May 05
2012

I made a small update to the natural language date Service that I put together a while back. I wanted it to handle input formats like “+3″ to get a date for 3 days from right now, and to handle adding times to the output if there’s a time-like string in the input.

Now you can use, for example:

Jan 24
2012

This post should have been titled “What happens to my mornings.”

I get a lot of one-off requests for scripts and tips on how to handle tasks specific to people’s workflow or writing style. I generally keep myself pretty busy, so I usually reply with a quick idea or thought and leave it up to them to run with it. David Coleman emailed me this morning, though, with…

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 24
2011

As I’ve mentioned before, I keep todo.taskpaper files in my web and code project folders. These allow me to keep track of bugs, ideas, notes, etc., and the archive it creates helps me remember what I did, when I did it and how it worked. I like having them separated per project; it’s the way my one-track mind works. I like the plain-text format because I can use any variety of…

Dec 21
2011

I finally got around to writing a script to auto-generate the documentation for my DefaultKeyBinding.dict file. The script now reads my comments in the file and creates tables of keystrokes and descriptions ready for GitHub. From now on, my fickle changes will be reflected in the readme​.md file in the repo and the keystrokes will stay current. You can see the current output here.

Nov 21
2011

I just added a pull request for my latest Dropzone (review) Destination. It’s called “Open URLs,” and with it you can open text urls from any number of text files, drag text straight from any application, or just click it to scan your clipboard. The files, text or clipboard contents are scanned for any http(s) links and they’re sent to your default browser using the system open command.

Nov 14
2011

Thus far, Marked has had a great reception and has, overall, worked superbly with a wide range of text editors. I frequently get requests for integration with more complex editors, but have been unable to fulfill them because Marked requires an actual text file to watch. To try and fix this situation, I’ve been scripting “watchers” for various applications which embed their files…