Automation

These are basically notes for my future self, but it may sort of work out for someone else, so here it is. I’m currently working on a project in which we obtain a large number of images all stored within a single folder. However, it would be ideal to store them on separate folders. The file names are like this export0_Lastname_FirstName_1.jpg, and there are several files per person. What I basically wanted, was to organize the mess of files into something like the following: ...

So, I was preparing my clases for the upcoming semester and I wanted to produce an outline of the lectures with the corresponding date and topic. For instance I have a class that’s once a week every Friday. I could look up the calendar and write every date, which is what I initially did. But then I though, I could write a script for this. And that’s when I entered the rabbit hole.1 ...

Despite all the tools and applications at my disposal, I like to write my comments, feedback and grade the lab reports I get from my students using plain text files. To be precise, markdown formatted plain text files md. I typically write in a plain text file using nvalt or textmate as my text editor. With the help of a TextExpander snippet I print out the class list and the other fields I must fill out, typically a general comment/feedback and the grade. The snippet produces something like this:1 ...

Dr. Drang recently shared two date commands he uses for: i) calculating how many days have passed since a given date, and ii) another that returns the day of the year of the current date. I was mainly interested in the first one because I often have to do that calculation.1 Because the script can also compute the days remaining until a future date, you can imagine how handy it can be. For instance, if I’d like to know how many days until the day I start my vacations, I just run the script with a future date and it’ll return a negative result in days. Or if I’d like to know how old I am in days. ...

I often use Imagemagick for image manipulation1. However, for simple conversion of an image to another format or similar things I have to go to the terminal and type something like the following convert somefile.png somefile.pdf Which is quite simple, and much better than opening preview -> export2->select pdf-> and hit save. But typing that for more than one image is also tedious. So, I decided I’d better create a service that would essentially do the following. It would take the selected finder items, mainly images in png, jpeg, or whatever, and convert all of them to pdf. Simple. ...