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List of my must-have Alfred Workflows

authorGreg
12th May, 2017
Administration

Use a mac? You’ll want to grab Alfred App. I’m finding it an invaluable replacement for spotlight and the workflows allow me to supercharge my workflows. It’s so useful that I’ve purchased the Powerpack lifetime license.

In addition to the standard features, here are a list of the most useful workflows for dev/tech:

Kill process – by Nathan Greenstein (@ngreenstein)
I use it as an activity monitor for CPU usage, and from there I can easily force quit any process if needed. It’s easier to see all processes on the Alfred UI instead of opening Activity Monitor on your mac. There’s also the workflow Kill Application – by Sebastian Hallum Clarke (and also on his site you can find other cool workflows).

Timer – by Daniel Bader
I use this one a lot. It’s super simple and by writing “Timer” and the number of minutes, you can easily set a reminder. It’s great for anyone using the Pomodoro technique or even if you leave something on the stove and want to go back to work.

Copy SSH Public Key – By oldcai
This one saves me time when I need to deploy my SSH key on a new server. Type ‘pk [ssh key file name]’ and it’ll copy the ssh key to the clipboard.

Incognito – by Nedwood
I find myself using this when I need to test a page and bypass the cache. Type ‘incog [url]’ and it’ll launch a new chrome window in incognito mode.

Find Folder by Samvlu
Finds a folder by name. I find this is faster than spotlight in just about every search.

Smart Folders by Deanishe
List all the Smart Folders/Saved Searches (same thing) on your system and drill down into their contents. Works in much the same way as Alfred’s File Filter, but Smart Folders are also available outside Alfred and are a bit more flexible.

For example, you can configure a Smart Folder to show all video/audio/image files without having to specify each different filetype individually. If you already use Smart Folders, this workflow can save you the work of re-implementing them as File Filters.

What’s more, you can exclude specific filetypes with a Smart Folder, which Alfred cannot do.

Advanced Google Maps Search by stuartcryan
This workflow gives you some quick and dirty shortcuts into Google Maps:

Commands:

To Configure:

mapsethome <home address including street number, name, postcode> (i.e. what you would type into Google Maps)
mapsetwork <work address including street number, name, postcode> (i.e. what you would type into Google Maps)
Commands for Use:

maps <query> – Search Google maps for an address
dir <query> to <query> to <query> etc (seperate multiple addresses with ” to ” minus the quotes, and you will get a multiple location search)
dirfw Show directions from Work to address
dirfh Show directions from Home to address
dirtw <query> Show directions from query to Work address
dirth <query> Show directions from query to Home address
trafficw – Show traffic from Home to Work
traffich – Show traffic from Work to Home

StackOverflow Search by deanishe
If you use stackoverflow as much as I do, this is a must-have.

Date Calculator
I find myself needing to calculate differences between dates in my personal life a lot lately. This workflow saves me a lot of time to do that. Want to know how far Christmas is away in days? ‘dcalc 12-25-16 – now d’ returns the number of days (assuming you’re using the US short format like I am).

Wifi Control by miroman
All my Macbooks periodically have issues with wifi. I’ve never been able to figure out what’s causing it but I use Wifi Control to restart the wifi which allows me to connect successfully.

Bugnot by vitor
If you use bugmenot at all, this is a useful extension to get logins without loading a new tab. Type ‘bn domain.com’ and you’ll get a list of matching passwords to use.

 

 

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How to Fix ‘Converter Failed to Save File’ with Excel 2016

authorGreg
2nd November, 2016
Administration

I recently upgraded to Office 2016 on my Windows 10 desktop and was getting the error “Converter failed to save file” when double clicking on the file along with an “There was a problem sending the command to the program error” every time. I finally had enough with the annoyance to troubleshoot it and figured out a solve.

If you have the same issue, here’s how to fix it:

  1. Open your Default Programs configuration from the Control Panel. On Windows 10, you can hit start, type Default Programs, and it’ll open the app.
  2. Scroll down the list until you get to the Excel formats (XLS):
    Default Programs
  3. If you see anything other than Excel as the default, you’ll need to change the default to Excel. For me, the issue was the Open XML Converter not being installed anymore after upgrading to 2016. To change the default, select the format, click the “Change Program” button and select Excel 2016 from the list of apps that pops up and click OK to set the association:
    App Select
  4. You’ll need to do this for each format in the list to correct it. The most common formats you’ll use are XLS, XLSX, & XLT.
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How to test email sending in Laravel 5.3 using artisan tinker

authorGreg
26th October, 2016
Laravel

I’m building a Laravel app and ran into an error when trying to send mail but wasn’t getting an error back since the request was posted through ajax. If you’re trying to troubleshoot it, artisan tinker app is very useful to get more information on the error.

Fire up terminal/command line and run:

and then run the following snippet:

Change emails.test to point to a blade that works and populate the email you want to test.

You should either see a success/null message if everything was correct, or an error with details on what went wrong. The error I encountered required configuring 2FA in Gmail or setting the insecure app option up to send through Gmail for testing.

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ReportCrash High CPU & How to Disable reportcrash in Mac OSX

authorGreg
28th September, 2016
Administration

For a while now, all of my MacBooks have run extremely hot and the fans have gone nuts. While troubleshooting the issue, Activity Monitor showed that an app named reportcrash has run very high on the CPU and has killed my battery life. Force quitting the app didn’t help as it would start right back up in a few seconds and climb back to 80-100% usage of the CPU.

What is CrashReporter?

CrashReporter runs in any time an application crashes and it’s designed to saves the application state to aid developers in working out why the app crashed. Basically a process is launching, crashing (and invoking CrashReporter) and then re-launching, repeating this cycle never ending.

How to Identify What’s Crashing

To show which process is triggering this cycle and stop it, CrashReporter is pretty verbose in its logging which makes finding the problem app somewhat easier. Open up the console.app (/Applications/Utilities/Console.app) and look towards the end of your system.log to see what app is crashing.

Unfortunately for me, the problem is a driver by some company called EFI and getting the latest drivers didn’t resolve the issue. The next obvious solution was to disable reportcrash.

How to Disable ReportCrash

Fire up terminal and run the following commands to disable reportcrash:

How to Enable ReportCrash

If you need to reenable crash report, run the following commands in terminal:

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How to flatten a directory on Mac through terminal

authorGreg
17th June, 2016
Administration

Recently, I was handed a project with pre-built ANT scripts that zip folders up into individual directories. The zip files in each folder needed to be uploaded to an FTP site without the folder so having to navigate into each was a bit annoying and time consuming for 40 files.

If you find yourself in need of merge or flatten a folder/directory, use this snippet to flatten everything into a single directory. If a file exists with the same name, you’ll be prompted to overwrite or leave in the existing folder.

In my case, there was an extra file generated within each folder that was not used and I didn’t want to be prompted 40 times to overwrite so changing the -i to -n will force files to be overwritten. I’d recommend using caution with this and only use it when you know the duplicate files don’t matter.

 

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Cheap Macbook Pro Docking Solution for about $30

authorGreg
9th June, 2016
Applications

I typically prefer developing on my desktop and large dual screen monitor setup as opposed to my Macbook. Recently, I’ve gotten into more PHP development and developing on the Mac is proving to be a more enjoyable experience only because Windows is still a second class citizen for most PHP libraries/tools. I still wanted a larger screen setup, so I considered buying a docking station to hook up to a larger monitor but I soon learned they feature the ‘Mac Penalty’ in that they cost more than they should just because it’s for Apple products.

I already have two large monitors and figured my Macbook could serve as third screen. Then I did some thinking and realized I could use one of the monitors for both computers. Assuming you have two HDMI screens already hooked up to your desktop, this would save you $150+ and still allow you to be more productive.

  1. Get a copy of Synergy (http://symless.com/) for $10. It’s open source and can be built if you have the time, but a one time fee of $10 saves me the hassle of doing so. With this, you can share your desktop keyboard across all your computers with the one license and it’s cross platform so Linux support is included too.
  2. Purchase an auto HDMI switcher. I purchased the PORTTA PET0301S 3×1 Port HDMI Switch/Switcher for about $9.
  3. Be sure to get 2 HDMI cables if you don’t already have them on hand. I don’t like the Amazon Basic brand for these as I’ve had problems with the Mac and those cables hooking up to larger screens.
  4. Install Synergy on the desktop as a server. Install on the Macbook as a client and it should autoconnect.
  5. Plug the HDMI cable from the computer into the HDMI switcher, and plug the spare into the Macbook pro. Plug the “Out” end into the monitor.

When you plug your HDMI cable into the Macbook, the HDMI switcher will automatically switch to it and project the Macbook. Synergy will auto-connect as long as it’s running on both and you can share the mouse and keyboard between both and work seamlessly.

If you have an iPad and want to turn that into an additional screen, grab a copy of Duet Display on your desktop/Macbook and install on your iPad for $15.99, and viola, instant portable second screen!

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How to repair permissions on Linux Apache /var/www/html folder

authorGreg
29th May, 2016
Administration

I recently ran into an issue where I could no longer FTP files to my Linux droplet when multiple users were uploading to the server. The server kept the user as the owner despite me setting them in the www-data group. This fix comes from my ex-boss, James Tomasino who was kind enough to provide some help since I was stumped. I’m sharing in case anyone else runs into the same issue and finds it useful.

You’ll need to fire up terminal, ssh to the server, and then execute these commands:

+s makes permissions sticky so that all files will inherit from the parent directory. This was the setting I was missing.

Open up /etc/ssh/sshd_config. I use nano so:

Hit CTRL+W and look for “subsystem” which is typically located near the bottom of the file. Change

to

If you already have files in the html folder, you’ll want to run these commands to reset the permissions:

 

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How to stop CouchDB on Mac OS

authorGreg
23rd May, 2016
Administration

I have been working on a proof of concept using CouchDB. After getting the proof of concept working, I spun up a digital ocean droplet and proceeded to setup CouchDB on the server. I went to enable the SSH tunnel so I could access the CouchDB Futon instance and promptly ran into an error because my local instance of CouchDB was using the same port, 5984. I had a lot of trouble finding out an easy way to stop CouchDB because the documentation in the Wiki wasn’t accurate:

As a workaround, in Terminal, run

This will output something like:

99093 0 org.apache.couchdb.288008

Grab the highlighted portion and run

Substitute the process name accordingly and you should be able to run the ‘launchctl list’ command again and see the process is no longer present.

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(98)Address already in use: AH00072: make_sock: could not bind to address [::]:80 – error

authorGreg
20th May, 2016
Administration

I recently got handed a new Ubuntu droplet at work to setup and work on. I was going through the typical configuration to lock down the server and go to installing Apache when I suddenly ran into the error

(98)Address already in use: AH00072: make_sock: could not bind to address [::]:80 – error

I was a little surprised considering I had only run 4 commands total on a brand new installation. If you’re getting this error like me, you’ll need to find out what’s being bound to port 80 and then stop it. Use this command to get a list of anything that’s running on port 80.

For me, it turned out nginx was running and bound to port 80. If you have the same problem, run this command to stop it:

Now you should be able to start apache.

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