Various small tricks I’ve found helpful. Most of these only work on OSX or Linux.

Speed up a time machine backup

This removes the CPU use throttling, so only use it when you aren’t actively using the computer

sudo sysctl debug.lowpri_throttle_enabled=0

Once the backup is complete

sudo sysctl debug.lowpri_throttle_enabled=1

Watermark a video with FFMPEG

Follow the instructions here

ffmpeg -i input.mov -i watermark_small.png -filter_complex "overlay=(.7*main_w):(.94*main_h)" output.mov

Places watermark in bottom right corner

Extract audio from video using FFMPEG

For an MP4 file this is easy

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 output.mp3

Remove columns from a space delimited txt file

Keep only the first four columns from the file lol.txt

>awk '{print $1" "$2" "$3" "$4}' lol.txt > lol2.txt

Run this as a script for all of the files in a directory

for file in *.txt
do
    awk '{print $1" "$2" "$3" "$4}' $file > $file\_edited.txt
    echo $file
done

Note that we had to use the system-specific escape character “_” in order to clear the underscore, this could be different on different platforms

To rename files with sequential numbers, run a similar script:

a=1
for file in *.txt
do
    awk '{print $1" "$2" "$3" "$4}' $file > $velocity$a.txt
    let a=a+1
    echo $file
done

Can

Sublime Text customization of settings

Open preferences from the menus and put your preferences in a single pair of curly braces (XML formatting)

{
	"color_scheme": "Packages/User/Tomorrow-Night.tmTheme",
	"font_size": 11,
	"open_files_in_new_window": false,
	"ignored_packages":
	[
		"Vintage"
	]
}

Put parentheses around all citations in LaTeX

This is useful for switching a document over to NatBib

\renewcommand{\cite}[1]{(\citenum{#1})} % parentheses around citations

This can go anywhere in the preamble

Run multiple Mathematica notebooks at once

The goal here is to have two notebooks open that don’t interact with eachother—separate kernels and namespaces

Evaluation > Kernel Configuration

Add a new kernel with a cool name, set “Launch on” to “Local Machine”

Open new notebook, go to Evaluation > Notebook's Kernel > Select the cool kernel name you just made

See this article

Shrink PDF files with minimal loss of quality

Install ghostscript if you don’t have it

brew install ghostscript

Compress the PDF file using the command

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -dPDFSETTINGS=/default -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -sOutputFile=output.pdf input.pdf

For different quality, try these flags:

Use the following ghostscript command:

-dPDFSETTINGS=/screen lower quality, smaller size.
-dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook for better quality, but slightly larger pdfs.
-dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress output similar to Acrobat Distiller "Prepress Optimized" setting
-dPDFSETTINGS=/printer selects output similar to the Acrobat Distiller "Print Optimized" setting
-dPDFSETTINGS=/default selects output intended to be useful across a wide variety of uses, possibly at the expense of a larger output file

More information on StackExchange

Open tar gz file

Format videos for Twitter

Use FFMPEG, for mp4 the file shape has to be even in both dimensions; can omit the -filter crop below if this is already true

ffmpeg -i video2_small.mp4 -filter:v "crop=3008:3000:0:0" -vcodec libx264 -acodec aac output.mp4

Deshake a video

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf deshake="rx=64:ry=64"  -an output.mov

The flags -rx and -ry are optional flags taken from this list here

Convert a directory of FLAC to ALAC for iTunes

Using ffmpeg

for i in *.flac ; do
    ffmpeg -i "$i" -acodec alac "$(basename "${i/.flac}").m4a"
    sleep 2
    # may need to adjust sleep time for processor speed                               
done

I saved this as a bash script, so just cd into the directory containing the FLAC files and then run

bash ~/codebits/utility_scripts/flac2alac.sh

Make spectrograms to check quality of audio files

Using sox

sox audiofile.flac -n spectrogram

A good FLAC file should have features at 22 kHz. A transcode low quality will have a plateau around 19 kHz (with some spikes). Great info here

Update packages in MacTeX

There is an actual package manager called tlmgr installed by default on TeX Live and MacTeX

First, update it

tlmgr update --self

Can install a package like this

tlmgr install revtex

Can view all installed packages like this

tlmgr update --list

Can update everything with this

tlmgr update --all

Note: I had to sudo all of these, since I installed MacTeX like a standard application on macOS

Fix focusing issue on Sublime text OSX

Add the following plugin “Tools > Developer > New Plugin” and save with a descriptive name. Copied from this GitHub thread

import sublime
import sublime_plugin
import os

cmd = '''
tell application \\"System Events\\"
    tell application process \\"Sublime Text\\"
        set frontmost to true
    end tell
end tell
'''

class FocusOnLoad (sublime_plugin.EventListener):
    def on_load(self, view):
        os.system('osascript -e "{0}"'.format(cmd))

Merge three videos in xy as a mosiac using FFMPEG

The height and widht parameters have to be calculated very carefully—any extra space will be filled with black thanks to the “color” option below

Crop mosaic length to the shortest video length

ffmpeg -i 1.mov -i 2.mov -i 3.mov -filter_complex "color=s=4912x1502:c=black [base];[0:v] setpts=PTS-STARTPTS, scale=1504x1502 [left];[1:v] setpts=PTS-STARTPTS, scale=1504x1502 [middle];[2:v] setpts=PTS-STARTPTS, scale=1504x1502 [right];[base][left] overlay=shortest=1 [tmp1];[tmp1][middle] overlay=shortest=1:x=1704 [tmp2];[tmp2][right] overlay=shortest=1:x=3408" -c:v libx264 output_merge.mov

Remove the shortest flag to set the mosaic length to length of longest video (pad with ending frames of other videos) 1520x1507

ffmpeg -i inv1.mov -i inv3.mov -filter_complex "color=s=3340x1508:c=black [base];[0:v] setpts=PTS-STARTPTS, scale=1520x1508 [left];[1:v] setpts=PTS-STARTPTS, scale=1520x1508 [right];[base][left] overlay=shortest=1 [tmp1];[tmp1][right] overlay=shortest=1:x=1820" -c:v libx264 output_merge2.mov

Note that this throws an error if the video heights or widths are not even numbers of pixels

Sources

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/33330279/ffmpeg-selects-shortest-movie-but-leaves-full-length-audio https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Create%20a%20mosaic%20out%20of%20several%20input%20videos