A quick and easy one for Alfred: a command which toggles AirPort on/off.

If you are using Alfred 0.9.9 (or better), you should be able to download this ZIP file and import it!

If you are using an earlier version of Alfred, follow these instructions:

AIRPORT=`networksetup -getairportpower AirPort | grep Off`; if [ "$?" = "0" ]; then networksetup -setairportpower AirPort on; MSG="AirPort enabled"; else networksetup -setairportpower Airport off; MSG="AirPort disabled"; fi; /usr/local/bin/growlnotify -m "$MSG" -a "/Applications/Utilities/Airport Utility.app" AirPort status

Create as a terminal script and configure it to be silent. I also borrowed the icon from AirPort utility for the script (Alfred for “airport” and then use Reveal in Finder on it; Get Info; click Icon and ⌘C; click the icon area in Alfred and ⌘V).

I wrote this little scriptlet to change network location in OS X using Alfred, but you could trigger it using whatever method you wanted.

If you’re using Alfred 0.9.9 or later, you should be able to download this ZIP file and import it!

if you using an earlier version, follow the instructions below:

/usr/sbin/scselect 2>&1 | /usr/bin/grep -i {query} | /usr/bin/cut -c 4-39 | /usr/bin/xargs /usr/sbin/scselect

UPDATE 2011-06-11: I have significantly improved the script to work around a bug caused by the 3Connect profile (3Connect is pants FYI), as well as use growlnotify to tell you if the change worked or not. It also allows substring matches (anchored at the start) so you can use “auto” for “Automatic”. If you have more than one profile that starts with a matching substring, the behaviour is currently undefined.

MSG=`/usr/sbin/scselect 2>&1 | /usr/bin/egrep -i "\({query}" | /usr/bin/cut -c 4- | /usr/bin/cut -f 1 | /usr/bin/head -n 1 | /usr/bin/xargs /usr/sbin/scselect | /usr/bin/sed -E 's/.+ \((.+)\)/Location changed to \1/'`; if [ "$MSG" = "" ]; then /usr/local/bin/growlnotify -a /System/Library/PreferencePanes/Network.prefPane -m "Unable to change location" Error; else /usr/local/bin/growlnotify -a /System/Library/PreferencePanes/Network.prefPane -m "$MSG" Location changed; fi;

If you want it without Growl notifications, use this version:

usr/sbin/scselect 2>&1 | /usr/bin/egrep -i "\({query}" | /usr/bin/cut -c 4- | /usr/bin/cut -f 1 | /usr/bin/head -n 1 | /usr/bin/xargs /usr/sbin/scselect

It’s slightly convoluted as it’s case-insensitive. To use it, create a Terminal/Shell script entry like this:

Now you can just type “location work” or similar into Alfred to change network location. I’ll add Growl-confirmation support when the next version of Alfred is released :)

However, building the Distribution version of the app gave me this warning:

“The CodeResources file must be a symbolic link to _CodeSignature/CodeResources”

which I duly ignored. However, the Application Loader (used to push the new binary to the App Store) also complained about that and wouldn’t upload it.

It looks like Dropbox’s replication may have been to blame for the symlink stopping being a symlink, so the solution is to use the handy new selective sync option in Dropbox and not sync the build/ directory between my machines (which is pretty much pointless anyway and certainly generates a lot of network overhead when you build). Having done that and built a clean copy it worked fine.

Means: Can’t reach the HTTP proxy you have configured. Maybe you should turn it off.

1. Install the following packages using the cygwin setup tool:
   • gcc4
   • make
   • openssl (needed for runtime, not for building)
   • openssl-devel
   • zlib-devel
2. Download and extract the tarsnap code.
3. Run ./configure (this seems to be much slower on cygwin than on other more UNIXy platforms)
4. Run make all install clean

Tarsnap should now be installed and you can use it in the normal fashion – create a host key with tarsnap-keygen and then get backing up!

Edit 2009-12-16: checkers from #tarsnap on EFnet has written a post with scripts for Linux and Cygwin tarsnapping at http://www.bluebottle.net.au/blog/2009/tarsnap-backups-on-windows-and-linux

You may also wish at add --prefix=/ to the configure command line, as /usr/local isn’t in the default path.

I tracked this down to it sending Expect: 100-continue in the headers of the request it sent to its server. However, it was going via our web proxy at work, which is Squid. Recently I upgraded Squid to 2.7, and this seems to be the cause of the problems. Squid 2.7 is less forgiving about that particular header (which is apparently an RFC violation on the part of the client).

It’s easily fixed by adding ignore_expect_100 on to your Squid configuration.

tail somefile | ccze -A -o noscroll | grep ...

-A makes ccze output ASCII sequences, and -o noscroll turns off the scroll option – whatever that is exactly. The man page says it’s a good idea to turn it off if you’re redirecting the output. Omitting it seems to make the output appear in lumps :)

For example, keep an eye on squid logs omitting all MSN crap:

tail -F access.log | ccze -A -C -o noscroll | grep -v gateway.dll

This goes in your zshrc:

  vman() {
    if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
      /usr/bin/man
    else
      if man -w $* >/dev/null 2>/dev/null
      then
        /usr/bin/man $* | col -b | vim -c 'set ft=man nomod' -
      else
        echo No man page for $*
      fi
    fi
  }
  alias man='vman'

And this goes in your vimrc (in a suitable augroup):

  autocmd FileType man setlocal ro nonumber nolist fdm=indent fdn=2 sw=4 foldlevel=2 | nmap q :quit

Now you’ll get nicely highlighted man pages with folded sections, and you can hit q to quit just like less.

The only problem I encountered was getting it set up to work with multiple networks in irssi. Configuring ZNC itself to put me on many networks was easy enough, and when I connected irssi to it for each network using /connect it worked fine. Using /server add to set up irssi’s server list didn’t work out so well.

Every time I tried to add another server (for connecting to another network), irssi would remove the first one. This is because irssi only considers a server’s hostname and port when trying to work out if it’s unique. When I added another server which differed from the first only by password and associated network, irssi assumed I was updating the existing one and changed it. Putting the required entries in irssi’s config by hand also didn’t work.

The solution was easy enough; one ZNC instance can listen on multiple ports, so I got it to listen on a selection of ports using multiple Listen directives in its config file, and then added each network’s server to irssi using a different port number.

Now I can take advantage of cool things like buffer replay and detaching from channels. Sorry, irssi-proxy – you don’t quite cut it now :)

Sit no more! Just hit Ctrl-t and fsck will reveal its secrets. (This sends the currently running process a SIGINFO.)