Mac

Since I’m not fond of carrying around all my photos on a cell phone where they’re perpetually at list of loss, I peridiocally dump the image and video files to a drive on my desktop for later burning to optical disc.¹ Saving these images in archival form is a hedge against the bet that my existing backup system won’t fail someday.

I’m using Blue-Ray optical discs to archive these image and video files; and each stores 25 GB of data. So my plan was to split the iPhone image dump into 24 GB partitions. H

In a previous post I described macros to support certain tasks in generating source material for L2 chorus repetition practice. Today, I’ll describe two other macros that automate this practice by slowing the playback speed of the repetition.

Background

I’ve described the rationale for chorus repetition practice in previous posts. The technique I describe here is to slow the sentence playback speed to give the learner time to build speed by practicing slower repetitions. By applying the Change Tempo... effect^[Change tempo effect in the Audacity manual] in Audacity. In my own practice, I will often begin complex Russian sentences at -50% speed and progress to -25% speed before practicing the pronunciation at native-level speed. By practicing at slow speeds, it gives the learner time to appreciate how syllables are connected to each other. The prosody is more apparent.

Achieving fluid, native-quality speech in a second language is difficult task for adult learners. For several years, I’ve used Dr. Olle Kjellin’s method of “chorus repetition” for my Russian language study. In this post, I’m presenting a method for scripting Audacity to facilitate the development of audio source material to support his methodology.

Background

For detailed background on the methodology, I refer you to Kjellin’s seminal paper “Quality Practise Pronunciation with Audacity - The Best Method!” on the subject of chorus repetition practice. The first half of the paper outlines the neurophysiologic rational for the method and the second half describes the practical use of the cross-platform tool Audacity to generate source material for this practice.

This is an update to my previous post on automating iTunes on macOS to support chorus repetition practice. You can read the original post for the theory behind the idea; but in short, one way of developing prosody and quality pronunciation in a foreign language is to do mass repetitions in chorus with a recording of a native speaker.

Because in macOS 10.15, iTunes is no more, I’ve updated the script to work with the new Music app. It turns out that it’s a lot simpler. No need to dive into the application classes.

Using AppleScript to automate chorus repetition practice

Indigo currently shipping version 7 is a leading Mac home automation software package. One of it’s mostly widely-used features is its ability to execute user-provided Python scripts of AppleScripts. In my previous introduction to scripting Indigo with Python I showed how to use the Indigo plugin host to execute Python scripts. In this post, I’ll describe how I use a third-party charting package rrdtool to graph data from Indigo by taking advantage of Indigo’s ability to execute arbitrary Python scripts. This tutorial is focused on using Python as a bridge between Indigo 7 and rrdtool. If you are interested in a solution that takes advantage of AppleScript and bash scripts to do the samee thing, see this thread on the Indigo forums.

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.

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.

I have a number of AppleScript applications that need to run at odd times. These maintenance tasks often attempt to run while the computer is sleeping. Particularly those that rely on UI scripting do not function during this period.

This most flexible way of dealing with this is to manipulate the power management settings directly via the pmset(1) command.

The variety of options available using pmset is staggering and beyond the scope of this post. Here’s what I do to wake the computer up at specific times so that scheduled AppleScripts can run: