Noulakaz

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

Technology

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.

How to create a permalink for a Microsoft Office 365 Outlook email

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At work, I have to use Microsoft Office 365. Sure, I’m more used to Google or open-source software solutions but, well, the Microsoft offering is not bad at all.

One small issue I have is that, in the web version of Microsoft Office 365 Outlook Mail, the URL which is in the address bar when reading an email is not a permalink. In other words, copying that URL in, say, a task manager is useless because, clicking on it, will not bring you back to the email. Rather, it goes to the Inbox, which is useless.

I got the solution from Nick on Superuser, part of the Stack Exchange franchise. The three steps are as follows:

  1. In Outlook Mail, in the list of all emails, right-click on a specific email and, in advanced actions, choose “Create Task”. A new task is created in To Do.
  2. In To Do (which can be accessed by clicking on the checkmark icon at the bottom left of Outlook Mail), click on the newly created task and a right side information panel opens up.
  3. The permalink is the “Open in Outlook” link. Right click on it and copy the link.

Voilà.

This is much more complicated that in Gmail (where the URL is always a permalink) but it’s better than nothing… For me, this is important as it allows me to use GQueues with Outlook Mail.

One caveat: moving the email to another folder (e.g. archiving it) invalidates the permalink. What I do is to archive first, search for the email then create the task. It is tedious but it works.