May 20
2011

It starts out with mdfind and all of the creative scripting you can do with it. You start finding batches of files with something in common and you do things with them or to them. It sounds genocidal; it’s not. It’s very productive after the initial script setup.

Take, for example, a little script I run to add thumbnails to weblocs I have laying around. It looks something like this:

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…

Apr 13
2011

Here’s a neat little command-line utility for searching your address book: aboo. It’s not complex… it just takes a single word or phrase and searches your Address Book entries’ names for it. It can output vcards and YAML, too. I created a fork that adds a few things, most importantly I extended search to business names and notes. It also does a better job of realizing…

Nov 19
2010

I needed a script send an SMS today, and I found a very handy post at sudocode to send one via Google Voice, using PHP. I wanted to make it a little more command-line-friendly, so I rewrote it (ham-handedly) in Ruby and added some options parsing to it. It’s designed for—and only tested on—OS X, but may work fine elsewhere.

Oct 11
2010

If you’re a Things.app user (and a Terminal user), I’ve got a quick function for your .bash_profile that will allow you to quickly add todo items to your inbox with notes and natural-language date parsing.

It uses php’s strtotime function, which does a pretty swell job with simple dates like “next tuesday” or “+12 days”. It’s not very smart, though; you have to…

Aug 14
2010

I was sifting through my previous blog after Jeffery Zeldman kindly sent a lot of visitors in that direction for some TextMate starter tips. Whilst milling around, I stumbled upon an old trick I used to use in Quicksilver (before I gave up on it[^quicksilver]), but had forgotten about since.

Aug 13
2010

I love the keyboard, and I love keyboard shortcuts. It’s one of the reasons TextMate and I get along so well. There’s one thing that bothers me any time I’m editing text (in any application), though: having to move my right hand all the way over to the arrow keys just to move forward a couple of characters, say, after an auto-paired set of parenthesis that I want to get out of.