Remember that dot that’s been showing up on my MacBook Pro display? I caught it! It’s definitely not a dead pixel or anything like that, since I was able to screen cap it and zoom in on it. Still don’t know what’s going on, though.
Every now and then I notice a pixel on my MacBook Pro display that’s stuck on white. This pixel has a 1-pixel wide light gray border. And it isn’t a dead pixel in the display – it appears in different places in the display at different times.
Now, just what in the hell am I supposed to do about that?
I talked about Things plenty when I compared it to OmniFocus a couple months ago. I’m still using it several times a day and love it. It has been updated a couple times since then, and now supports tags in the mobile version. No support for Areas yet, but it still serves my needs pretty well.
Byline is a pretty slick Google Reader client. I’ve gone back and forth between Byline and the mobile version of the Reader site, but Byline sealed the deal by adding folder support a little while ago. It allows you to share, star, and note items, and you can sync up to 200 items for offline reading – great for reading on the Metro, where I don’t get any cell service.
I fiddled with Instapaper on my desktop and didn’t really see the point, until I got the iPhone app. Instapaper gives you a bookmarklet that will save the content of a web page to their service, and for most sites, figure out which part of the page contains the content so you can just view the actual text.
Sort of useful on a computer; way useful on a mobile device. It will sync the articles you choose and save them on the iPhone for offline reading. Again, great for Metro rides. I typically use this in conjunction with Google Reader: when I come across a longer article or blog post that I want to read later, I save it to Instapaper and read it on the train.
There are two versions of Instapaper available in the app store: the free basic version, and the $10 pro version. The pro version includes several extra features, but the most important is that it will remember your place for you. The basic version just drops you at the list of articles every time you start it, which is a pain if you close the app halfway through a long article.
Evernote is a web app for collecting your notes, and they also have clients for Windows, Mac, iPhone, and Windows Mobile devices. I’m finally getting comfortable savings things in here, like all the stuff that was in my “Reference” e-mail folders and personal wiki, and a bunch of information about our wedding.
Viewing the notes does require a net connection – it seems that they are cached temporarily but not stored long-term. However, they recently added a feature to mark your favorites notes, which will be saved on your iPhone. I used this for notes about prescriptions and medical information, and information about upcoming flights – basically, stuff that I need to be able to get at whether I have cell reception or not.
I’ve only been using Tweetie for a couple days, but it’s way better than the other Twitter clients I’ve tried. Granted, it’s been a while since I tried any – Twinkle was so slow and weird when I used it months ago that I’ve been using the Twitter mobile site for a long time now. Tweetie is really quick and has a pretty full feature set, so I think I’ll keep it.
What happened to the power options in the menu bar in 10.5.6? I used to be able to choose Better Energy Savings, Normal, Better Performance, and Custom energy settings from the menu bar – and dagnabbit, that’s the way I liked it!
A couple weeks ago, I got a new keyboard for my carpal tunnel issues. It’s pretty comfortable to use, now that I’ve started to get the hang of the split style, but it’s also got all these extra buttons: mail, home page, favorites, things like that. I never understood why anyone would want all that extra crap until I started using them – they’re not a waste of desk space after all!
But this particular keyboard includes at its center a much-touted zoom slider. Who the hell needs a zoom slider? Aside from the elderly or others with poor eyesight, I can’t imagine this thing being useful, and I was pretty disappointed to find that the configuration doesn’t allow you to use it for scrolling instead – something everybody could use.
Lucky for me, I found Josh Highland’s post on the matter. He has a link to download a new version of C:\Program Files\Microsoft IntelliType Pro\commands.xml, but I don’t recommend that. I used WinMerge to diff it against my own, and found that some new stuff had been added since he posted that two years ago.
Thankfully, updating the file is a piece of cake.
C:\Program Files\Microsoft IntelliType Pro folder. Copy commands.xml to another location, just in case something goes wrong and you need to restore the original.C:\Program Files\Microsoft IntelliType Pro\commands.xml in your editor of choice."ZoomOut" with "ScrollUp"."ZoomIn" with "ScrollDown".IllustratorZoomin or IllustratorZoomout. I don’t know if these should be replaced with ScrollUp and ScrollDown or something else, but I don’t use Illustrator anyway. You can try replacing those if you’d like to.And bingo bango, you’ve got something useful in the middle of your keyboard. As always, I make no guarantees about this process, do it at your own risk, and try not to set anything on fire.
I just realized, pretty much just now, that I really don’t want to get a desktop. I got rid of my last one about a year ago, and I always sort of figured I would get an iMac once I had somewhere to put it.
What do I want with another computer, though? I don’t need more synchronization and backup headaches. An iMac won’t do anything for me that my MacBook can’t do. What I really need is a nice keyboard, mouse, and monitor that I can hook the MacBook up to when I’m at home. Well, what I really need is an apartment with a second bedroom so we can have an office. Right now, we do most of our computing at the kitchen table, and most of our eating at the coffee table. I can start thinking about upgrades once I have somewhere to put them.
Quicksilver is one of the most useful Mac apps available, hands down. I don’t even know how to find things on a Mac without it anymore – which makes it distressing when it doesn’t work the way I expect it to.
I keep a list of project ideas and things like that at Documents/GTD/Someday.txt under my home directory. Straightforward enough, but I can never remember where it is, and thanks to Quicksilver, I shouldn’t need to. But Quicksilver couldn’t find it this afternoon, and a little digging proved that Quicksilver wasn’t cataloging any subdirectories in Documents. I’m pretty sure it used to – I’ve been using it for a few years and never noticed any problems like this before, so I imagine that this bug was introduced when I updated to ß54 a week or two ago, and I just hadn’t noticed yet.
Now, I call it a bug, but it’s entirely possible that the developers made the change on purpose. Even so, here’s what I did to fix it:
i icon at the bottom left. This will open an information drawer. Notice that the Depth slider in the drawer is set to 1, but it’s disabled.
I fumbled my iPhone good today.
Erin and I were waiting for the bus to go kayaking. I had just put on sunscreen, so my hands were all slippery when I went to text Aubri, and it just spilled out and landed face-down on the sidewalk. We both kind of looked at it for a second, not daring to pick it up and see the damage.
My first thought was, “Well, I guess I’m upgrading after all.” I had no intentions of getting the 3G version any time soon – what little money I have is much needed elsewhere. But then I realized that thousands of OTHER people are upgrading – and selling of their old ones in the process. I could just get a used one and drop in my SIM card.
Unfortunately, used first-gen iPhones are running about $250 on Craigslist here, and my search for “iPhone” returned a lot more want ads than sale ads, so it’s safe to say that demand is high enough to keep prices higher than I want to pay. Or I could pay $200 to get a brand-new 3G, at an extra $10/month for the data plan – an extra $70 over the course of the next year.
Either way, it sucks. I really don’t want to spend money on a phone right now. I suppose I could just get a super-cheap regular phone, but after having an iPhone for 10 months, could I ever go back? On the other hand, I’ll bet I would be able to receive MMS.
The screen is hard to read, but it still works, so I think I’m going to give it a week. I’m just hoping that prices on used phones will fall a bit, which might be a little too optimistic, but we’ll see what happens.
At some point in our lives – let’s call it “college” – many of us downloaded illegal copies of software because we didn’t have the money to purchase it, or because we needed the money for something else – let’s call it “beer.” Not that I would do such a thing, of course.
Now that I’m not flat broke, I’m more willing to pay for well-designed software that I find useful, and much less likely to spend a lot of time trying to find and figure out flaky free alternatives, or consider “other” means of acquisition. These are some of the Mac apps that have been deemed worthy of my purchase lately.
Uninstalling applications on a Mac usually just means dragging them to the trash. It’s a simple method, though incredibly difficult for PC users to get used to. However, not all applications can be removed so easily. Sometimes, configuration files lurk in your Library or elsewhere. Furthermore, it can be hard to get rid of things like plugins and widgets if you don’t know where to look.
AppZapper fills this hole – it’s the “uninstaller Apple forgot.” It’s true that Apple should have just included this functionality in the OS, but since they didn’t, AppZapper is definitely worth the $12.95.
It seems like there should be at least one free FTP client for the Mac that doesn’t suck, but since I haven’t found it, Transmit was worth $29.95. After the 15 day free trial, you don’t get to use favorites and it limits your session to 10 minutes. For months, I resisted the price tag. I assumed that there simply had to be a good free alternative out there, and any FTP’ing I had to do was done in 10-minute increments in Transmit. I don’t know why I held out for so long, because Transmit is a great product, and the developers deserve to get paid for it.
This isn’t a new purchase (I’ve had it for about a year), but TextMate has become more and more useful to me lately. I wrote a post about it a couple days ago. It was a little cheaper when I bought it, and $64 seems pretty steep for a text editor, but it meets needs I didn’t even know I had.
OmniFocus is the kind of thing that I should really use more than I do. It’s a fantastic GTD-style task management app, but it would be a lot more valuable to me if I could just get in the habit of using it to track things I need to do. I’ve made a few well-intentioned attempts at my own GTD system, but I always seem to put a bunch of “I should do this eventually” type stuff into my system (in this case, OmniFocus), and then I never want to open it because I’ll be faced with all this crap that I need to get done, so I just keep making little post-it notes and ad-hoc lists and things still fall through the cracks. It took me about a dozen tries to quit smoking – maybe it will take me a dozen more to start using OmniFocus.
It took me forever to figure out what the dropdown at the bottom of the TextMate window is called – you know, the one where you select the language you want to use. As it turns out, “language” would have been a good starting point in the Google, but it took me a while to figure that out. It’s the one that says “Blog – Markdown” in this screenshot:
Anyway, I wanted TextMate to default to Markdown instead of Plain Text, and once I figured out what to search for, I found my answer pretty quickly.
To find the UUID for Markdown, I did this:
% cd /Applications/TextMate.app/Contents/SharedSupport/Bundles/Markdown.tmbundle/Syntaxes/
% plutil -convert xml1 Markdown.plist
% grep -A1 uuid Markdown.plist
<key>uuid</key>
<string>0A1D9874-B448-11D9-BD50-000D93B6E43C</string>
And once you’ve got that, this line sets the default:
% defaults write com.macromates.textmate OakDefaultLanguage 0A1D9874-B448-11D9-BD50-000D93B6E43C
Disclaimer: I don’t know if the UUID is specific to Markdown, or to Markdown on my machine. I would recommend running those first three commands first and double check the UUID before you try to do this. The UUID is specific to Markdown, so you can just execute that last defaults write line (thanks Drew!)
Also, blogging from TextMate is pretty handy. You may have noticed that the screenshot includes the beginning of this post, because I was writing it just then, right in TextMate. Handy, I tells ya.
Here’s a neat trick I didn’t know about. I already knew that hitting Command+Shift+3 will take a screen shot, and Command+Shift+4 will allow you to select an area of the screen to shoot. But if you hit Command+Shift+4, and then hit Space, you can take a shot of a single window without having to carefully select it.
Most of the text I edit is code. It’s just part of being a web developer. Sure, I do a little writing now and again for this here blog, but I usually do that in a web browser, so most of the time I spend in text editors is for code. But, I’m working on a pretty big documentation project for work, and I’m trying out Markdown for blog posts, so I’m spending more time in a plain vanilla text editor to do both.
These are the text editors I’ve come to know and love.
Everybody starts with Notepad. I think I wrote all of my HTML and fledgling Javascript in Notepad back in high school – Dreamweaver just felt unwieldy, and I didn’t know about any other options at the time.
It’s been a long time since I’ve used UltraEdit, but it was my go-to editor for most of college. I really only used it because I could open several files in tabs – pretty standard these days, but that was the first time I’d seen it. I don’t even know what else it was capable of, because I just used it as a basic text editor.
Zend Studio has been my primary IDE since I started my current job two and a half years ago. I love it because of the code completion and debugging for PHP, but I wind up using it for just about any text I need to edit quickly while I’m working because it’s always open. I also use it on my MacBook if I’m doing stuff for work.
TextMate has been gaining ground in my workflow. It’s a pretty powerful little editor, but I barely take advantage of it. I use it all the time to edit plain text, but I almost never code in it – Zend is a far superior IDE for PHP, so it never made sense to use TextMate for it.
The real power in TextMate comes from its bundles. I just finished a project with Code Igniter (more on that in another post soon), and TextMate turned out to be a lot more useful thanks to the Code Igniter TextMate Bundle (for the record, I found a second bundle when trying to find the link to that one, but I haven’t tried it yet). I like Zend’s code completion, but I was able to develop in TextMate a lot quicker with the shortcuts provided by the bundle.
It also has a Markdown bundle, which adds some keyboard shortcuts, provides a quick cheat sheet, and makes it easy to preview while you’re writing. In fact, I’m writing this in TextMate right now.
Update: I love it even more now that I’ve watched this video about blogging in TextMate. You can post new entries and edit existing ones right in TextMate!
To be honest, I haven’t actually written anything in WriteRoom, except for the couple of times I’ve played with it to tweak the font and such. Basically, it gives you a solid black screen with a narrow column of simple green text and a blinking console cursor. The colors can be customized, of course, but the point is that it gives you a stripped down, no frills, typewriter-like interface where you can write without the distraction of menus, bouncing dock icons, or IM windows. It really makes me wish I had something to write, because it just compels me to spill everything into words on the screen. I thought I might start using it with Markdown to write blog posts and stuff, but that was before I found all the shortcuts in TextMate. Still, WriteRoom just begs to be used, and I wish I had more than two days left in my trial so I could see if I can’t find a use for it.
After Guitar Hero made its way to mobile phones, this shouldn’t come as much of a surprise: The game has (unofficially) made its way to the Commodore 64. Creator Toni Westbrook calls it Shredz64. We call it a ridiculously cool labor of love, and the best thing we’ve seen today.
People like this make me wish I was geekier. Full article on Joystiq.
Remember when I was complaining yesterday about the dock in 10.5.2? Well don’t I feel silly.
I guess I didn’t really bother looking for an answer, because 30 seconds on Google got me a forum thread about this very subject. To use the folder’s icon in the dock, you just need to remove it and re-add it to the dock, or switch it from folder view to stack view and back again. For some reason though, restarting the machine won’t do it (I tried that first, just in case).
And since I didn’t describe it well, this is what I had to start with:
And this is what I’ve got now:
The Finances icon was made for me by the lovely and talented Sarah Friedlander, and I made the Atheist icon using the same tool she did, Can Combine Icons.
