Mar 13
2011

A Pinboard redesign built off of the styles started by Josh Pigford, I’m providing a bare stylesheet which works with StyleBot on Chrome and User CSS on Safari. The Chrome version can be installed straight from Stylebot​.me. Stylebot​.me also has a userscript version which could be used with Greasemonkey, but my styles don’t seem to translate well to Firefox, yet. I’ll work on…

Feb 20
2011

I’ve been flirting with a plain-text to-do system again. The biggest problem for me is that a plain text system opens up so many possibilities for fiddling and scripting. I always end up fiddling more than working when I try it. I don’t see any reason this time would be different, but it’s Sunday and I have some extra time on my hands after being snowed in today. So I’m fiddling.

Feb 06
2011

I know, I said I was done with the Lorem Ipsum generators. Then Dr. Drang responded with a brilliant solution which doesn’t require Internet access to generate some beautiful dummy text. I set it up and ran it myself, and loved the results. Then I found myself wanting to expand it to do more, such as multiple paragraphs, list items and other things I use regularly when making…

Feb 05
2011

Ok, this is the last TextExpander Lipsum post, I promise (with my fingers crossed). I’m posting a full TextExpander group with all of the TextExpander random Lorem Ipsum generators I’ve posted so far (LoremIpsum​.com, LoremIpscream), plus some new ones based on the Kwisatz Haderach[^dune] generator. That one seemed to make a few people pretty happy (looking at MacSparky). It…

Feb 04
2011

I usually get up an hour or two before I start my work day and “play.” Playtime usually results in half-finished scripts and deleted git branches, but sometimes I do something simple and useful (to me). Wednesday was Bash fun, and here’s this morning’s project: LaunchBar actions to url encode and decode strings[^fn1]. If you run them outside of LaunchBar, they’ll encode/decode…

Feb 02
2011

This is probably going to seem stupid, but every time I decide to do something in Bash that should only take me a minute, I end up losing an hour. I obsess over “better” ways to do everything. Not surprisingly, my motivation often wanes before I actually find the better, more elegant way, so these little projects end up lackluster. Fortunately, I end up learning all kinds of…

Feb 02
2011

It turns out it was me that was broken, not the Loremipscream API. That API can return just plain text, so the shell scripts are much more readable than trying to hack apart XML in Bash. You can get a list of “flavors” from the website, or just curl "http://loremipscream.com/flavors.xml" from the command line. That will also give you the slugs you need to use when calling them.