www.copyandwaste.com

I got a bunch of cool stuff this year.  My favorite is probably the GPS my fiance got me.. I get lost very easily.  My expected favorite is the Drobo, my un-expected favorite is my caliper.  2008 was interesting..

• Got a job at a media giant, that is somewhat sinking.
• Got enganged
• Picked up ruby and python (python is winning)
• Built a CCNA lab
• Got into microprocessors
• Started to brew beer
• Got more networking experience than ever before
• xbox with netflix changed my life.

Best Tech Things of the Year / Found Out About this Year (to me.. in all seriousness)

1. Adafruit Industries ( actually useful kits)
2. Ponoko ( next best thing to owning a laser cutter)
3. SlugPower (seriously my favorite hack of the year, it’s not hard to control a relay over serial.. but the integration and thought is awesome)
4. Netgate (for the diy router/firewall maker)
5. Drobo ( I’m allowed to say that.. I’ve built almost a dozen different NAS’s)

Here’s some stuff I got:

“The real shame of it Andy is that most things in life are as useless as twitter, and most people haven’t realized it -LLL”

“We’re all mushroom men, … We’re all in the dark eatin our own shit -LLL”

“It’s a sacrifice to Murphy -LLL”

“Silence is agreement -LLL”

Whenever I write a shell script I find myself trying to construct command line arguements to achieve what I want. Then I google the problem I’m going to solve and find better ways to do it. By the next time I need to solve a similar problem I forget what I’ve done… hence this post.

To list all files without extension:
======================================
ls -R | grep -v “\.”

To sum the first column of values:
======================================

awk ‘{tot=tot+$1} END {print tot}’

Today’s name abbreviated:
======================================

date +%a

Send an email message:
======================================

mail -s “subject line” blah@blah.com < /path/to/file

Traverse syslog directory, find all files with no extension, find out size
======================================

#Get Kilobytes for Today’s files into <date>daily with full path
find -f /data/ | grep -v “\.” | grep -e [Wed]/[0-9][0-9]$ | \
xargs du -k  > /home/staff/akonkol/scripts/$filename

• “find -f” will list the all the files/directorie’s full path
• “grep -v “\.” will find everything that is not a directory
• “grep -e” will find all paths that end with today’s abbreviation slash num num
• “xargs  du -k” will perform a “du -k” on every path that is piped in.

I’ve decided to make my own mouse, because I like hardware and there is an artistic element to the project.

I now own my first Apple computer. After a week of debate with my inter demons, I pulled the trigger on a 24″ imac 3.06Ghz core 2 duo.

The imac kind of goes against everything I’ve ever wanted. I haven’t bought a put-together PC let alone an “all-in-one” machine in over 10 years. I’ve built dozens maybe even hundreds of machines at this point in my life. So… Why? Whenever I move it seems like I’ve collected more machines than the last time I moved. There is always (and almost overwhelming) collection of hardware which I have kept for the last few years.

I have less and less time to muck around with multiple machines and keep things for the sake of “oh thats going to be part of project z.” I had to consolidate… I got rid of my Pentium II machine I was using as a pf firewall and local dns, an other machine that was a frankenpix, and two micro-itx machines which were once a car computer, and a mythtv set top box.

Although I never thought I would buy a all-in-once machine ever, like ever… I really enjoy it. If I want to accomplish a task I can write a bash script and run it with cron, but if I want to watch movies and need a nice UI.. I have it.

Software I think is good… (many suggestions via decavolt)

• Quicksilver
• Little Snitch
• Griffin powermate
• KeePassX
• MarsEdit is not as good as Windows Live Writer
• Vmware Fusion

I hate the trash can… simple bash script to run in cron (runs on the 59th minute of every hour everyday:

59 * * * 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 /bin/rm -rf /Users/akonkol/.Trash/*

I’ve found there isn’t a lot of good freeware for Mac, useful programs you would find in a Windows environment for free are usually about $30-$40 in the mac world. Because of my current environment and a bet at work.. I’ve started learning ruby on rails… I’m also making a mouse.