg are two compilers that create self-contained executables out of your Node scripts. Deno introduced this in a recent release, which got me looking for Node-based alternatives.…

Tesseract is an Open-Source OCR Engine

Here’s a short overview but I found it as easy as brew install tesseract # See output.txt tesseract -l eng input.png output…

Hazel for macOS is an automation tool that lets you watch folders and apply all sorts of rules to them.

By a single dev. At $42, an absolute steal for all the things you can do with it. Perpetual license, no bullshit subscription model. 😍…

gron is a JSON grepper

Woo! Covers the biggest reason why I use jq (grep for fields) which, as the gron author notes, is more general-purpose and takes a little more effort to understand and use.…