Tag: mac

From Google Books to PDF lickety-split!

January 16th, 2013 · · schmeg No comments - Tags: , , , ,

So I got a Kindle for Xmas and wanted to start sticking some content on it. Google Books has some gems (some in full!) so i have just figure out this process of getting them into PDF format and then onto my Kindle. I use PDF as you get images from Google Books and not text. Somebody might wan to find a command line image-to-text converter (OSC) and stick this in at the end of this process (depending on how keen you are). There are some large text books i would consider doing it to, but for now…

  1. Use Firefox with the GreaseMonkey add-on and the Google Book Downloader script to generate a list of links to all the page images
  2. This will genarete a long list of links, one for each page, so you can then use the FireFox add-on DownThemAll! to… downlaod them all…
    • create a folder for them all to live in
    • under “Fast filter” I entered “‘books?id=” to select the book page links
    • Set the “Renaming Mask” to “*text*” (less the quotes)
  3. This should give you a folder with all the book pages as images. To convert these to PDF you will need imagemagick installed (on the Mac i recommend using Homebrew to get this installed quickly). Simply crack open the terminal/command-line:
    cd /folder/with/the/downloaded/images
    and then:
    convert *.png mynewbook.pdf

…and your done!

If you have a eBook reader them you might want to import the PDF with Calibre and upload to your respective device.

Mass renaming files

April 3rd, 2011 · · work 15 comments - Tags: , , , , , ,

Nice little shell one-liner to mass rename foo*.jpg to bar*.jpg

ls foo*.jpg | awk '{print("mv "$1" "$1)}' | sed 's/foo/bar/2' | /bin/sh

Leave off the last pipe to get a preview of the output first ;)

Heres a variation I used to keep just the first part of a file name before the first space (i.e. when Finder makes a copy of a file say)

l -1 *.jpg | awk '{print("mv \""$0"\" "$1".jpg")}' | /bin/sh

Recursively remove .DS_Store files

September 14th, 2010 · · work One comment - Tags: , , , , , ,

If your working on a coding project and your submitting it to version control, heres how to remove the meta-schmeg that OS X leaves around:

find . -name '*.DS_Store' -type f -delete

If your using GIT as your versioning control system then I’d suggest making a .gitignore file in the root of the project after running this command and before you git init to save yourself some bother.

Convert .dmg to .iso

January 7th, 2008 · · work 5 comments - Tags: , , , ,


hdiutil convert /path/to/filename.dmg -format UDTO -o /path/to/savefile.iso

For Mac OSX only of course

Apache, mod_rewrite on Mac OS X

March 8th, 2007 · · work 57 comments - Tags: , , , , ,

Here a quick list of things to remember when trying to debug Apache on Mac OS X (10.4.8 anyway):

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