tips

Scratch File - Add to Top

I modified my scratch file script. The new version appends the clipboard to the top of the file rather than the bottom. That way the scratch file is in chronological order. WARNING: This script overwrites the contents of a file. [cc lang="AppleScript"]do shell script "pbpaste '/tmp/qqq_Scratch.txt' echo '/tmp/qqq_Scratch.txt' cat '/Volumes/Macintosh HD 2/Dropbox/Notes/qqq_Scratch.txt' '/tmp/qqq_Scratch.txt' cat '/tmp/qqq_Scratch.txt' '/Volumes/Macintosh HD 2/Dropbox/Notes/qqq_Scratch.txt'"[/cc] Just as a Unix reminder, the double angle bracket "

Scratch File

I keep a scratch file in my NVAlt library. I use it to keep random bits of information that I want to out live the clipboard. It's not meant to be permanent just a stop-over to some other destination. My clipboard is pretty volatile since I have a number of macros and scripts that temporarily hold bits of information on the clipboard. If it's something I might need later, then I better get it into something a bit more permanent.

Command Line Fu

I’m in heaven… CommandLineFu.com Some much good stuff. At least an evening worth of fun hacking to be had with this site.

Beer Tracking The Trilogy

The Trilogy This is the opening crawl to a trilogy. Like any good trilogy, it will begin with episode 4 and never, ever speak of episodes 1–3. The trilogy will describe a quest to find the ideal solution for curating my collection of micro-brewery beers. The quest spans several suites of applications: Bento, OmniOutliner and iWork Numbers. I’ve learned a lot about how I can use these tools and I hope someone else gets something out of this series.

Styling OmniOutliner on the Mac

As I have mentioned, my dear wife is now a full time OmniOutliner user. She started on the iPad and eventually migrated to the Mac. One major advantage of using OmniOutliner on the Mac is that you can design templates that automatically handle formatting based on context. The Omni Group provides some tutorials and some specific demos of styles but I decided to whip up a little tutorial for my wife and I am presenting it below.

Upload File Selection Via Transmit

In the never-ending pursuit of hard-won laziness, I often develop scripts to do simple tasks. Sometimes the joy is in the problem solving and sometimes it's in the final product. In this case it was in both. Yesterday I was working on an as yet to be published post that has a large number of images. My typical workflow is to make an annotation in the text of the image I want to insert.

Test Your ISP

I have been experiencing some odd behavior with my network performance. Mostly issues associated with HTTP requests hanging. I have not solved the issue yet, but I do have a few tools that come in handy for figuring out if your ISP is up to no good. The first is Glasnost from the Max Planck Institute. The java applet will check for packet shaping antics as well as throttling from your ISP.

Where039d My TXT File Go?

I'm not sure which application or service is responsible for it but I've noticed that a large number of my text files have been converted to Markdown (.md) and MultiMarkdown (.mmd) files. This isn't be so bad since the contents are still just plain text. However, several applications that I either use or I am testing do not recognize the md or mmd extensions. Recently I went to find a file in NVAlt and it was not available.

Too Many Triggers

After posting one of my macros for Keyboard Maestro @hiilppp tweeted that there is a simpler way: Create a service with one line of Shell script. That is simple, but I have more services than I care to admit. So I started to play around with various methods of triggering scripts and macros. I am not a savant with LaunchBar, TextExpander or Keyboard Maestro, so there may be better solutions that what I describe.

Making Things Go Boom Link

I love everything about this Screencast. Especially the obvious love for making interesting things. I think Boom is a solution for a problem I’ve been working on lately. Fun is at hand. By way of Brett Terpstra