Tasker: displaying Active Profiles one per line in a Minimalistic Text widget on the homescreen

so a few days ago i actually purchased an app. for the first time ever. (some would say i’m cheap, but i prefer frugal)

what warranted the opulent purchase of $3.99, you ask? Tasker, the android automation app that apparently lets you automate just about everything on your phone. i was instantly enthralled, to say the least.

i’m still new at this, but today i figured out how to display something pretty nicely and i couldn’t find the instructions on almighty google, so i’m sharing:

how to make an at least semi nice looking active profiles display widget

 

a screenshot of an android with the cyanogenmod 12.1 OS showing custom tasker widgets, among which one shows the currently active profiles
fun fact: i just got cyanogenmod 12.1 the other day so i had to google “how to take a screenshot on cyanogenmod 12” to get this image

if you haven’t already guessed, i’m going to provide a short tutorial of how to get the “Active Profiles” custom widget seen in the screenshot. you may also be wondering why on earth i’m still using BBM, but i’m going to ignore that for now.

some of you might be reading this and thinking “but wait, doesn’t Zooper do something like this with Tasker integration?”

why yes, i have been googling that for hours, thanks for checking. but since Zooper is  $2.99 and i’ve already indirectly mentioned that i’m a fan of free apps, i wanted to see if i could do this with Minimalistic Text instead. so i did.

i’m going to assume that those reading this have at least made one very simple profile in Tasker already (maybe try this first if you haven’t).  there is also this handy tutorial if you’ve never worked with Minimalistic Text-Tasker integration before.

it is important to note that when Tasker Profiles become Active (in use and lit up green within the app UI itself), Tasker stores a comma separated list (a string, not an array) of all of the Active Profiles in its built in global variable %PACTIVE. they also put commas at the beginning and end of this string “to make matching easier”. it is very ugly.  this will come up later.

now to the learning part!

Continue reading Tasker: displaying Active Profiles one per line in a Minimalistic Text widget on the homescreen

this sqldump file is too big for a text editor to find and replace without crashing, HELP

this helpful tidbit is for readers with perl installed on their computers that need to perform a find-replace on entirely too large of an SQL file. on a mac you can find out if you have perl by checking for the version:

perl -v

if something shows up like “This is perl 5, version 18, subversion 2, etc. etc. etc.”, congrats, you have perl!

the other day i was exporting a monster wordpress site and needed to do a find-replace on the entire database before importing again. the sql file was a tad large, and by that i mean it crashed my Sublime Text Editor. it also crashed a regular text editor and Coda. so i did what i always do when my programs fail me: to the command line!

Continue reading this sqldump file is too big for a text editor to find and replace without crashing, HELP