Hear this recitation by Stephen Fry1, then think about what he says.
Hear it again, then meditate on what he says.
- this man could read the instruction manual of a tape recorder and i would still link to it and love it [↩]
We often ask God to show up. We pray prayers of rescue. Perhaps God would ask us to be that rescue, to be His body, to move for things that matter. He is not invisible when we come alive. I might be simple but more and more, I believe God works in love, speaks in love, is revealed in our love. I have seen that this week and honestly, it has been simple: Take a broken girl, treat her like a famous princess, give her the best seats in the house. Buy her coffee and cigarettes for the coming down, books and bathroom things for the days ahead. Tell her something true when all she’s known are lies. Tell her God loves her. Tell her about forgiveness, the possibility of freedom, tell her she was made to dance in white dresses. All these things are true.
Go forth and be awesome !
I’ve used keyboard maestro quite a lot at this point, but i was pleasantly surprised to find quite a few unknown KM tips, from this link that i had buried in my instapaper list1.
Here are the more uncommon tips that i didn’t know of:
The first trick is that you can prefix a macro name with a number, followed by a closing parenthesis, and that prefix will be used for sorting the macros but won’t be displayed in the menu or in palettes
KM 5 introduces a new method to make separators: use one dash as macro name, like “10)-” and you’ll get a real (unselectable) separator.
These tips just made organizing my KM Macros a whole lot easier. I’ve also added the multiple clipboard copy and menu glyph macros. If you’re a KM junkie, then you’ll enjoy the post.
- one of the only problems with Keyboard Maestro, is that the documentation doesn’t clearly explain enough the true power and possibilities of what you can achieve on your Mac with KM [↩]
for all our failings, despite our limitations and fallibilities , we humans are capable of greatness…
from the book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space by astronomer Carl Sagan
Many people in the pure classical circles criticize Zakir ji for being more of a showman. To this I only share the below video as a response1:
This is an astoundingly classical masterpiece, on the tabla. But if you have to truly enjoy it, you need a little knowledge of the “bols”. Having this cursory knowledge lifts the experience of watching the previous video to surreality.
And here’s a video where he demonstrates his showmanship and the gimmickry that the misinformed seem to be offended by:
Say what you may, true mastery will gain its rightful recognition.
- students of sound-engineering, notice how at 03:40 he asks the low-mid to be reduced. [↩]
Truly inspirational stuff. I see a Tom Hanks movie script already in the making.
Andy Ihnatko’s recent post on Presidential candidates and how they handle shame, led me to President Obama’s speech on Race. His speech addresses the murky situation when Rev. Jeremiah Wright racist remarks almost derailed the campaign.
Both are must-reads.
Bonus points if you can gather how another recent President has had to tackle some atrocious actions.
I bought the Marked app mainly to support the super awesome Brett. I’ve now come to really like its capabilities1 .
I use BBEdit solely, so it seemed obvious to have a Quick “Preview in Marked extension”. I couldn’t find one, so I whipped one up in Keyboard Maestro. I’ve reused a couple of KM’s “Move Window” library macros, so make sure you download them.
Todo: While KM is capable of moving windows, I’ve found moom and divvy to be much faster. So will have to write an AppleScript that would allocate the moving to moom.
- My utopian goal would be to replace Microsoft Word completely with BBEdit txt files and Marked [↩]
I read this post on macintweak that lets you quickly share files through dropbox, and felt inspired to make a Keyboard Maestro version.
My KM macro works a tad bit differently from the one described in the post:
- select a bunch of files/folders from the Finder
- hit a keyboard shortcut (i use Cmd Shift S)
- boom.. your done
In the background:
- KM zips the files together (even does folders recursively)
- generates a random filename for the zip file (as recommended by Merlin Sensei)1
- creates a goo.gl shortened url link
- copies it to your clipboard, so it’s ready for quick posting.
I’ve added two macros, that pop up as a palette with two options: one that removes the original files and another that keeps the originals untouched.
Update : So I felt a little guilty that my macros were not truly “securely” sharing the files through dropbox. I’ve corrected this by adding a third option to the macro palette, that does a pretty decent job with security. It additionally prompts for a password to the zip file, that the receiver must use to open up the archive.
You can download them all from my github repo.
- Ok, so maybe this isn’t the most “secure” way of sharing, but it should do for most basic stuff. [↩]
I’m a little troubled that I love these kind of lifehack videos.
Frankly, I was surprised that Gruber mentioned Markdown previewing at all. If you’ve been around the Markdown community for any length of time, you know that the first rule of Markdown is: Gruber never talks about Markdown
great article on hiring developers via hacker news:
… You should mention what technologies you are using (because listing WCF or Java will save me the hassle of applying, and you the hassle of rejecting me), but don’t list specific tools, languages and frameworks as requirements.
Good developers who know Rails can learn Django or Node.
Going between Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL and Postgres is all pretty trivial.
… I remember being asked quite eagerly, during a pre-interview, if I knew a specific view engine (like erb, or haml…). Seriously, a view engine!?!? A shitty programmer can learn a new view engine in 10 minutes. Or a more common one that always gets to me is listing some specific version control software. Or a specific library that solves a trivial problem (I see this all the time from the .NET world with DI and mocking frameworks)
Good programmers not only learn, but they want to learn. They often know enough about a technology so that they have a good feel for what problems it might solve; and only invest time truly learning it when it’s needed.
do read the article in its entirety. it’s pretty short and pure gold.
i’ve had this link lurking in my instapaper feed for sometime.
if you’ve been using the web for a couple of years, you know what “captcha” is. in my day job as a software designer i was taking a look at preventing bot attacks on an online site my company was developing. i heard reCAPTCHA was helping digitize books and was curious to know how they were doing it. Here are the interesting parts:
reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.
But if a computer can’t read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here’s how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.
Currently, we are helping to digitize old editions of the New York Times and books from Google Books.
if a company i worked for ever gave me 20% time to do my own thing, i would most definitely work on something like this:
The latest beta of Google Chrome offers something similar to tab syncing. There’s a catch though:
it only works if your tabs are open in another other device at that exact moment.
Sync has always been Google’s strong suite: they’ve done the Profile thingy pretty well and the whole Android to Gmail/Gcal sync worked flawlessly well before the competitors. But Tab sync in it’s current form is not too impressive. I’m sure though, it’s only a matter of time before they get it right.
Until then, if you wish to have a more useful form of Tab Sync, check out the extensions TabCloud for Chrome and Sessions for Safari.
If you’re looking to purchase a Mac, this is definitely the best place to scout out the best prices.
This is why I love Stack-Exchange: Curated, no-nonsense erudite answers.
Significant points from the post:
Chrome is a moderately CPU intensive application on its own (a tradeoff that is inherited by its One Process Per Tab design). It taxes your hardware a little bit more when creating new tabs and it uses slightly more RAM in order to keep things smooth. In exchange, you have a very solid -hard to crash- browser that will be able to keep working even if some of its tabs are literally dead.
I’ve added a tag now for all these browser-war related posts.
Unlike the cool kids online, I don’t feel any shame admitting that I think the Google Glass project “concept” is pretty cool. I just strongly feel, no matter how good you choose your promo models, you cannot avoid looking like a douche bag wearing an electronic gadget on your self. Also notice, how un-google like the models chosen to wear Project Glass are1 ?
But I thank Google from the bottom of my heart for google Project Glass… why ? “Lover’s Craving by Bibio“.
- as in no hipster looking kid, but chiseled-feature god-like looking creatures… i’ll stop now [↩]
Ok I promise to take a break from the BBEdit and Keyboard Maestro posts, but I just had to post this macro. I’ve added so many customizations to BBEdit at this point that I find it impossible to type text in any other environment. So i needed a quick “edit in BBEdit and get back” sort of script.
Cursory Googling revealed that there’s already a paid app in the Mac App Store that does exactly this (see QuickCursor). If you don’t have Keyboard Maestro, I highly recommend you just pay the 5$ and get hold of the tool. It’s created by the very cool Hogbay Software of PlainText and WriteRoom glory.
If you have Keyboard Maestro though, you should use this KM macro I just created (mine should work with Mail and most other Applicationa). Here’s a quick video demo of the macro being used.
It’s late and I haven’t tested this enough for quirks, but it’s been working pretty good so far. Download the macro from my github repo.
Do write in with your suggestions/bug notifications.
One of the great features of any MacBook is the shut-lid-instant-sleep feature. Just shut your laptop lid and it safely puts your system to sleep. You get so accustomed to this, that you might eventually forget how one actually shuts down a MacBook. There’s one caveat though:
Shut your Macbook down “completely” if you don’t plan to use it for more than a few hours.
For more details on this check Dan’s previous hivelogic post on the subject.
