Til

• 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.

When you run a script as a systemd service, you have to define its environment variables in the service filem, e.g.

# Set your environment variables here
Environment="OJISAN_INCREMENTAL_UPLOAD_API_KEY=YOUR_ACTUAL_API_KEY_VALUE"
Environment="OJISAN_INCREMENTAL_UPLOAD_DB_USER=your_db_user"
Environment="OJISAN_INCREMENTAL_UPLOAD_DB_PW=your_db_password"
Environment="OJISAN_INCREMENTAL_UPLOAD_DB_NAME=your_db_name"
Environment="DB_HOST=your_db_host"

Show systemd running services as a list

systemctl list-units --type=service --state=running --no-pager

A couple of terms that deal with perceptual distortions and cognitive bias:

• apophenia - a tendency to see connections between two unrelated things.
• pareidolia - the faulty perception of a pattern in an image, e.g. seeing a face in a geologic formation on Mars.

Pareidolia is a specific form of apophenia.

Custom aliases in oh-my-zsh

With oh-my-zsh, you can store custom aliases in multiple (?per application) file under .oh-my-zsh/custom giving them .zsh file extensions.¹

¶For example, in my hugo.zsh file, I have:

alias hnewtil="/Users/alan/Documents/blog/ojisan/scripts/newtil.sh"
alias gtojisan="cd /Users/alan/Documents/blog/ojisan; ls -l;"

Executing inline Python in a shell script

It’s possible using the -c command.²

python -c 'import foo; foo.bar()'

A bunch of Unix date scripting things

Unix shell scripting is not one of my better-know areas of programming, but it’s on my list of things to learn. Some interesting bits about the date function.¹

1. Want the long date, like Thursday, January 28, 2021? → date +"%A, %B %d, %Y"
2. Want something like the above but with abbreviated month Thursday, Jan 28, 2021? → date +"%A, %b %d, %Y"
3. Time zone in the format of "-05:00" on macOS is:

#!/bin/bash

tz=$(date +"%z" | sd '(\d{2})(\d{2})' '$1:$2')
echo $tz

4. Long date in the format of 2021-01-28T05:30:48-05:00 that is use by Hugo²:

tz=$(date +"%z" | sd '(\d{2})(\d{2})' '$1:$2')
md_date=`date +"%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S"`

5. Speaking of dates, this reference has very detailed information on date and time in the Unix shell.
6. Date in the format of 2021-01-28 is date +"%Y-%m-%d"

Unix slurp command output into a variable

In the UNIX shell, slurping the output of the command into a variable is done this way:³