Mac OS: Spotlight and source code #
Mac OS X has a real time file indexing system called Spotlight. By itself, it's not terribly useful for me. What makes it useful is that it's accessible from the command line. I can search filenames:
locate mapgen2.as mdfind -name mapgen2.as
The locate command relies on a database that's rebuilt nightly; mdfind is updated in real time. Spotlight also indexes the contents, which gives me something similar to recursive fgrep:
fgrep -R word * mdfind -onlyin . word
It won't search for arbitrary regexps but for quickly narrowing down files to find certain words, it's useful.
Extracting Safari's Reading List #
I use Safari's Reading List to transfer pages from my phone to my computer. But I don't really want to read these in Safari on my desktop. I'd rather read them in Firefox, maybe through Pinboard, which has an API to write items and mark them as "to read". This blog post documents what I learned.
Update: [2014-06-07] Deleting items out of the reading list does not work properly. It's ok to read everything out of there but I haven't figured out how to properly modify it. So I guess I need to delete things manually after I read them out.
Update: [2014-09-18] With iOS 8, I'm switching from Reading List to something else, maybe Pinner, to make this process easier.
I searched the web for some resources, and learned that the reading list, as well as other Safari bookmarks, are stored in ~/Library/Safari/Bookmarks.plist. I can use plutil and PlistBuddy to read and edit that file.