Applescript

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:

In Anki 2.1, it’s practically impossible to get plain text from the web into note fields. A solution (on macOS, at least)…

An AppleScript to create year and month groups in DEVONthink

A couple years ago I wrote about a method for deleting cookies from Safari on macOS by employing AppleScript. Now I have a new script that works on OS X 10.14 Mojave. There are ways of surgically removing cookies, but honestly most sites leave so many cookies on my machine that I have no idea what any of them do and to what extent they use them to track me.

Safari

Here’s the script for Safari. Install it in ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Safari (or really, wherever you like.) When launched from the scripts menu in the menu bar, it will close all current tabs and delete every cookie that Safari has saved. Since it employs UI scripting, you’ll need to give it accessibility permissions when asked.

Using AppleScript to automate chorus repetition practice

For the last two years, I’ve been working through a 10,000 word Russian vocabulary ordered by frequency. I have a goal of finishing the list before the end of 2019. This requires not only stubborn persistence but an efficient process of collecting the information that goes onto my Anki flash cards.

My manual process has been to work from a Numbers spreadsheet. As I collect information about each word from several websites, I log it in this table.

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.

I manage a handful of websites, like this one. Having built a few on other platforms, such as Drupal, I’m familiar with the dreaded error “The website encountered an unexpected error. Please try again later.” On sites that I don’t check on frequently, it can be an embarrassment when people begin emailing you with questions about the site being down.

I wrote the following Python script to deal with the problem:

Hazel and DEVONthink make a great pair as I’ve written before. Using AppleScript, it’s possible to take the import workflow even further by tagging incoming files automatically.

Use case

I download a lot of mp3 files containing pronunciation of words in a language I’ve been learning. I keep a record of these words and tag them appropriately using my hierarchical tagging system.

I’d like to download the files to a directory on the desktop. Keep them there for a few minutes until I’m done working with them, then import the file to DEVONthink Pro Office, tag the file there and delete the original.