mxsrm

A curated list of command-line utilities written in Rust

Note: I have moved this list to a proper repository. I'll leave this gist up, but it won't be updated. To submit an idea, open a PR on the repo.

Note that I have not tried all of these personally, and cannot and do not vouch for all of the tools listed here. In most cases, the descriptions here are copied directly from their code repos. Some may have been abandoned. Investigate before installing/using.

The ones I use regularly include: bat, dust, fd, fend, hyperfine, miniserve, ripgrep, just, cargo-audit and cargo-wipe.

atuin: "Magical shell history"
bandwhich: Terminal bandwidth utilization tool

If you're using a high-end bluetooth headset on your Macbook Pro it's likely your mac is using an audio codec which favors battery efficiency over high quality. This results in a drastic degradation of sound, the SBC codec is the likely culprit, read more about it here.

Find out what codec you're using

Play a song on your headphones
Option (⌥) click the Bluetooth button at the top of your screen
If you're using AAC or aptX, you can stop here—those are the highest quality codecs.

Change your codec to AAC or aptX

Intro

Out of the box, my SMB performance on macOS 12.3.1 would top out at around 20MB/s in short ~5 second bursts, which was absolutely horrendous, slow to navigate in Finder and slugish to interact with.

Since making these changes, I now get sustained ~80-100MB/s+ and instant Finder navigation which is superb and how things should be out-of-the-box (OOTB)!

May 2023 update: As of Ventura, the SMB issues were just horribly inconsistent and hard to maintain. Something in the combination of Unraid, macOS and SMB just doesn't play nice. I ended up binning NFS/SMB all together and heading to a locally hosted Nextcloud instance for file syncing, then using SFTP/Ansible Git flow for editing files within appdata.

Sources

Since we're dealing with simpler AV1 encoding, that does mean we'll be eskewing aomenc-av1, since it requires 2-pass encoding to be able to take advantage of it, and I use it externally since I have access to a special build.

Now, let's get on with the simple guide.

You'll first need to be reasonably competent with command line builds or use a recent up to date ffmpeg GUI with support for SVT-AV1.

As such, I would recommend getting a master git ffmpeg build for the operating system of your choice right here:

https://github.com/BtbN/FFmpeg-Builds

Current aomenc recommended settings for sharpness and detail retention:

--cpu-used=4 --cq-level=16 --end-usage=q --lag-in-frames=48 --enable-fwd-kf=1 --aq-mode=1 --deltaq-mode=0 --enable-chroma-deltaq=1 --quant-b-adapt=1 --enable-qm=1 --min-q=1 --enable-keyframe-filtering=0 --arnr-strength=1 --arnr-maxframes=4 --sharpness=3 --enable-dnl-denoising=0 --disable-trellis-quant=0 --threads=64

General CQ guidelines:

40: Youtube quality
30: Watchable, fine for streaming or lower bitrate encodes
20: Good quality

A simple Ghostscript command to merge two PDFs in a single file is shown below:

gs -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOUTPUTFILE=combine.pdf -dBATCH 1.pdf 2.pdf

Install Ghostscript:

Type the command sudo apt-get install ghostscript to download and install the ghostscript package and all of the packages it depends on.

	#!/bin/sh
	#
	# Clean-up Xiaomi smartphone without rooting:
	#
	# 1) You have to install adb tool from android sdk
	# 2) You have to activate developer options, next activate usb debugging
	# 3) Comment out or delete lines with packages, if you really need them
	# 4) Optional: I hightly recommed to activate OEM unlocking feature in developer options.
	# It doesn't unlock you device immediately, but in case of breaking you phone
	# you will have opportunity to unlock you phone and reflash it via MiFlash.

	#!/usr/bin/env python3

	# Simple tool to switch the Creative BT-W5 Bluetooth Audio dongle between AptX Adaptive Low Latency or High Quality mode.
	# Of course, only works with Bluetooth headphones that support AptX Adaptive, such as the Tranya X3
	# Reverse engineered based on communication between Creative's desktop app for Windows and the BT-W5.
	# Might also accidentally overwrite other settings as a whole config data array is sent without taking into account the existing config.
	#
	# Usage: sudo ./btw5-switch.py ll (for low-latency mode)
	# sudo ./btw5-switch.py hq (for high-quality mode)
	#

	#!/usr/bin/env python3

	# Simple tool to switch the Creative BT-W5 Bluetooth Audio dongle between AptX Adaptive Low Latency or High Quality mode.
	# Of course, only works with Bluetooth headphones that support AptX Adaptive, such as the Tranya X3
	# Reverse engineered based on communication between Creative's desktop app for Windows and the BT-W5.
	# Might also accidentally overwrite other settings as a whole config data array is sent without taking into account the existing config.
	#
	# Usage: sudo ./btw5-switch.py ll (for low-latency mode)
	# sudo ./btw5-switch.py hq (for high-quality mode)
	#

	#!/usr/bin/env bash

	# builds mpv & mpv.app on Apple silicon (M1 / M2) Macs
	# run this script from the root directory of the mpv repo

	# if anything fails, gtfo
	set -ex

	meson setup build
	meson compile -C build