cloud computing

cloud computing research & development

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TextExpander → Alfred 3.x

That’s a long overdue I wanted to write about.

TextExpander creators, Smile Software, announced back in April, 2016 they moved to subscription model. Although after an overwhelming response from the TextExpander users, the company offered a lifetime 50% discount for users upgrading from the previous version, I wanted to consider other options as I was not very happy with a subscription.

Luckily there was a new Alfred 3 release that has a new snippet feature. Since I was already an active Alfred user, it was the way to go!

What I needed to resolve is to migrate my current snippet database from TextExpander to Alfred.

I came across on a TextExpander conversion tool by Daniel Diekmeier. There is also the online version.

However, I decided to go with the github version.

installation 

brew install npm

npm install -g textexpander-to-alfred3

conversion 

textexpander-to-alfred3
...

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youtube download script on mac

Accidentally came accros the helpful youtube-dl script.

If you need to watch a video offline or without any ads, it’s the tool.

installation 

brew install youtube-dl

usage

  1. Copy a youtube video link to the clipboard.
  2. youtube-dl `pbpaste`

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Voice conversation using cloud →

In the Episode 106 of AWS podcast, Jeff Barr and David Isbitski had an interesting discussion on the Amazon Echo device and the Alexa Voice Service that resides behind it.

Amazon Echo pic

It’s great we have another player on the scene that increases competition in the field.

The interesting part is that all the magic happens in the cloud (of course!). As a developer, you can extend device functionality:

  • create your own hosted cloud service;
  • your service comminicates with the Alexa Voice Service (with JSON/HTTP);
  • the Alexa Voice Service converts normal spoken language and provide your service with data in your predefined contract

So, as a developer you’re not building apps but building skills.

One more thing is the Alexa Skills Kit - you can build you very own “echo” devices as long as it has speaker, microphone and an internet connection.

From the privacy point of view, it’s said that customer...

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Keeping SSH sessions alive

I’ve faced a problem with breaking SSH sessions while working with my servers. The sessions kept breaking every time I switched from the terminal:

[root@i-deploy ~] Write failed: Broken pipe

It mostly depends on timeout settings of the devices that are on the route from your terminal to the servers. The idea that is helping to resolve the issue is to send keep alive signals so the connection is not idle.

The SSH has the ServerAliveInterval (in seconds) and several places where you can specify it to achieve that. I’ll leave the detail description to the great screen cast and article describing the approach. It’s for Linux but works for Mac as well.

I stick with a rather intense setting for all the users on my Mac and used the client settings in /etc/ssh_config for that:

 Host *
   ServerAliveInterval 10
   SendEnv LANG LC_*

It should be enough to have it 45 or even 60 for the...

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