macolyte.net

How I Back Up

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 18:21:00 -0400

It appears the post I wrote about downgrading from Mountain Lion to Lion has become wildly popular (relatively speaking). The reason I was able to restore all of my data (and then write that post) was that I had a recent backup. Backing up is probably the single most important piece of maintenance you can perform on your computer. And having multiple backups in multiple places is also a pretty stellar idea. So with that in mind, I thought I’d share my current backup strategy.

Hourly: Time Machine to a Time Capsule.
Daily: Arq , which backs up my home folder to Amazon S3.
Monthly: SuperDuper!, which clones my entire hard drive to an external USB drive.

This setup works really well for me and I haven’t been tempted to change it since I started using it (which is a minor miracle in itself). The most important facet is that it’s pretty much friction free. And that’s what you want in a backup system: something where you can set it and forget it until the (hopefully rare) moment you need to use it. The Time Machine and Arq backups happen automatically, so I never need to remember to do them. If I were to keep the external drive attached to my MacBook Air at all times, I could also schedule SuperDuper! to run its backups automatically as well, but I don’t so there’s a monthly repeating task in OmniFocus that ensures I do it.

There are other solutions out there, especially in the online backup arena (you can check out CrashPlan , Backblaze , or Carbonite , for example). If you want even more information on the topic, the Mac Power Users Podcast recorded an episode all about it. I highly recommend checking it out.

Instant Safari Porn Mode

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 17:32:56 -0400

Every browser keeps track of your history. This is handy in most cases, like if you accidentally closed a tab and want to go back to it. But there are some instances when you don’t want your browsing tracked: you’re doing your banking, you’re searching on Google, you don’t want your wife to see all the porn you’ve been looking at. For those scenarios Safari’s Private Browsing mode has got your covered. You just go up to the Application menu and click. No problem.

But what if you want to always visit a certain site in Private mode? You could open a new tab, type in the URL and go click the Private Browsing item. Sure it’s not an overwhelming amount of work, but why not automate it? (Bet you didn’t see that coming.) Apple doesn’t provide a keyboard shortcut for Private Browsing, so you could set one up in System Preferences and shorten the process a little bit. You’d still have to open the tab and type in the URL yourself though.

Fortunately, Safari has decent AppleScript support and opening a new tab and setting its URL are things it will let you do. You can also script the clicking of menu items (even if it is a bit ugly). With all the pieces in place, here’s a script that ties everything together:

Not only will this script open your new tab, if it’s already open it will close it and exit Private Browsing mode.

One unfortunate caveat for Private Browsing: you can’t apply it to a single tab; it apples to all tabs. So if you’re logged in to a web page in another tab and try to do anything with it, it will forget that you’re logged in. You can, of course, log in again.

Two Automation Articles from Mac|Life

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 20:36:59 -0400

I don’t normally link to these “N Totally Awesome Things You Can’t Live Without” type posts, but some of these were genuinely useful. Sadly, I don’t remember who pointed me in their direction.

15 Automator and AppleScripts You Can’t Live Without

7 Awesome Hazel Rules You Can’t Live Without

How new Mac security measures will impact AppleScript

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 17:44:58 -0500

How new Mac security measures will impact AppleScript:

Lex Friedman:

Apple doesn’t want to annoy you, or restrict you from doing the things you want to do with your Mac. So if you run a script “by hand”—whether from AppleScript Editor, from within Automator, or as a standalone app or droplet—it should be able to do whatever it’s scripted to do, just as it can today. Put another way, you should be able to continue to run scripts by hand just as you always have.

I certainly hope that’s true. But I wonder how it will effect apps like FastScripts or LaunchBar that allow you to run scripts you’ve created “by hand”….

TextExpander tools for AppleScript editing

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 17:37:49 -0500

TextExpander tools for AppleScript editing:

I had set up a few of these on my own, but it’s nice to see them all in one place and maintained by Brett.

How to Downgrade from the Mountain Lion Developer Preview to Lion

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 09:38:00 -0500

Have a recent SuperDuper clone of the machine you want to downgrade created before installing Mountain Lion (the first machine).
Have another computer currently running Lion (the second machine) and a USB drive of at least 8GB.
Install and run the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant on the second machine.
Boot the first machine from the USB stick created in the previous step.
Launch Disk Utility.
Restore the first machine’s hard drive using your SuperDuper clone by dragging the drives from the left hand pane to the Destination and Source fields,respectively, on the right.
Stop trying to use development versions of operating systems as your primary operating system. Shit will break. Often badly.

Macdrifter - Justin Lancy’s Writer Workflow

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 14:19:00 -0500

Macdrifter - Justin Lancy’s Writer Workflow:

You should spend some time trying to refine your way of working but, in the end, you should never forget that systems and tools are less important than something else — actually doing your work.

Justin’s Veritrope site is one that I should have been following but wasn’t, which is weird because I’ve stolen a thing or two from his scripts. Fortunately that error is easily rectified and there is now a link to his site in the sidebar.

David Sparks - Dumping Google Search

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 09:18:00 -0500

David Sparks - Dumping Google Search:

Since I do >90% of my searches with LaunchBar, I created a custom search template. To create one, display your LaunchBar index (from the Index menu) and select Search Templates. Then tap the Add button and add a new search template for DuckDuckGo pointing at http://www.duckduckgo.com/*

Custom search templates? Thank you David for reminding me how little I actually know about LaunchBar’s functionality.

Interesting Links - Week 3, 2012

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 11:39:25 -0500

Diurnalize - Silly daily challenges.

Steven Frank: Notes - Who doesn’t love Steven Frank? Guy knows his shit.

iBooks Author - Announced by Apple this week, I think this could be a game changer for digital publication.

Evernote and MarsEdit

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 10:32:52 -0500

I use MarsEdit to post most of the articles (if you want to call them that) I write here. It’s a great application, but I don’t like writing draft posts in it because there’s no way for me to access them when I’m not on my Mac (at least not until Daniel gives us MarsEdit for iOS). I’ve tried to write my drafts in text files stored in Dropbox using vim, TextMate, nvALT and Byword and then mashing together some combination of AppleScripts, shell scripts, and TextExpander snippets to easily get the content into MarsEdit. Every “solution” was hacky and I grew dissatisfied with them all so quickly that I lost track of which one I was using at a given time. But since The Switch to Evernote, I’ve come up with what could be the One True Blogging Workflow for me.

I created a notebook in Evernote called @macolyte_drafts where I keep a note, written in Markdown, for every post I’m currently working on. Once I’ve given up on trying to make the post sensible, I hit ⌘ ⇧ M and the following AppleScript is run (thanks to another one of Daniel’s excellent applications: FastScripts) to turn the note into a new blog post entry in MarsEdit:

(Some bits of the code are from here and here

After the piece is published, the note gets moved to the @macolyte_pub notebook (sadly, Evernote doesn’t support moving a note from one notebook to another via AppleScript so I have to do it manually). And that’s it. My drafts are always with me and getting them published is not in any way hacky.

Interesting Links - Week 2, 2012

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 18:07:02 -0500

Awk - A Tutorial and Introduction - Pretty self-explanatory.

TThor Newsletter - Long list of interesting links, delivered to your email inbox every week.

The Kingdom of Loathing - Ever wanted a pet sabre-toothed lime? Have an urge to celebrate the Festival of Jarlsberg? If you answered yes to either of these questions, then this the online game for you. But even if you didn’t, forget your fancy World of Warcraft graphics. Embrace the simplicity of line drawings.

BBEdit

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 17:47:48 -0500

A couple of good, detailed posts about BBEdit this week. Not an editor I use on a regular basis, but I’ve tried it a few times here and there. It doesn’t suck.

Macdrifter - Moving Text Editors: Taking BBEdit Seriously:

What I’ve discovered is that BBEdit is an incredibly complicated and simple tool. It’s a plain text editor on the surface, but it’s highly customizable (like Textmate or even Vim). I’ve been documenting some of my experience and this post describes some of what I like about BBEdit 10.

Clark’s Tech Blog - Problems with BBEdit:

Right now, to be honest, I write all my BBEdit scripts in Python using Appscript. It’s far more easy to write and I can leverage all the Python libraries to do things.

RAW Week at Boing Boing

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 22:19:58 -0500

RAW Week at Boing Boing:

Speaking of Bob:

Over the next week, Boing Boing will be posting a series of remembrances, interviews, videos, and other material about Robert Anton Wilson that we hope will astonish and delight you, too.

My Favorite Author

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 07:50:05 -0500

Various members of the Read and Trust network spent November writing about their favorite authors. Since I’m not nearly cool enough (and let’s be honest probably never will be cool enough) to belong to a group of such excellent writers, I thought I’d share mine here: Robert Anton Wilson. You’ve probably never heard of him.

I first came across Bob’s work while I was a very impressionable teenager. I must have been taking a break from my obsession with The Lord of the Rings because I was looking through my dad’s book collection for something (countercultural?) to read. On one of the shelves I found a book enticingly titled Cosmic Trigger: The Final Secret of the Illuminati. It was an old paperback; the pages were yellowed. The Illuminati reference is what initially piqued my interest, but it was the epigrams and wonderful illustrations scattered throughout the book that sucked me in. Much like a Lovecraftian scholar vanishing from the Orne Library, the book mysteriously disappeared from my dad’s.

Cosmic Trigger wasn’t the first book that Bob had written. Both the cover and the text made reference to another book: The Illuminatus! Trilogy, which he had co-written with Bob Shea. It sounded fascinating. This was in the days before Amazon.com, so it was difficult to track down a copy, but track it down I did. Most people would be put off by an 800+ page non-linear narrative, but I gobbled it up like a five year old reading Thomas the Tank Engine (or whatever it is five year olds enjoy). And that’s where shit got crazy.

You see, it wasn’t just the content of Bob’s books themselves that made me such a fan. Everything he wrote drew from so many sources that I’d find myself traveling down some ridiculously eclectic avenues of investigation. A very small handful of things I’ve been exposed to thanks to Bob:

Discordianism and The Church of the SubGenius
Fnords and the 23 enigma
Alfred Korzybski and General Semantics
Reality tunnels and Synchronicity
James Joyce
Friedrich Nietzsche
H.P. Lovecraft

Given even this small list, I think most people today would simply dismiss Bob as a crazy burned out relic of the Hippie age who dropped acid with Timothy Leary one too many times. It wouldn’t be a completely unfair observation; he couldn’t help but be a product of his time (who can?). I certainly didn’t agree with some of his more utopian ideas and was never particularly keen on the drug references, but to me he was more the sage mystic who knew a secret none of us did. He made me think about how arbitrary everything really is and how needlessly complex we’ve made this silly little world of ours. He taught me that in most situations there’s more than yes/no, either/or: there’s also a maybe.

Bob was an eternal optimist. He, like Nietzsche, lived most of his life dealing with various kinds of pain. He contracted polio at a young age and suffered from post-polio syndrome for the remainder of his days. His daughter was killed in a robbery at age 15. He lost the love of his life to stroke. Despite all this (and the election of George W. Bush) he still believed in the basic goodness of people.

Bob died on this day, at this hour, in 2007. And it saddens me that he never wrote a book on Finnegans Wake.

Resources:

Interesting Links - Week 1, 2012

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 13:50:22 -0500

Interesting Links - Week 1, 2012:

Slow week….

The James Joyce Checklist - A huge database of primary and secondary works related to James Joyce.

Code Year - A new programming lesson automatically sent to you every week. I’m in. (via Brent Simmons)

Brett Terpstra - Some of my Favorite Mac apps in 2011

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 18:10:06 -0500

Brett Terpstra - Some of my Favorite Mac apps in 2011:

When Brett says an app is good, you listen.

An Interview With Notational Velocity Developer Zachary Schneirov

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 15:00:06 -0500

An Interview With Notational Velocity Developer Zachary Schneirov:

I think in Notational Velocity you can see the genesis of this wave of text editors and note taking applications we’re currently riding. I switched to nvALT when it first came out, but that application wouldn’t have existed without the original.

Macdrifter - Safe URL System Service

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 11:05:05 -0500

Macdrifter - Safe URL System Service:

A nice example of how to integrate Python with Automator. I can definitely see myself using this in the future.

Interesting Links - Week 52, 2011

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 14:16:10 -0500

Interesting Links - Week 52, 2011:

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Python - Just a rough outline at this point, but could turn into something promising

Raspberry Pi - A $25 ARM-powered Linux box. I might buy one just for the hell of it. The price is certainly right.

Asciiflow - An online flow diagramming tool done completely in ASCII characters

Proposed New Calendar Would Make Time Rational

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 09:08:00 -0500

Proposed New Calendar Would Make Time Rational:

Not Mac related, but I’ve always been fascinated with calendars and the measurement of time. Personally, I think the Discordian calendar is far superior to anything we have going right now: none of this 30 days hath September bullshit. It’s all arbitrary anyway.