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TIL that there’s an OmniFocus hidden setting so that URL links to OmniFocus that open perspectives, projects, etc are opened in a new window. The default behavior had been to change the frontmost window, which is often the window I’m working in.
Read moreUntil today my most recent blog install on heroku was visible at https://hroe.me. To move that domain over to point at this new GitHub Pages hosted version:
Read moreI’ve been on-again-mostly-off-again with writing blog posts. It’s always been entirely for myself, mostly to record information somewhere that I will find it again when I need it. This is the latest version of that, having been in an off-again mode for five years or so. With some of the things I want to work on and think about in the coming year I’d like to try on-again.
Read moreFor years I’ve used a couple of hacked together bash scripts lessfits and grepfits for doing quick command line looks at the contents of FITS files. (FITS format is a file that most astronomical images/spectra/data. It’s a bit antiquated at this point, but unlikely to go away any time soon.)
lessfits is like the unix command less but for the header of a FITS file. e.g.:
$ lessfits 2016-06-24_0138.fits.gz
SIMPLE = T / conforms to FITS standard
BITPIX = 32 / array data type
NAXIS = 3 / number of array dimensions
NAXIS1 = 320
NAXIS2 = 256
NAXIS3 = 21
EXTEND = T
[....paging through the entire FITS header with all the usual navigation hotkeys of "less"]
grepfits outputs values of selected keywords from the headers of one or more FITS files. e.g.:
$ grepfits EXPTIME,NEXP,RA,DEC 2016-06-24_013[6-9].fits.gz
filename EXPTIME NEXP RA DEC
2016-06-24_0136.fits.gz: 1.0 21 22:23:21.47 +10:15:31.1
2016-06-24_0137.fits.gz: 1.05 21 22:23:47.50 +10:15:31.3
2016-06-24_0138.fits.gz: 1.1 21 22:24:13.53 +10:15:31.4
2016-06-24_0139.fits.gz: 1.15 21 22:24:40.57 +10:15:31.5
Because I habitually gzip --best any FITS file I’m dealing with, both of these scripts work smoothly on either *.fits or *.fits.gz files. I recently spent a few minutes updating these scripts to work more reliably. Both are available as gists on github (see below). Note that they do not not require any type of fits library to be installed. Both scripts do use python, but with no additional library dependencies beyond gzip and sys, which are both included in every python install I’ve ever encountered. This is an intentional choice to make these scripts work as universally as possible.
If I’ve had to google search for a tip or tool more than a few times, then it’s time to post something here.
Occasionally I need to dump the text from a PDF file, to search for a word or extract some bit of information. This does the trick nicely:
mdimport -d2 filename.pdf