Curious Mints

How to Automatically Run Shell Scripts on a Mac Using Cron Jobs

I wanted to run a shell script at regular intervals to update a greeting image on my Tidbyt device. The script had to render the image and push it to Tidbyt so that the greeting would refresh every few minutes. While developing this, I realized I needed the script to

Building a Hello World App for Tidbyt Retro Style Display

I recently bought a Tidbyt, a fascinating retro pixelated display that can do everything from showing the weather to displaying memes (h/t to Greg Baugues for the recommendation). After setting it up and exploring some pre-built apps (mine currently cycles through a Nokia Snake game, a Tetris clock I&

AppleScript

Automating Weekly Review Date Headers with AppleScript and TextExpander

While reviewing my week in Day One, I like to kick things off with a heading that reads something like "Week of Date 1 to Date 2." Sounds simple, right? But almost always, there's a bit of friction to this. I have to pause my reflection,

Setting Up SQLite with Flask

I wanted to set up SQLite with Flask for a simple, lightweight database solution that doesn't need a separate server process. Perfect for prototyping or smaller-scale applications. Here's how I did it. 1. Installing SQLite SQLite usually comes pre-installed with Python, so you likely don'

Quickly Cycling Through and Fixing Spelling Errors in VS Code Markdown Files

I wanted to cycle through and fix all spelling errors in a VS Code markdown file. I already had the spell-checking extension installed but couldn't figure out how to see all the errors together and fix them quickly. Here's how - 1. Open the markdown file

Changing the Number of Posts Displayed Per Page in Ghost CMS

So, I wanted to customize the number of posts displayed per page on my Ghost CMS website using the Dawn theme. The default setting was showing only 5 posts, and I wanted to bump that up to 25. Here's how I did it, broken down into simple steps,

How to Globally Ignore files like .DS_Store in Git Repos

So, I got tired of adding .DS_Store to every git repo on my Mac. I was pretty sure there would be a better way to handle this on a global way on my Mac, so I don't have to do this for every repo. Here's

My first ChatGPT app - Google Drive + LangChain + Python

I recently built my very first app using ChatGPT's API. Just followed @greggyb's super helpful guide to write my first ChatGPT app that queries a PDF sitting in a Google Drive. 🤩 Here's me querying @culturedcode's AppleScript Guide (PDF) 📚 Very helpful in finding

API

AssemblyAI - Retool App

I had a great time exploring AssemblyAI and thought it would be cool to create a user interface for it using Retool that lets you easily transcribe audio files. Here's what I came up with in version 0.1. Just upload the file, or if you prefer, record

Automating Python Project Setup: A Shell Script to Create New Projects Quickly

As someone who loves experimenting with Python libraries and APIs, starting new projects quickly is important. Setting up these projects can sometimes be time-consuming, and a bit annoying to be honest. Wrote this shell script to automate the process and start coding quickly. Here's what it does -

Export todos from Things app using AppleScript

I had a bunch of todos in the Things app that I wanted to move to my notes. Manually copying them from the app didn't grab the notes in the todo, which was quite a hassle. So, I ended up writing this quick AppleScript to export all todos

ChatGPT

How do I get ChatGPT responses to highlight the code in the terminal?

In a previous post, I played around with ChatGPT to query PDFs stored in Google Drive. I use the Things app as my task manager, and sometimes play around with the AppleScript to move around things. No pun intended. The makers of the app provide this handly PDF manual for

Resolving a 504 Timeout Error on Ghost with Digital Ocean

Woke up to a 504 error this morning. It's hosted on Digital Ocean, so I reached out to support, which wasn't very helpful. They basically said this, and then dumped a bunch of not-very-helpful-generic-504-articles. As a self-managed infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provider, we do not

Creating Custom Workflows in Warp Terminal

I've been playing around with warp.dev, which is a new terminal app for Mac (Windows coming soon it looks like) with a focus on improving developer productivity. Looks really good, and has already improved quite a few workflows for me. Speaking of which, it actually has a

Speeding Up Terminal Load Time: How I Fixed a 90-Second Delay by Cleaning Up .zshrc File

This answer on Reddit helped troubleshoot. I just commented everything, and it made the load lightening fast. Then, on a closer look, I found this mess. No idea how it got to this, but commenting out all but one of them did the trick. I was wondering why my terminal

My Sublime Text 3 Setup: Aliases, Themes, and Terminal Fixes

Adding an alias to zshrc file Wanted to add an alias to quickly open Sublime Text editor from the command line. Here's how - 1. Open the file ~/.zshrc in a text editor 2. Add the following line - alias sub="/Applications/Sublime\ Text.app/Contents/SharedSupport/

Playing with APIs in Postman: Getting Code Samples and Curl Commands Quickly

Now that I am playing around a bit more frequently with APIs, especially Twitter’s v2 API, and Airtable’s API, I have found myself playing around a lot more with Postman. It’s my new favorite app/service. I have obviously been living under a huge rock all this

Playing around with Postman

I have known of Postman for a while now - it's a tool you can use to explore and test APIs. I just never got down to using it much. That changed quite a bit in the last week or so. I started playing around with it while

Flask

Create a Content extension for Canva using Flask

Saw this Quick Start guide on Canva's developer portal that walks you through creating a content extension for Canva's users. It uses Node.js and Express.js as the server backend. I wanted to replicate this example using Python and Flask as the server. What is

How to deploy a Flask app to Digital Ocean's app platform

I recently went throught the process to put my side project howbigisthebaby.io on Digital Ocean's new app platform, and wanted to document it in case anyone else found it helpful (or atleast me revisiting this later). Part 1: Setup the environment for the Flask app Step 1:

How to add a Twitter CTA at the end of each article on Ghost CMS?

I recently saw a tweet that it's a good idea to have a CTA at the end of each article. In fact, Daniel Vassallo argued that the CTA should be pointing to Twitter instead of an email list. So, how do I do that in Ghost? Being new

How I Automated Markdown and HTML Link Generation for My Ship30for30 Essays

I had written a bunch of short essays as part of Ship30for30 challenge over the summer. Now that I was redoing my website, I thought it would be nice if I could have a collection of those links here. I had the titles and the URLs for all of them

Setting up Ghost - some early thoughts...

Just setup Ghost on this website (ajot.me). Had been running a home grown version of Flask + Flask-Frozen for a couple years. It was cool, but I was starting to feel friction in getting my thoughts out. Decide to give Ghost a whirl. Here are some early thoughts (less than

New Project: How big is the baby?

We are expecting our first baby soon and like most first-time parents, we signed up for a bunch of pregnancy tracking apps that tell you how big your baby is each week. You know like, "this week your baby is as big as an eggplant". As informational as

Hello Django - How to set up your first Django web app

I wrote this for myself whilst setting up Django for the first time. Been meaning to write this post for my future self, who’s invariably going to forget the steps to set up Django on a new machine. So, here are the steps to set up Django on a