Avil Page (Posts about 2023)

Periodically Launch an App in Background

Anand Reddy Pandikunta — Wed, 23 Aug 2023 13:33:49 GMT

I recently started using Outlook app on my Mac. If the app is closed, it won't send any notifications. When I accidentally close the app, until I re-open it, I won't get any notifications.

I want to ensure that it starts periodically so that I don't miss any notifications for meetings.

After trying out various methods, I ended up using open command with cron to launch the app every 15 minutes.

$ crontab -e

*/15 * * * * /usr/bin/open -a "Microsoft Outlook"

This will launch the app every 15 minutes. This is inconvenient as it will bring Outlook to foreground every 15 minutes.

To avoid this, I passed -g option to run it in background.

$ crontab -e

*/15 * * * * /usr/bin/open -g -a "Microsoft Outlook"

This silently launches the app in background without causing any disturbance. Since the app is running the background, it will send notifications for any meetings.

This will ensure that I don't miss any meetings, even if I close outlook accidentally.

Mastering HammerSpoon - Excel Automation

Anand Reddy Pandikunta — Sun, 21 May 2023 12:44:00 GMT

Introduction

Recently, I have been using Excel a lot. When opening a new Excel file, I have to do the following:

Maximize the window
Select all columns and fit them to its width
Apply filters to all columns
Freeze the first row

When opening and closing multiple Excel files, this becomes a tedious task. So, I decided to automate this and came across Hammerspoon.

HammerSpoon

Hammerspoon¹ is a powerful automation tool for macOS. It allows you to write Lua scripts to automate various tasks and make our keybindings.

First, let's install Hammerspoon using Homebrew.

$ brew install hammerspoon

We can write our automation script in ~/.hammerspoon/init.lua file. Let us see how we can automate the above tasks.

Automating Excel

-- excel
function excel(appObject)
   local win = hs.window.focusedWindow()
   if (not win) then
      return
   end
    win:maximize()

    appObject:selectMenuItem({"Edit", "Select all"})
    appObject:selectMenuItem({"Format", "Column", "Autofit Selection"})
    appObject:selectMenuItem({"Data", "Auto-filter"})

end)


function applicationWatcher(appName, eventType, appObject)
   local w = hs.application.watcher
   if (eventType == w.activated or eventType == w.launched) then
      if (appName == "Microsoft Excel") then
         excel(appObject)
      end
   end
end

This script will watch for application events and when Excel is launched or activated, it will call the excel function.

The excel function will maximize the window, select all columns and fit them to it's width, apply filters to all columns.

Free top row option is not available in the standard menu. So, I have added it to the quick access toolbar and click it via mouse event.

Conclusion

Hammerspoon is a powerful tool for various automation tasks. In addition to that it can replace a lot of utility apps like CheatSheet, BlueSnooze², Rectangle, ShiftIT³, HotKey etc. I have replaced most of the utility apps with Hammerspoon, and it is working great. I will be writing about it in detail in the upcoming posts.

Automator Quick Action for KDiff3 in Finder

Anand Reddy Pandikunta — Fri, 10 Mar 2023 02:54:11 GMT

The need for quick action

kdiff3¹ is a diff & merge tool that compares multiple files/directories and shows the difference line by line and character by character as shown below.

In Windows, when we select multiple files/directories and right click on them, it will show the option to compare selected items with kdiff3.

However, in Macbook, it doesn't show this option. In this tutorial, let us see how we can create the same quick action in the right-click menu when we right-click on the files/directories.

Creating Quick Action

Let us open Automator², create new file and select Quick Action.

On the left side select Utilities and then select Run Shell Script.

For Workflow receives current, select files or folders and then select in Finder.

Then select pass input as agruments and in the script section let us add the following command.

/path/to/kdiff3 $1 $2

After adding the command, save this Quick Action.

Now if we relaunch Finder app and then select multiple directories, and right click we can see Compare with KDiff3 in quick actions.

Conclusion

Even though we can use the command line to compare the files/directories, it is always good to have a quick action in the right-click menu.

Setup Kubernetes Anywhere with Single Command

Anand Reddy Pandikunta — Fri, 03 Mar 2023 21:25:27 GMT

Introduction

In an earlier article, we have seen how to set up Kubernetes on M1 Mac. That involved spinning up a VM and installing Kubernetes¹ on it. In this article, we will see how to set up Kubernetes directly on Docker so that we can use the same set-up on any operating system.

Prerequisites

Ensure you have Docker installed on your system. If you are on a Mac or Windows, you can install Docker Desktop².

k3s/k3d

k3s³ is a lightweight Kubernetes distribution by Rancher. It is a single binary that can be run on any Linux machine. But it doesn't work on Mac or Windows.

k3d⁴ is a wrapper around k3s that allows you to run k3s on Docker. It is a great option for running Kubernetes on your local machine.

Installation

k3d can be installed using the following command:

$ brew install k3d  # mac
$ chocolatey install k3d  # windows
$ curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/k3d-io/k3d/main/install.sh | bash # linux

Once it is installed, we can create a cluster using the following command:

$ k3d cluster create demo

This will launch a cluster with a single node. We can also setup a multi-node cluster using the following command:

$ k3d cluster create demo --servers 3 --agents 2

We can verify the cluster is up and running using the following command:

$ kubectl get nodes

We can also use GUI tools like Lens to manage and navigate the cluster. In the above video we have used Lens to create a Jenkins deployment as well.

Conclusion

In this article, we have seen how to set up Kubernetes on Docker. This is a great option for running Kubernetes on your local machine. We can also use this to run production setup for small applications.