Keith Smith - My Blog

Homebrew is a package manager for OS X. A package is a collection of code files that work together. Installing them usually means running a script (a bit of code) that puts certain files in the various directories. A lot of the packages you will want are going to have dependencies. That means they require you to have other packages already installed on your computer. Homebrew will find and install dependencies for you AND it will keep them organized in one location AND it can tell you when updates are available for them. On top of all of that it gives super helpful instructions when everything doesn't go smoothly. You can read more about it at Homebrew's website. For now, install Homebrew using the following line of code:

$ /usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

The script will explain what changes it will make and prompt you before the installation begins. Once you’ve installed Homebrew, insert the Homebrew directory at the top of your PATH environment variable. You can do this by adding the following line at the bottom of your ~/.profile file

export PATH="/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:$PATH"

Now, we can install Python 2.7:

$ brew install python@2

Because python@2 is a “keg”, we need to update our PATH again, to point at our new installation:

export PATH="/usr/local/opt/python@2/libexec/bin:$PATH"

Homebrew names the executable python2 so that you can still run the system Python via the executable python.

$ python -V   # Homebrew installed Python 3 interpreter (if installed)




$ python2.7 -V  # Homebrew installed Python 2 interpreter




$ python3 -V  # Homebrew installed Python 3 interpreter (if installed)

The Gmail web UI hasn’t changed much over the years regarding the way it looks and it still is lacking features. I found that most prefer to use a mail client instead to send/receive mail which is a pro but the con to this method is synchronizing calendar items, insert outlook google calendar sync for the win.

This solution is open source and works great, it can sync calendar items from your outlook calendar to your Gmail calendar or from your Gmail calendar to your outlook calendar, or it can do bi-direction sync which is most useful for those who bounce between the Gmail web UI and the outlook client. If you have Gmail and you use the outlook client I recommend installing this, don’t forget to enable the auto sync on it.

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