Dead batteries in the middle of a flight sure make the trip feel longer. Here’s the stuff I suggest to my friends and family to make batteries last as long as possible.
It’s not rocket science.
Macbook Reduce the fricking screen brightness! They even put shortcuts on the keyboard to do this. They’re trying to give you a hint. Lowering the screen brightness is the single biggest change to cut power consumption.
It’s a dumb trick but pretty handy. Here’s an Alfred custom search for Brewery DB. Note that spaces need to be encoded as “+”
:::text http://www.brewerydb.com/search?q={query} And here’s a query string for BeerAdvocate:
:::text http://www.beeradvocate.com/search/?q={query}&qt=beer Here’s the Untappd query string:
:::text https://untappd.com/search?q={query} RateBeer uses an ASP form so there’s no URL query possible.
Pretty straightforward use of the custom Alfred Web search function but put to a very good use.
Brett wins for so many reasons, least of which is the anthropomorphizing of software and their mutual affection.
This video excites me way more than it should. My iThoughts icon has three thumbs up, because if I’m going to imagine my application with arms, it damn well will have more than two.
Coda is the one of a kind development app for the Mac. I’ve used it since version 1.0 but the latest update to 2.5 brings back some of the excitement of that first release.
Coda 2.5 for the Mac greatly improves the application interface but one of the big new features is addition of Panic Sync. With Panic Sync, the iOS and Mac apps will contain all of the same sites which can be a pain to do manually.
Here’s a great Mac app for getting your PDF annotations into usable text. Highlights (Mac App Store Link) takes the native PDF annotation you probably already use and exports them as annotated Markdown. It’s a bit of a text editor and a bit of a PDF highlighter. What I really like is that it automatically captures the page number for each annotation.
Highlights has a basic image selection tool that automatically drops a Markdown image link right into the text area, which adds an entirely new level to annotating in Markdown.
Just a quick reminder for nerds that installed Yosemite. You probably need to reinstall a bunch of Python modules. If you use Paramiko, then you should also install the XCode command line tools first. You can install Paramiko and the dependent Crypto library manually, or through Easy_Install.
Anyway, it’s nice to have my Hazel scripts running again.
After moving to the released version of Yosemite from one of the many GM candidates1 I started seeing a console warning that was hard to research. I saw it a lot. Hundreds of times a minute this message would appear in the console:
It was hard to research because there appears to be very little mention of the terminology outside of security research. Yeah, that started to make me concerned. I unfolded my tinfoil hat and rolled up my sleeves.
From The Register:
Spotlight phones home in OS X Yosemite, version 10.10, and it is enabled by default: it can be switched off, but with Apple insisting that it now takes people’s privacy seriously, the software has raised some eyebrows.
Count my eyebrows as being raised too. It should be off by default and opt-in only. The problem with these decisions is that they increase my suspicions of all activities.
Macstories has always been my favorite Apple-related site, but Alex Guyot has been a fantastic addition to the stable. His latest article about automation in Yosemite is great.
Here’s all of Alex’s stuff at Macstories.
Carbon Copy 4 looks like a very worthy upgrade, especially if you need it on Yosemite.
I like the new scheduler interface and the simple setup seems approachable. I’m sticking with SuperDuper because it works and there’s no reason for me to break something that works. But if you want bootable backups and have $40 CCC should be a good option. I like the icon too.
