Philo van Kemenade

I’ve spent years trying to find a blissful way to prepare a clean looking CV (résumé) in PDF format. Tools like MS Word, Illustrator, InDesign, etc never really cut the mustard for me as I can’t rely on having this proprietary software installed on my machine in the future.

I finally figured out a future-proof CV generation workflow that makes me happy!

keep a master file with ALL THE THINGS in Markdown

style via local CSS file incl print styles

copy master and remove less relevant experiences

preview markdown in browser from text editor (I currently use Sublime Text with this Markdown Preview plugin)

print to PDF

Using npm’s scripts functionality you can scaffold out your web dev preprocessing workflow without the need for extra tools like grunt and gulp.

Based on the following references I put together a processing pipeline with tools I like to use on most of my front end projects:

https://www.keithcirkel.co.uk/how-to-use-npm-as-a-build-tool/

https://www.sitepoint.com/guide-to-npm-as-a-build-tool/

Here's how to execute a command on every file that matches a query, while reusing its filename in the output filename.

this does the execution:

for f in QUERY; do COMMAND $f; done

this creates an output filename based on the input filename:

$(basename "$f" CURRENT_EXTENSION).NEW_EXTENSION

for example convert all the JSON files into CSV:

I just figured out how to use cron on OSX. Here’s some quick notes on what I learned.

What is cron?

Cron is a little command line tool you can use to schedule tasks on *nix systems. Although some sources suggest that Apple has deprecated the use of cron in favour of launchd, it is still supported and provieds a nice cross (*nix) platform solution. This works nicely for me because I’m working on something I later want to run on a Raspberry Pi.

How does cron work?

A cron snippet has 5 positional time codes, followed by a command to execute. The below diagram nicely captures what every position (indicated by the asterisks *) stands for. You can read more about cron here.

┌───────────── minute (0 - 59) │ ┌───────────── hour (0 - 23) │ │ ┌───────────── day of month (1 - 31) │ │ │ ┌───────────── month (1 - 12) │ │ │ │ ┌───────────── day of week (0 - 6) (Sunday to Saturday; │ │ │ │ │ 7 is also Sunday) │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ * * * * * command to execute

Note that the command executed by cron by default can only include standard command line tools (that are loaded from /usr/bin:/bin). You can add more directories to your PATH as part of your cron file as explained here.

Some examples cron snippets (from Ole Michelsen):

Execute on workdays 1AM

0 1 * * 1-5 /bin/execute/this/script.sh

Execute every 10 minutes

*/10 * * * * /bin/execute/this/script.sh

Log output to file

*/10 * * * * /bin/execute/this/script.sh >> /var/log/script_output.log 2>&1

How do use cron on OSX?

To add a task to the the list of cron jobs you use the crontab command.  To edit (and create if necessary) a cron job use:

crontab -e

This opens a (at this stage probably empty) file in the Vim editor. I tried for a while to get it to open in Sublime Text but couldn't get it to save properly. The Vim commands seem obscure if you havent used it before, but don't panic, you'll only need a few.

First press 'i' to enter INSERT mode.

type / paste your cron task code

press ESC to leave INSERT mode.

press 'ZZ' (capitals) to save and exit Vim.

Testing if your cron job is working

This Stack Exchange answer suggested testing with a plain command line utility (one that cron has access to by default):

* * * * * /usr/bin/logger "hello world"

this will log the text "hello world" to your system console every minute (open it by typing "console" into spotlight).

... and now running a python file

Once this was working, I moved on to get it to run a Python script I have prepared.

Adding python3 /absolute/path/to/my/python_file.py as the comman to execute by cron didn't work for me, probably because my python3 isn't part of cron's default PATH. To solve this I made the python script executable by the command line (shell) by finding the path to my python3 installation

which python3 /usr/local/bin/python3

and adding this as the first line of my python file:

!/usr/local/bin/python3

Now I'm was able to simply add the the absolute path to my python file as the command to execute in my cron job:

A couple of projects that ‘morphe perspective’ to make you see both frog-eye and bird-eye view at once.

http://berglondon.com/products/hat/

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2016/01/istanbul-inception-warped-turkish-citypcapes-by-aydin-buyuktas/

“... my job is to somehow make them curious enough or persuade them by hook or crook to get more aware of themselves and where they came from and what they are into and what is already there and just to bring it out. This is what compels me to compel them. And I will do it by whatever means necessary.“

Matt Bucy: I'm a coder, and hell if I was going to tackle this manually! So I wrote a simple little app that helped me and another friend take the movie apart, marking out all the words one by one. It was still pretty manual, but I used a nifty little technique to visually display the soundtrack such that words were easy to spot and locate. It went very fast.

That program spit out a big text file with all the words and their locations in the film, which I then imported into a spreadsheet, sorted in alphabetical and then chronological order, and fed into another little program that took the sorted list and produced the edit. So basically, it was edited in Excel. The credits were done straightforwardly in a video editor. The clouds behind the titles were shot from my roof.

“Anything Fritz heard, you'll hear in amazing fidelity – if there's a cough to your left, your mind tells you there's someone over there (and they're having respiratory issues.) We recorded everything from the rumble of the undercarriage below you, to the ever-unintelligible announcements over the PA to the hiss of the doors closing next to your ear. When you look to the left in the Blackout train, the aural space adjusts appropriately to match your physical position. It’s uncanny how well it works. “ - from Specular’s Blackout Kickstarter update.