BrockLi Soup

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:

1. Open the Quicksilver Catalog.
2. Click User in the list on the left.
3. Select Documents.
4. Click on the 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.
5. At the bottom of the drawer, click on the Attributes tab.
6. Click the Create A Copy button.
7. A copy will be created, and you are now editing that copy. Click back to the Source Options tab in the drawer and change the Depth slider to infinite (or lower, if you want it to catalog faster).
8. Click on User in the list at the left again. The checkbox next to Documents should have been automatically unchecked, since your new item overrides it. Uncheck it if it wasn’t done automatically.
9. If you want to update your catalog immediately, click the refresh button at the bottom right corner of the window.

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.

AppZapper

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.

Transmit

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.

TextMate

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

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.

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.

This year, I got me a Sansa TakeTV for Christmas. The system requirements make no mention of OS X, so I did some looking around online before opening it up - I only have a Mac, you see, and I wanted to make sure I could use the damn thing.

The Internet says I can use the damn thing, and I can. Unfortunately, it doesn’t handle many formats, so I’ve been trying to figure out how to convert video files and DVDs to DivX without having to pay for any software, or put much effort into it.

I’ve already got VisualHub, so I was hoping I could use that. I couldn’t find any specifics online for VisualHub and TakeTV, so I spent a little time fiddling with it. It took me a few tries, but I figured out how to do it.

1. Select the AVI tab
2. Drag your video file(s) into the big box in the middle
3. Click on the Advanced button - you have to change one of those fields that they tell you not to change
4. The last field in the Video section is “Extra ffmpeg flags.” In that dropdown, select “Best Possible MPEG-4″ (even though you’re making an AVI). This should be replaced with the following ffmpeg flags:

-vcodec xvid -mbd 2 -me full -flags +4mv+trell -aic 2 -cmp 2 -subcmp 2

5. Close that window
6. Pick a destination directory in the “Save To” box
7. Click the Start button
8. Give it about half an hour, and you’ll have a video file to drop on your TakeTV flash drive

I hope that makes life easier for someone, because I spent a while looking around with no luck at all.

Up until a version or two ago, I would just keep hitting Command+W as I finished reading tabs in Firefox, and when I closed the last one, the window would go away. I’m not sure why this doesn’t work anymore, but I just found out that Command+Shift+W will close the current window. It’s not as fluid as it used to be, but it makes me a lot happier than having to use the mouse or just using Command+H to hide the window until I need Firefox again. I figured I’d share, because I can’t be the only one who hadn’t figured this out.