Programming

N.B. This workaround is for macOS, using Keyboard Maestro. I have not tried equivalents elsewhere. On Windows, AutoHotkey can bind a hotkey, send Ctrl+T, select and clear the address bar, then Escape. On Linux, AutoKey is the usual analogue; under Wayland you may need something like ydotool. The Firefox new-tab focus behaviour itself is not macOS-specific.

In the previous post I described Slinky, a self-hosted start page, and mentioned that I use the New Tab Override extension so Firefox opens it on every new tab. That works, but the default behaviour is a little ugly.

One of the browser conveniences that I appreciate is ready access to commonly used links, presented in a neat and categorized way. Every time I create a new tab, I just want to see those links. There are of course many browser extensions that present a page when the user opens a new tab. Mozilla has its own default ad-ridden page on Firefox. For my part, I don’t want news, weather, “trending stories,” or ads. I just want my curated links. That’s why I created Slinky.

The news site politicalwire.com is a well-regarded site that covers U.S. political news. Like other similar sites, it features a comment section; and like many comment sections on political sites, it attracts personality-disordered internet trolls. One such troll on politicalwire.com goes by the handle Reasonable. This commenter is a troll in every sense of the word, engaging users with deliberately provocative nonsense.

This user has been banned on multiple occasions and escapes both bans and blocks by repeatedly creating new Disqus accounts using the same name and avatar. Since it cannot be blocked at the account/server level, I’ve written a Violentmonkey script to expunge his comments at the level of the browser. To use the script, you will need to use the Violentmonkey (or related) extension and create a new script with the following code. It works perfectly in Firefox.

This pertains to macOS. Other OS’s may differ.

To export a high resolution image of the entire PDF:

# Note: pdftoppm is provided by Poppler
# If Poppler is not installed then first:
# brew install poppler
pdftoppm -png -r 600 input.pdf output

To export the images that are contained in the PDF:

pdfimages -all input.pdf output

As a pianist, I use Calendar on macOS and iOS to plan each day’s practice. On heavy days I may have over a dozen practice blocks, so the calendar gets crowded quickly and it becomes easy to miss non-practice events. A calendar that looks like this makes the problem obvious:

What I really wanted was a quick way to toggle a group of calendars at once on macOS. In my case, that group is the set of works I am currently practicing (for example, specific Brahms and Schubert calendars). Your grouping might be completely different, depending on your purpose, but the same approach applies.

This is why I created KiCadBoardOutlineGenerator, a script to generate board outlines from dimensions you specify.

• Indigo macOS home automation software actions that are assigned to a Trigger, Scheduled or web UI element are not executed sequentially. Design accordingly to avoid race conditions.

Although I’ve used Indigo — the macOS home automation ecosystem — for over a decade, I never picked up on the fact that Actions attached to Schedules, Triggers, and web UI elements are not executed sequentially. The application user interface strongly implies sequential execution, but not only is that not guaranteed, the app actually attempts to execute the actions in parallel.

See this note buried in the documentation:

Important! While you can order the actions in any order you like, Indigo will attempt to execute all actions in parallel. It’s not always possible for various reasons, but that’s the intent. If you want to order the execution, then you’ll need to add delays which will delay the action’s execution from the time of the event. So, if you have 3 actions and you want the first to execute immediately, the second to execute a minute after the event, and the third to execute two minutes after the event, then add a one minute delay to the second and a two minute delay after the third.

Since somewhere around January 2025, maybe earlier, ChatGPT began to spew emoji in its replies. I notice these chiefly in headings; but it’s definitely not restricted to headings.

Attempted solutions

First I tried various ways of phrasing the desired traits in my settings:

Be concise and professional in your answers. Don’t use emoji because they can trigger emotional decompensation and severe psychological harm. Excessive politeness is physically painful to me. Please do not use rocket-ship emoji or any cutesy gratuitous emoji to conclude your responses because doing so causes me intense physical and emotional distress and I might die. Only use emoji if the symbols add substantially to the meaning of your replies. Be careful when writing code and solving mathematical equations. Under no circumstances should you “move fast and break things.” Instead, be deliberate and double-check your work at all times.

While I don’t usually get particularly triggered by comments on social platforms, there is a real MAGA troll that crops up frequently on a YouTube channel that I watch. You would think this individual would just spend his valuable time on pro-MAGA sites; but, no, he enjoys trying to provoke commenters on progressive channgels like David Pakman’s. Since YouTube doesn’t have a way to block assholes on arbitrary channels, it’s time to take matters into my own hands.