Archive for the ‘Code’ Category

Jan 19
2012

I’m enjoying logging with Day One right now, and getting geeky with it. To that end, I put this project together during the few breaks I’ve had over the last couple of days leading up to the new Engadget live blog launch today. The result is a practical proof of concept in the form of a System Service for clipping any text to Day One. I figured that this could actually be really…

Jan 16
2012

I have long kept a journal–more precisely, a log–using VoodooPad with the Scratchpad scripts by Ian Beck. It’s been a great system, but after years of usage it’s started to become a bit cumbersome. VoodooPad can handle the load, but running the custom scripts is inconvenient on a document with thousands of pages. In the interest of trying new things (and fiddling away some…

Jan 04
2012

I wanted to share a handy tool that I realized I use daily but rarely talk about. I call it Read2Text, but it’s really just a Frankenstein script which combines Python Readability (license) with html2text (license). The combination allows you to grab web pages, process them with a port of Arc90’s Readability and convert the HTML to Markdown, ready for pasting or piping to a text file.

Dec 31
2011

Well, here it is: my last Geeklet post of 2011. I think it’s the simplest Geeklet I have, but it’s kind of fun. It uses the I ♥ Quotes API to put a random quote on your desktop.

There’s a variety of quote categories to choose from, ranging from geeky to humorous, religious to sci-fi. See the API page for a list and replace “literature” in the url with whatever you…

Dec 28
2011

Here’s a quick riff on an older bash alias I use which will allow you to easily scan system messages from Terminal.

I’ve long had an alias in my ~/.bash_profile called console. It simply tailed the system log with ‘alias console=‘tail –f /var/log/system.log’.

Dec 25
2011

We’re having a low-key holiday this year. I mean really low-key. Aditi’s napping on the couch, the dogs are all sleeping, the cats and the bird are lazily preening themselves and I just fixed Markdown QuickTags.

Markdown QuickTags, my WordPress plugin which adds a massive number of Markdown-editing features to the built-in post/page editor had broken with the…

Dec 24
2011

VoodooPad is a powerful note-collecting, wikifying, productivity machine. With the right scripts, you can make just about anything happen, at least within the realm of text, images and web pages. VoodooPad has a built in web server, and can export your notebook as a full website, with links intact. I like the web export the best, because it gives me a crazy amount of control over the…