Noulakaz

The blog of Avinash, Christina, Anya and Kyan Meetoo.

Archives for March 2021

Convert multiple lines into one tab-separated line using paste

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I generally have a lot of text files with such content:

1
Play track
Turn Around
Unlove this track
Panic Attack
Avinash Meetoo
110 scrobbles
2
Play track
Playing the Angel
Unlove this track
Precious
Depeche Mode
101
3
Play track
The Singles 86>98
Unlove this track
Personal Jesus
Depeche Mode
98

These are the three tracks I have listened to most since I started using Last.fm way back in 2005.

What I want to achieve is to easily convert these 21 lines (3 x 7) into 3 tab-separated lines which can then be easily imported into, say, Libreoffice Calc:

1<TAB>Play track<TAB>Turn Around<TAB>Unlove this track<TAB>Panic Attack<TAB>Avinash Meetoo<TAB>110 scrobbles
2<TAB>Play track<TAB>Playing the Angel<TAB>Unlove this track<TAB>Precious<TAB>Depeche Mode<TAB>101
3<TAB>Play track<TAB>The Singles 86>98<TAB>Unlove this track<TAB>Personal Jesus<TAB>Depeche Mode<TAB>98

For many years, each time I had to do that, I wrote a small Awk script. But, today, thanks to RudiC on the Unix Stack Exchange, I have the perfect recipe using paste:

paste -s -d "\t\t\t\t\t\t\n" file-containing-all-the-lines.txt

Naturally, you can adjust the number of “\t” if you have fewer or more fields.

Enjoy :-)

Installing a previous version of a program in Homebrew

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I’m an avid user of Homebrew on macOS.

Doing an updates rightly updates all software installed through Homebrew to their latest version as expected. But, sometimes, you might want to install the previous version of a program. Here is the correct way to do it courtesy of variar on Stack Overflow:

TAP=...    # <org>/<repo>, for example "my-org/homebrew-old"
MODULE=... # name of module you want to install, e.g. "hugo"
VERS=...   # version of $MODULE you want to install, e.g., "0.80.0"
brew tap-new $TAP
brew extract --version $VERS $MODULE $TAP
brew install $TAP/$MODULE@$VERS

An example without using the shell variables is as follows:

brew tap-new avinash/homebrew-old
brew extract --version 2.51.3 unison avinash/homebrew-old
brew install avinash/homebrew-old/unison@2.51.3

The first command creates a new tap called avinash/homebrew-old and this needs to be done only once.

This will install a previous version of unison, version 2.51.3. Incidentally, to obtain the list of versions of a specific Homebrew program (called a formula), you can use this excellent search feature of Github.

I have my dream HiFi setup: Audiolab and Elac

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One of the “exercises” I love doing is imaging my perfect audio setup.

Four years ago, I thought that my dream combination would be a Nad integrated amplifier and Dynaudio speakers. Two years ago, I changed my mind to an Audiolab 6000A and the same Dynaudio speakers. Today, I now have my dream setup for listening to music:

And, very interestingly, I purchased the Audiolab and the pair of Elac speakers in Mauritius. I got the Audiolab 6000A at Art of Sound (thanks Gilbert and Ravind) and the Elac at ED Electronics (thanks Hafiz). At both places, I dealt with real professionals who were also passionate about high end audio and music in general. Everyone told me that there is a definite market for high end products in Mauritius.

The equipment cost me around Rs 50,000. Quite steep but, bear in mind, that this is not an expense but more of an investment for years and years to come. At least, this is what I like to say to myself.

A big thanks to Christina. She is the one who made everything possible. And she is now an audio buff, just like me and so are our kids. Life is really cool.