As you may know, I store a lot of information in plain text files. Among the things I enjoy about this has always been that I can grab the contents of any file straight to the clipboard — without opening it — when I’m on the command line. I just use and boom, done. I wrote a function a long time ago to make this a little safer and more convenient. It avoids clipping non-text files accidentally and provides a little feedback.
macos, service, terminal
The next beta of nvALT 2.2 is ready for automatic update (for users already on the beta), or for download below. We received some great contributions from the community and there’s a lot of new goodness (and bugfixes) in this release. Special thanks to:
nvalt
I’ve updated the Markdown Service Tools again, now at version 1.5.2. A couple of Services had stopped working completely, and a few needed improvements to be a little smarter with various formatting anomalies, and I made a couple of minor additions.
markdown, markdownservices, service
I just had to test this. It’s a Jekyll plugin that takes the ID of a Flickr photo set and turns it into a gallery, keeping all photos hosted on Flickr. Not that I make a lot of galleries on my blog, just one of those “I think I can do that” things.
gallery, personal, photography
Update: So many people told me that it didn’t work for them that I had to go digging for why I was different. I had forgotten where the whole discovery started: I mapped hyper-Tab to Command-Tab in BetterTouchTool. That’s why it functions this way. Get BetterTouchTool and add a keyboard mapping, then this will all make sense.
keyboard, productivity, quicktip
As I start blogging more with Jekyll, I find that manually placing the images in my source folder and typing out the resulting urls is a bit cumbersome. I know a lot of people have come up with solutions for this, but it was simpler to roll my own in the end. I’ve created a few ways of doing this on OS X. All of these methods will copy the image to an appropriate, date-based subfolder in your static blog’s source, optimize it if the tools are available and immediately place Markdown…
jekyll, ruby, service
I’ve had a lot of fun with Jekyll lately. There are little things popping up on this blog that seem insignificant but took way too much time. I’m not sorry, I had fun doing it. I intend to blog a bit more about my Jekyll hacks, but I threw this one on today and it’s simple enough to write about in under five minutes.
jquery, tagging, webdesign
It was great to have Howard Buddin, Ph.D. back on the show this week. We continued our discussion of the human brain with conversations about memory loss, common disorders and the perceived rise of autism.
podcast, systematic
Thanks to contributions from several readers, the Localized Weather Geeklet has been updated with new languages, including Italian, Polish, Norwegian, Dutch and Swedish. The current list of credits includes:
geektool, nerdtool, weather
I talk a lot about keyboard and text tools. Many of my projects are System Services, but I’ve also shared a pretty vast array of KeyBindings. If you’re like many of the people who contact me with questions, you’ve probably wondered what the difference is and why you would want to use both. After all, you can assign keyboard shortcuts to Services, so what’s the point of confusing keybindings?
keybindings, productivity, service
I ran into a situation yesterday where I wanted to create over a thousand TextExpander snippets. I won’t go into detail about why, but I thought I’d share my solution. In my case, I was working with a huge CSV file where one field would be the abbreviation and another would be the expansion. The script I’m sharing below only works with CSV files containing two fields (abbreviation, expansion), but it can easily be extrapolated to work with much more complex sources of data.
productivity, ruby, scripting, snippet, textexpander
