I keep my Dock very trim. The only apps that have a permanent home there are apps that I either have to have running all day, or apps that I choose to have running all day. However, I don’t make them launch items. Booting up can be slow enough without trying to launch five heavy apps at the same time that everything else is loading.
macos, scripting, terminal
I use the Growl Extra in a lot of my scripts to offer notifications while they run in the background. It works great, and still works with Mountain Lion, but I have a thing for system integration and new shiny.
growl, macos, ruby, scripting
While my uses for it may be unconventional, I’m a fan of Day One for journaling and logging on Mac and iPhone/iPad1. I’ve been beta testing new versions for both and am excited to announce they’re finally available!
apps, dayone, giveaway, ios, macos
Episode 3 of my podcast, Systematic, is up on 5by5 now. I was ill and trying to get one in before I lost my voice (which I did), but the cold medicine left me a wee bit scattered. Hopefully my edits pulled the coherent parts together…
podcast, systematic
Via a post on OneThingWell, I discovered a new Ruby library and accompanying CLI called terminal-notifier. It allows you to quickly interface with Mountain Lion’s Notification Center from the command line. will be available as part of the filesystem-watching tool Kicker, but you can put it to use as a general notification system for Terminal right now.
cli, macos, ruby, terminal
Ok, I told the world and myself (in a podcast you haven’t heard yet1) that I wouldn’t admit to putting time into this, but… I kinda like it. Given that you’ll probably need it at least once at some point, I might as well share it and save you the time.
scripting, spotlight, terminal
The GeekTool Weather and Forecast script has been updated to handle multiple languages and with a system that allows for more languages to be added easily. It comes with Spanish, German, Dutch, Japanese and French.
geeklet, geektool, nerdtool
Mountain Lion moves “web sharing” out of the System Preferences interface (and into Mountain Lion Server), and disables Apache by default. Now that there’s no button to click to turn it on, you have to do things yourself. I’ve seen some of this posted in a few places, but this serves as a note-to-self.
macos, webdesign
Here we go again with the automated work logging. I decided I wanted to keep a record of my public Github gists in my log as well, with descriptions and links. I use gists a lot these days and they’re a good indicator of some of the things I’ve been working on outside of my git repositories (which are logged separately).
dayone, logging, scripting
I’ve been using this little trick frequently for a while now. I doubt “normal” people ever need to frequently restart apps, but when I start working on keybindings and other things that require fresh starts to take effect, it’s nice to be able to do so with a couple of keystrokes.
applescript, macos, scripting
Here’s a quick script I was playing around with this morning. I want to do some extensive string handling on all of the posts in my WordPress database. It made the most sense to me to pull each post’s content from the db, do the string mangling with a shell script and then replace the post_content field as I go. This script is destructive and any mistakes you introduce could kill your entire blog. Should you have a need for this script, back up first!
Wordpress, ruby, scripting
I’m pleased to report that—with minimal effort on my part—nvALT and Marked are running fine on Mountain Lion. I tested them a few pre-releases back, but got confirmation from a slew of users on Twitter (thanks everybody) that there appear to be no issues.
macos, marked, nvalt
Yes, I’ve been horrible about posting for the last week or two. I made you a podcast, though, with the help of Mike Rose (@MikeTRose). We discuss Retina displays, improv and delve into areas of psychology where neither of us should probably be delving… but it’s all for the greater good.
podcast, systematic
