Oct 18
2011

I ran into an interesting problem this evening. It actually started a few days ago when I noticed that my qq script wasn’t returning searches within the @(metadata) I set up in the note bodies. I figured I’d come back to it when I had time. Then I got a couple of emails from readers who had also noticed this, so I started digging. It turned out that Spotlight had stopped…

Oct 04
2011

I’m not up for doing a full Bash autocomplete tutorial tonight, but wanted to share something I figured out instead of eating lunch. Here it is with a modicum of explanation.

I’ve been using Jon Stovell’s quit script to stop running applications with various save options as part of tweaking a safer universal computing setup with Dropbox. For various reasons I found myself…

Sep 29
2011

I worked out a somewhat cool trick this morning using Twitter, some PHP and Wordle​.net. If you’re curious to see what the major topics of conversation are in your Twitter stream right now, follow the instructions below. It currently piggy backs off of a dead project (JustTheLinks) I was working on, so it needs some polish before it’s presented as any kind of usable service…

Sep 25
2011

I was playing around with some readline options this morning, after reading this post on Reddit Commandline. A few of them wouldn’t work for me, so I did some research into the version of Bash that comes with OS X.

Sep 02
2011

I was looking at some numbers on a web page. A wide variety of fairly large numbers. The web page didn’t provide any kind of average for the numbers, and I was curious. Curious, of course, meant writing a script to solve the problem. Yes, I could have copied the numbers out, punched them into a calculator one by one, or opened up Numbers and pasted them into cells… bah…

Mar 26
2011

Hey, TextExpander users! Wanna see something cool? I made a little tool this morning to allow any of my TextExpander groups to be installed with your own custom prefix. You can now use whatever is “standard” for your shortcuts. All of the group links on the project page now go to this tool, and you can open it directly for access to all of my groups.

Mar 18
2011

I use TextMate for editing most of my Markdown. I could name a dozen reasons why this is the case, but let’s leave it at auto-pairing, wrapping and the Blogsmith Bundle features. Anyhow, I got a bug yesterday to make TextMate work in “concentration” mode (ala WriteRoom). Not because I think that will improve my writing habits, I just wanted to see if it was possible. A few…