macolyte.net

Text Processing in Linux - Useful on the Mac too

einstein - NewtonOS emulator. Not something new to me, but it’s been getting some more love lately.

Amazon Kindle Source Code - I’ll never look at this, but still pretty nifty

playterm - Like looking over someone’s shoulder as they do stuff in a terminal.

70Decibels - Fun podcasts. British accents.

pickleDB - Kinda like plists.

I’ve always thought Evernote would make for a workable place to keep something like a daily log, but I could never find a friction free workflow to make it happen. However, I was recently reminded that LaunchBar is more than just an application launcher and can execute actions, which can be AppleScripts. Since I know a little AppleScript, I wrote one that would basically solve this problem:  

Now all I have to do is invoke LaunchBar, hit space the switch to text entry mode, and type my text. A new note is created in the Log notebook with the current date as the title. If a note with that title already exists, the new text is appended to it. Each “entry” is prepended with a timestamp and the pipe character like this: 12:34:56 |. It also pops up a nice friendly message if, for some reason, there are two notes with the same name in the Log notebook.

If you choose to use this, and the format I chose doesn’t appeal to you, or you want to use a different notebook, it should be fairly straightforward to see where those things can be changed in the script. Of course after writing this I found another daily diary script that I’m sure is much better written than mine, so you can check that out as well if this sort of thing interests you.

I’m pretty happy with how this turned out, but sadly I can only use it on my Mac (and even then only until Apple kills off AppleScript support). It would be nice if I could use it on my iPhone/iPad and especially useful on the shitty PC they make me use at work. It’s not impossible to do on either platform, just not quite as smooth. If Evernote on iOS supported TextExpander Touch it would be helpful, but it doesn’t. Fastever does support TextExpander and could be used for creating the initial note for a given day, but I don’t think you can append to notes once they’ve been created. At work, I’m experimenting with Breevy and the PC client and it’s working ok so far. But these are still workarounds; no amount of text expansion will change the fact that I still have to launch the application instead of just hitting a quick keyboard shortcut. That friction could make all the difference between actually using it regularly and not.

I really enjoy Brett Terpstra’s web excursions, so I’ve decided to shamelessly steal the idea. Look for new installments Saturday-ish (unless I don’t find anything interesting to share).

Here are this week’s links:

Calepin - Markdown + Dropbox = Blog.

(An ((Even Better) Lisp) Interpreter (in Python)) - Title says it all.

SmalltalkHub - A source code repository for, and written in, Smalltalk

A quick followup to my stealing Amazon image cover images post. I wrote a short AppleScript that will let you grab a one-off. First you’ll need to visit the book’s page on Amazon, highlight the ASIN in the location bar and copy it to the clipboard. Then run this little guy:

Assuming you stay on the item’s Amazon page, it’ll be replaced with just the image, which you can then drag out of Safari. 

If, for some crazy reason, you use Google Chrome, this script will mostly do the same thing:

This whole process is still not as automated as I’d like it to be, but it’s getting better.

I’ve decided to abandon my plain text note-taking system in favor of Evernote. nvALT and Byword, Elements and PlainText, these are all great applications and I’ve gotten a lot of use out of them over the years, but there was one use case that they weren’t addressing for me: sometimes it’s helpful to have images, or some other kind of non-textual data, accompany a note. The plain text editors just don’t do that (by design and rightfully so). I’ve used Evernote off and on to clip interesting things from the Internet and I think it would be easier for me if everything was in one place instead of scattered across multiple applications.

After deciding to take the plunge I whipped up an AppleScript to import all of my existing text notes into Evernote:  

I saved it as an application, selected all the text files and dropped them onto it. A few minutes later they were all in Evernote, with the note’s creation date set to the original file’s creation date.    It’s also trivially easy to turn the script into an OS X Service, so if you find yourself wanting to import random files from the Finder into Evernote you can. To do that: 

1. Open Automator and create a new Service. 
2. Set the Service receives selected dropdowns to files or folders in Finder.app.
3. Find the Run AppleScript action in the left hand pane and drag it over to the right.
4. Copy the repeat block above and paste it into the on run block in Automator.
5. Change the file_list variable to input.
6. Save it with a sensible name like Import File to Evernote.
7. There is no step 7.

You could also use an application called ThisService, which takes an AppleScript and turns it into a Service, but I’ve personally never used it and it hasn’t been updated since 2008. I don’t see why it wouldn’t still work though.

I’ve got a few posts about some other useful things I’m doing with Evernote in the pipeline and will share them in the near future. So stay tuned. 

There are a bunch of licenses people use for their web content these days. The most prolific is probably Creative Commons and its many variants. But the one constant in all licenses is pervasive legalese. So with that in mind I present to you the Don’t Steal My Shit License:

• You can read my shit
• You can quote my shit
• But don’t be a dick and steal my shit

Simple, permissive, to the point. If this license appeals to you I encourage you to use it on your own works. But keep in mind that I am not a lawyer (nor do I even play one on TV) and this license will probably not stand up in court if someone does steal your shit.

Re: my last link, I feel like I should explain, briefly, why I have no use for sites like Engadget or the Verge (hereafter referred to as General Purpose Tech Blogs, or GPTBs) instead of just saying they suck.

For better or worse, I’m only interested in a small area of the tech world. GPTBs, as my pithy initialism suggests, all cover broad categories of tech topics, most of which I consider completely irrelevant to my life. For example, I couldn’t care less about reviews for the Hot Android Phone of the Week or speculation about what Apple may or may not be doing six months from now. I understand that they do this to bring in a wide audience (and hence more advertising dollars), but for me the signal to noise ratio is just too low. Their home pages are completely overwhelming and, quite frankly, it’s a waste of my time to look through all of the headlines and try to find the one or two articles I would actually want to read. Ditto for any RSS feeds that they publish. 

I know there are lots and lots of people out there who actually care about overall trends in the tech world or whatever the new hotness is, but I’m not one of them. And I don’t think these kinds of sites should go away either. They have their uses and occasionally put out articles that interest me. I just assume if that happens, it’ll probably pop up in one (or many) of the other news sources I follow. And that’s worked out pretty well for me so far.