Hacker News

> afconvert

Oh wow! A while back I ripped some concert audio from Youtube, but it was too large for me to sync using my `iTunes Match`. I've been too lazy to figure out how to downsample it juuuuust enough. But it looks like this works right out of the box

Mostly I use XLD (https://tmkk.undo.jp/xld/index_e.html) for audio conversion (as I'm mostly converting from .BIN + .CUE to "iTunes Plus" AAC for uploading to iTunes Match); but my understanding is that under the covers it's mostly just using afconvert (or whatever the system-framework equivalent of it is.)

So if your needs are just "one audio file in, one audio file out, and let me tell you exactly what it should look like", then afconvert is probably what you want.

How does that compare with ffmpeg? The arguments seem about the same.

"superior" ... It looks silly to include such a judging adjective in the description of a comman line utility. I don't need "subtle" Apple ads on the command line. And aac is about the last format I would choose, encoding my audio in.

Its open source GitHub repo at https://github.com/sveinbjornt/hear

Man page at https://sveinbjorn.org/files/manpages/hear.1.html

> (Uses built-in macOS capabilities for transcription from audio to text.)

Question (to self, currently researching)... Which capabilities? Released when? I ask because Apple Intelligence has expanded the use of audio transcription features.

Answer: `hear` uses SFSpeechRecognizer [1] which has been available since macOS 10.15. I'm not yet sure how it relates to Apple Intelligence transcription services.

Note: "speech recognition is a network-based service" which perhaps suggests Apple Intelligence (the marketing term, not an Apple Developer term, I don't think) uses it as well

[1][ https://developer.apple.com/documentation/speech/sfspeechrec...

I thought I recognized the name of the developer! The person that brought us Platypus! Nice.

> which hear

> hear not found

macOS 15.1

Another useful caffeinate tip is the `-w` option.

You can use it to pass a pid to keep the computer awake until that process completes. I use it for longer-running scripts that I don't want interrupted

I use this all the time:

open -a <GUI Application> <File>

Handy for distinguishing between editing and consuming media.

open -a is nice, i use it with alias, ex:

  alias qt='open -a "quicktime player"'
  alias vlc='open -a "vlc"'

open -a "Finder" . - open Finder in the current directory.

Standard apps usually just need the name, like Finder and Safari but you can also specify the path "/Applications/DifferentFinder.app"

That's one of macOS pitfalls: the inability to open 2 instances of the same app, simply using the default GUI is annoying sometimes.

I think Windows is right in that matter...

Does `open` give focus? It used to, but since a few releases ago the app opens in the background, which is pretty annoying.

My poor workaround is to use osascript: `tell application "System Events" to set frontmost of process "Finder" to true`

Also, `cd .` to open the current directory in a Finder window.

Not mine (found online years ago), but here's the opposite. `cd` into the frontmost Finder window:

  cd "$(osascript -e 'tell app "Finder" to POSIX path of (insertion location as alias)')";

`caffeinate -disu` is the best combination (that is, enable all options): your laptop won't go to sleep, won't dim the screem etc.

caffeinate -d is incredibly useful for work... uh reasons

Disk Utility used to be excellent, a model of how an app should be. But then they rewrote it in Swift and now it's just bad.

Apple promotes Swift heavily but the results are not really encouraging. I don't think the "so-so" results are entirely because of Swift (probably due to newer, less battle tested software and also newer/younger devs) but still the fact is, all the not-so-great new software from Apple came with Swift rewrites, hard to not make a connection...

`pdisk` might be more convenient if you've worked with `gdisk` on ArchLinux

https://manpagez.com/man/8/pdisk/

Or "man diskutil"

Kinda related: does anyone else regularly finds CLI tools, installs them and never ever even call them once?

I found a tool of mine submitted by someone else on the site (pleasant surprise!) and I want to update the description and add a more recent/better image. How would I do that?

This looks like a list of cross-platform command line tools. What about it is Mac-specific?

100% That's why I made it a point to share that page.

I still get a ton of mileage from reading the macOS How-to page https://ss64.com/mac/syntax.html

Thanks for the kind words, I'll be scanning this thread to see if there's anything new that I've missed.

networkQuality is in the article.

I'm curious if there's a way to do this with standard input instead of having to supply a filename?

I do this with man pages but it opens up in a full Preview window, not QuickLook.

Thanks for the heads up! It should be back up now

And sometimes handy: shift+cmd+. to toggle showing hidden (dot) files in Finder.

Sort of like command+k in the Finder, connects to a server. You can type in vnc://host or vnc://localhost:port... the latter is for VNC to hosts via an SSH tunnel.

It's quite a good VNC client, too.

It's too bad this doesn't use .ssh/config

See: https://chatgpt.com/share/672b94e1-4c20-8001-aea9-9371b4e9d9...

Also: https://github.com/toy/blueutil

Thanks Spotify:

coreaudiod is using very high CPU at 111.90 ms/s

I'm on a 16" M1 Macbook Pro 16 gig.

    ; which jq
    /usr/bin/jq
    ; jq
    jq - commandline JSON processor [version 1.6-159-apple-gcff5336-dirty]

> obviously, less useful now that `jq`is built in

Hold up, what?

For reference, it’s been there since macOS 12. You may also like to know that this year (macOS 15) they added jq.

Unfortunately, it's not actually very useful, as whatever server they're using on the other end is severely constrained. networkQuality gives me:

Downlink: 884.856 Mbps, 198 RPM - Uplink: 13.238 Mbps, 198 RPM

whereas speedtest (whether to the official speedtest server OR a friend's home server in their basement!) gives ~700 Mbps uplink.

I can vouch for fzf being a game-changer if you spend a lot of time in the CLI

Not sure that's an easter egg? That's been the pronunciation for 25 years.

It actually understands roman numerals, to a certain extent. E.g. `say LVIII` will say "58". However, `say MCMLXXIX` speaks some gibberish that ends in the word "six", for some reason.

It also knows how to say numbers up into the trillions but not more than that (although I feel like it used to).

Other cute `say` tricks: muck around with OSX Default Speech Voice (to a siri-ish voice) and you can invoke that from the CLI.

I hacked together a little script for demo recording like:

    START_FROM="$1"
    STARTED=0
    function transcript() {
       ID="$1"
       TO_SAY="$2"
       if [[ ...STARTED || START_FROM && ID... ]]; then
          STARTED=1
          say "$TO_SAY"
       fi
    }

    transcript "STEP001" "This is a test"
    transcript "STEP001b" "of the emergency broadcast system"
    transcript "STEP002" "This is only a test, if this was ..."
    transcript "STEP003" "...etc..."

That way I can iterate on voiceover scripts, eg: `./demo-script "STEP002"` => `./demo-script --output`

It's really helpful for iterating on pronunciations, eg: `transcript "STEP005" "In case of Four Hundred and Four errors..."`, I can just "skip to" and iterate against that line (and subsequent ones), or "skip back" and hear it in more of a flowing context.

...even if I don't end up using the `say`-generated audio, having a transcript (and even pacing) that I can just read through with my own voice is super helpful.

Oh this is pretty neat, thanks for sharing!

https://ss64.com/mac/pmset.html

I have this .zshrc function to track the battery and charging, which uses pmset:

    function batt-info() {
        echo
        system_profiler SPPowerDataType | grep Wattage | cut -c 7-
        echo
        pmset -g batt
    }

I've found reliably "turning on" with pmset to be hit or miss. I can't remember the gotcha I ran into if it was that you had to have your laptop lid open or something else...

Copying using OSC52 is great! I have a cross-platform shell function for that in my bashrc [1], as well as an implementation that works in vim [2].

[1]: https://github.com/DvdGiessen/dotfiles/blob/2c02332b4a657690... [2]: https://github.com/DvdGiessen/dotfiles/blob/2c02332b4a657690...

since I switch between linux and macos a lot I wrote a dotfile function called "clip" that will work the same on both. nice thing is it will automatically paste if nothing is piped to it to copy so there's no need to use separate commands... although I just realized it might be nice to have a "passthrough" mode that both copies and pastes if you add this to a pipeline in order to capture some intermediate part to the clipboard

    if [[ "$(uname)" == "Darwin" ]]; then
      clip() {
        [ -t 0 ] && pbpaste || pbcopy
      }
    else # assume linux if not macos
      clip() {
        [ -t 0 ] && xclip -o -selection clipboard || xclip -selection clipboard
      }
    fi

At my job I have to work with a lot of JSON that's usually minimized. This command has single-handedly saved my sanity:

$ pbpaste | jq | pbcopy

Then I can paste it into whatever text editor I want and it's all nice & pretty-printed for me.

Bonus is that I don't have to change the command at all, just copy the minimized JSON to the clipboard (say from DBeaver, for example), then hit the 'up' arrow and enter.

I copied this functionality to linux it's been so useful.

I have thousands of old photos that preview can open, but I can’t upload them into the photo.app because the file format is wrong. I’m going to try and use SIPS to convert them all into png first and then add to photo.app. Thanks for this pointer.

Nice. After reading the man page, I see that it can be used to convert image file formats:

    sips -s format png photo.HEIC --out photo.png

    sips -z 300 600 original.jpg --out new.jpg

sips looks really cool, thanks for pointing this out.

Not gonna lie, I missed this because I thought it was related to macOS SIP, System Integrity Protection. Which is something I am deeply uninterested in.

That's cool. I wish it could convert webp images.

That's in there.

Yep, I do this in a tmux session. But sometimes I'm on a call and forget and the ROBOT VOICE says "DATABASE DUMP IS COMPLETE" and I jump out of my skin.

I'm fascinated by "sips" which has a full JavaScript interpreter built into it for rendering images using an entirely undocumented (as far as I can tell) Canvas-like API: https://til.simonwillison.net/macos/sips

Why not just a directory with subdirectories by ID? No mdfind needed, no problems with just-created directories, no wait, etc

Except xdg mime types are easily heist-able by programs and there is no universal truth for it.

Install vscode on Linux and have fun with it hijacking opening directories. Which is easy enough to fix (with a bit of know how) or work around but annoying.

MacOS is far from perfect but open always doing what I expect is a good example of what Apple did well.

FWIW that appears to be soon deprecated according to MacOS 15.2:

WARNING: The airport command line tool is deprecated and will be removed in a future release. For diagnosing Wi-Fi related issues, use the Wireless Diagnostics app or wdutil command line tool.

Cheatsheet? I've used it for years. Just hold down Command for a few seconds to see a list of all available shortcut keys in the current app.

https://www.mediaatelier.com/CheatSheet/feedNotes.php

https://formulae.brew.sh/cask/cheatsheet

The database is not set up by default.

Your better bet on MacOS is to use `mdfind -name ....`

is it better than ffmpeg in any way?

For a GUI version, Amphetamine is quite nice (and free). https://apps.apple.com/us/app/amphetamine/id937984704?mt=12

Indeed, many applications I would expect to prevent sleeping (some audio playback ones, games, etc.) don't implement this. I assume it's a case of Apple's APIs changing over the years and not everyone catching up/caring. At one point I had downloaded Amphetamine[^1] but it is much nicer to just use the terminal here.

[^1]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/amphetamine/id937984704

I was able to install a `caffeine` package with Apt on Linux. In that one the `caffeinate` command is supposed to be run with another command. While the `caffeine` command does what macOs `caffeinate` does.

While it may avoid sleep, it doesn’t prevent inactivity, in my experience. For instance, my chat app at work will still show me inactive while running caffeinate. I have to do non-interactive training semi-regularly and need to interact to keep from looking like I’m away from my desk.

It would be cool to have this activate when a Jupyter notebook is currently running a cell, and deactivate automatically when its finished.

These are programs, not shell commands.

If you're going to correct someone snarkily, don't make a similar mistake...

Even calling them "zsh commands" would have been more accurate.

Would you mind expanding on what these "sharp edges" are that you're warning about? I'm not really sure what you mean by this. Keychain has served me (and I imagine many others) really well for a while.