Programming

Hugo is the platform I use to publish this weblog. Occasionally I have the need to include a collection of images in a post. Mostly this comes up on other sites that I publish. Fancybox can do this; but it wasn’t immediately clear how to direct Fancybox to create a gallery of images in a page based on images in a directory. Previously, I’ve solved this in different ways, but I was anxious to find a simple shortcode-based method.

macOS offers a variety of virtual keyboard layouts which are accessible through System Preferences > Keyboard > Input Sources. Because I spend about half of my time writing in Russian and half in English, rapid switching between keyboard layouts is important. Optionally in the Input Sources preference pane, you can choose to use the Caps lock key to toggle between sources. This almost always works well with the exception of Anki. Presumably Anki’s non-standard text management system thwarts the built-in Caps Lock/toggle mechanism for reasons that are not clear to me. Equally unclear is why this worked previously but now does not. I’ve not updated either Anki or the system software. It’s a mystery. Nonetheless, began to search for an alternative method for switching between keyboard layout switching. What I developed relies on several tools:

A method for stripping diacritical markings from Russian text.

A Hugo shortcode used to style inline text in a post. I use it here to style Russian text in my posts.

An AppleScript to create year and month groups in DEVONthink

One of the sites that I manage uses a jQuery-based image gallery to display images in a grid. The script decides which thumbnail to use based on how large and image is needed. A series of suffixes à la Flickr^[Well, sort of. I don’t think this is exactly what Flickr uses; and I made up the _q suffix for the less than 500px image.] is used to signify classes of image size. I wrote the following script to automate the process of scanning a source folder and creating four thumbnail sizes to an output directory.

Regex 101 is a great online regex tester.

---

Speaking of regular expressions, for the past year, I’ve used an automated process for building Anki flash cards. One of the steps in the process is to download Russian word pronunciations from Wiktionary. When Wiktionary began publishing transcoded mp3 files rather than just ogg files, they broke the URL scheme that I relied on to download content. The new regex for this scheme is: (?:src=.*:)?src=\"(\/\/.*\.mp3)

I’ve written previously about extracting and processing mp3 files from web pages. The use case that I described, obtaining Russian word pronunciations for Anki cards is basically the same although I’m now obtaining many of my words from Forvo. However, Forvo doesn’t seem to apply any audio dynamic range processing or normalization to the audio files. While many of the pronunciation mp3’s are excellent as-is, some need post-processing chiefly because the amplitude is too low. However, being lazy by nature, I set out to find a way of improving the audio quality automatically before I insert the mp3 file into my new vocabulary cards.

Among the many reasons I use iTerm2 in lieu of the macOS Terminal is its AppleScript support.

I recently had the need to automate some tasks on my Amazon Web Services EC2 server in a way that takes advantage of iTerm2 AppleScript functionality.

Use case

I’ve found recently, that my screen sessions were disappearing. Although I haven’t completely excluded other causes, some have suggested that infrequently-reconnected sessions can be cleaned up. Since I’m not a Unix sysadmin, I’m not sure about this. However, I decided to test the hypothesis by writing an AppleScript that logs into my EC2 server, attaches to each screen session, detaches and closes the connection.

As I’ve mentioned before I use Anki extensively to memorize and practice Russian vocabulary. With language learning in particular, adding spoken pronunciations to the cards makes an enormous difference. Since I use Open Russian extensively to provide information to built my Anki cards, it’s a natural source of audio data, too. To optimize my learning time, I built two small scripts to grab and rename the audio files from the Open Russian site. First, I’ll describe my workflow.