Nov 04
2011

I’ve been having an issue with the latest version of Growl (1.3.1) where notifications randomly get “stuck.” No amount of clicking and option-clicking will make them go away. Until there’s a fix for this, I’m using a brute force restart to clear them. I have it set up as an alias (killgrowl) in my .bash_profile and as a LaunchBar action (Restart Growl.scpt). It’s a really…

May 01
2011

A little while ago I approached the subject of scripting automated encoding for HTML5 video formats. I started using the process regularly as I built the Blogsmith Bundle video site. Pretty soon I got some help from friend and TUAW editor Mike Rose, and working together we refined the script and improved the speed tremendously. It was built for use on Mac OS X, but with just a few…

Jun 19
2010

Just a quick hit on this one… when hacking away at the styles of things one probably shouldn’t be hacking away at, embedding images right in the CSS is a handy trick. It’s done by Base64 encoding the image, removing line breaks from the resulting string, and using it to set the background property for the CSS rule.

Apr 28
2010

I’m fascinated by http://to. It’s a url shortener with no TLD. Some browsers, and apparently some DNS setups, don’t like the urls it creates (they want a .com or .org or anything at the end), so it’s not exactly in heavy usage. Still, I wish they had an API. In lieu of that, here’s a quick Ruby script that will run on a stock OS X install as a System Service. It’s so…

Mar 06
2010

Just a quick change to my post on the bash function fk that I’ve been using. A small modification has greatly improved its usability: make the cancel option always be first in the menu. Just move “Cancel” before the $(fp $1) bit. It’s a little odd that I didn’t do that to begin with…