A nice outline of common unix tools for monitoring resources and processes.1
I originally drafted this post with a link to Nettuts. But it looks like they just ripped off the original. Kind of disappointing. It makes me skeptical of the rest of their work. ↩︎
ccstone has a nice cheat sheet over on Github. It’s a quick reference for BBEdit Regex.
By way of Mac OS X Hints
Pinboard.in is well known for being an anti-social bookmarking service. The addition of default private bookmarks is inline with that philosophy and I think it’s a great idea. About half of my 10,000 bookmarks are private. The other half, I make public to anyone that is bored enough to look through them.
Side Note The majority of my private links are work related. The second most common private links are personal projects I'm working on that I'm not ready to share.
It can be tough explaining what Markdown is to a normal human being. I’ve struggled with describing the expanse that is MultiMarkdown. What’s a header when you don’t know what HTML is? No more explaining.
Introducing the Markdown Field Guide by Eddie Smith and David Sparks.
This is a wonderful tour of Markdown. It guides the reader from the basics up through the sophistication of MultiMarkdown. It is well organized, simple and beautiful.
Here’s a little trick in OS X that I underuse: Hit F5 while typing a word in many Cocoa apps to get a list of suggested words.
This works in TextEdit, Mail, OmniFocus and Tweetbot.1 Unfortunately it does not work in Sublime Text or nvALT at all.
Actually, this command has several keyboard shortcuts that work in different apps:
⌘.(period)
ESC
F5
Only F5 works consistently for me in multiple applications.
I constantly use a few of the hardware keys on my MacBook. The Volume, Play/Pause and Mission Control are developing some serious wear marks. But I never use the rest. This means I have to be annoyed by a modifier key if I want to use the F-keys for anything else.1 There’s an easy solution to this problem.
I set the keyboard preference to use standard F-keys instead of hardware controls.
I still use OmniFocus during the day on Windows. But there’s a trick. I use Spootnik as a rudimentary interface to my projects and tasks. What’s Spootnik? It’s a third-party WebDAV syncing service for OmniFocus that provides a basic web interface to the OmniFocus data.
Spootnik is not a complete solution. It lacks the ability to set start and due dates, see or edit notes or choose assign projects. However, for a few dollars a month, it provides a very convenient way for me to add and process tasks while on Windows.
Here’s a quick tip for using Pixa for Mac to extract icons from application bundles. Just drag the application into Pixa. A new folder with the same name as the app is created. All image resources can be browsed and filtered easily using the Pixa automatic tagging.
Note, this creates a copy of the application bundle in Pixa not just a view into the original application bundle.
Default Folder X is one of those system utilities I never think about but immediately miss when on someone else’s Mac. The “favorites” are just one of those little touches that make DFX worth the $35 price.
Favorites are configured in the DFX preference pane and can be configured with a system wide hotkey to access the folder at any time.
Now, every Open and Save dialog has easy access to the favorites through the side bar of the DFX window chrome.
I don’t think I’ve linked to this before, but Philippe Martin has one of the original and best pages of Keyboard Maestro tips.1 I love the formatting of the example macros. It’s clearly a labor of love and must have taken ages to compile. The whole thing beats the pants off of the native Keyboard Maestro documentation.
I just wish it had better references and attribution. I know I’ve seen these before and I would really like to know the original sources.
