Lately I’ve been playing around with mutt, a “small but powerful text-based email client for Unix operating systems” and offlineimap, a software that downloads your mailbox as a local Maildir.

After I finally got everything set up (easier said than done), I needed a way to make offlineimap synchronize my mailbox periodically. Apple recommends usinglaunchctlinstead of crontab. The following example shows how to runofflineimapin quiet mode every two minutes:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
  <key>Label</key>
  <string>com.kimgrytoyr.offlineimap.plist</string>
  <key>ProgramArguments</key>
  <array>
    <string>/usr/local/bin/offlineimap</string>
    <string>-u</string>
    <string>quiet</string>
  </array>
  <key>StartInterval</key>
  <integer>120</integer>
</dict>
</plist>

This file is basically an XML file, but the extension you must use is .plist. You would typically call it something like com.yourname.scriptname.plist. Place it in the folder ~/Library/LaunchAgents/, and make sure you replace yourname and scriptname with something relevant.

When you’ve saved the file to the specified location, type the following to load it into launchctl:

launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.yourname.scriptname.plist

If you ever need to remove it from launchctl, you can type the following:

launchctl remove ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.yourname.scriptname.plist

Using launchctl on Mac OSX 10.10 to run a script periodically

This is something I don’t do that often, and I always forget the correct syntax. Thus this post.

Let’s say you have a table images and a table users. Now you want to delete all rows in table images that are associated with rows in the table users that are marked as deleted.

First, I usually do a visual inspection of the rows that will be deleted:

SELECT i.* FROM images i LEFT JOIN users u ON i.user_id = u.id WHERE u.deleted = 1;

The rows returned by this query are the rows that will be deleted when you run the following query:

DELETE i FROM images i LEFT JOIN users u ON i.user_id = u.id WHERE u.deleted = 1;

They key part here is to specify which table you want to delete from. In this case it’s the table i, which is the images table.

Deleting rows with a LEFT JOIN in MySQL

Disabling the password needed for sudo for a specific user is very easy in Ubuntu. This method applies to Ubuntu 16.04, but probably also other versions of Ubuntu and maybe even other distros.

Note: If this is the first time you’re running this command, you’ll most likely be presented with a list of editors to choose from. Choose the one you’re most comfortable with.

Then enter the following line at the end of the file:

Make sure to replace user with the username of the user you want to allow using sudo without entering a password.

Disabling password for sudo in Ubuntu

The Royal Norwegian Air Force practices formation flying every year in December. This year, they were schedule to fly over Bodø at 11:22 on December 8th. I managed to capture them with my zoom lens just a couple minutes after their scheduled arrival.

It wasn't the greatest light for photographing moving aircrafts, but I managed to get a couple of photos that turned out somewhat okay.

RNoAF Christmas Star 2022

I relatively recently posted about moving my website to WordPress. This actually still holds true, but I’ve given the website a new look and made some changes to the deployment routines.

Now I have a solid development focused foundation based on Trellis.

My website is my playground. This is where I can freely play with any new technologies that I come across and just have some fun. It’s important to me that some of the things I do on the computer is just for fun, and not only work related – there’s quite a lot of that.

My previous WordPress setup was just a Digital Ocean droplet created using their One-Click WordPress installation. This works fine if you just want a website up and running where you can add a theme and your favorite plugins and start typing. But it gets a bit trickier when you want to have a local development version of the site on your computer and a production version, and even maybe a staging version, running live on the internet.

This is where Trellis comes into play. It’s a ready-to-use setup based on Bedrock and Ansible and lots of other good stuff that makes it really simple to get up and running with three different environments:

The workflow for setting up a new site once you have Trellis installed is something along the lines of:

Do some small adjustments to a couple of configuration files for the hosts (servers) and the various environments

Create a git repository of your project and push it to ie. Github

And voilà! Your site is now deployed to the staging server. Of course, you must have set up a server somewhere to use as a staging server. The same goes for the production environment.

In addition to this, I use the WP DB Migrate Pro plugin(s) so that I can easily migrate my database and media files from one environment to another.

Website changes – again

I'm Kim, a full-stack web developer and entrepreneur based in Bodø, Norway. Currently occupied with running my own company, being a father and raising a little standard poodle.

Full-stack web developer, business owner and tech geek.