I forget a lot of things. I forget how I did something, or where I found an answer, or where I put my glasses. I use technology to help with that to some extent, and Notational Velocity/nvALT are excellent at helping me find previous notes, assuming I bothered to take them.
logging, macos, notes, productivity, tagging
To pick the winners for the Yoink and Listary giveaways, I wrote an AppleScript to make the process completely random and as painless as possible for me. I still have plans for making a similar WordPress plugin, but that’s still in the planning stages. For now, this is working quite well and I thought I’d share it. I doubt many people have the exact same setup and requirements, but the basic structure might be helpful for other projects.
applescript, automation, ruby, scripting
The Listary giveaway has ended, and the five lucky entrants have been sent their promo codes. If you’re on the list below and didn’t receive a notification (and you’ve checked your Spam folder), contact me and we’ll get it sorted out. If you didn’t win but still need an outstanding syncing list app, be sure to check out the Listary homepage.
giveaway
I worked out a somewhat cool trick this morning using Twitter, some PHP and Wordle.net. If you’re curious to see what the major topics of conversation are in your Twitter stream right now, follow the instructions below. It currently piggy backs off of a dead project (JustTheLinks) I was working on, so it needs some polish before it’s presented as any kind of usable service. Before I put too much time into it, though, I wanted to get some reactions.
experiments, twitter
Gradient is a very polished tool for creating CSS3 gradients in a visual way. If you’re not familiar with CSS3 syntax, it looks a little like this:
appreview, css, webdesign
I just posted a minor update to the Marked Bonus Pack with a few bugfixes for the included Service and AppleScripts. The biggest fix is for the issue some people were having where running the Service would always open TextEdit. I was unable to replicate the problem, but I think I found a solution for it.
markdown, marked, multimarkdown, scripting
Quick tips are random posts regarding something I discovered on my way to something bigger. They usually get longer than “quick” would imply, for which I refuse to apologize.
experiments, inputrc, quicktip, terminal
The developers of Listary contacted me about working on some nvALT integration of their Simplenote-compatible iPhone app for creating lists that sync across any device or machine. I found the app cool enough that it’s definitely worth a mention here.
appreview, ios, iphone, review
I know, it sounds like one of those experiments that the productivity crowd subjects themselves to, just to see what happens. This was not intentional, premeditated or appreciated, though.
personal, writing
Continuing the series of geeklets I’ve been posting for GeekTool and NerdTool1, here’s my “Top CPU Processes” monitor.
geeklet, geektool, nerdtool, scripting
I had an interesting idea this morning. At least I find it interesting, but I haven’t slept much lately. Either way, here it is: in Markdown, if you misname a reference link, forget to fill one in or have a malformed URL, your broken Markdown shows up in your output. Wouldn’t it be nice if your preview highlighted those for you before you went to publish?
javascript, jquery, markdown, marked, news
