I did do some drawing today, just not the regular kind.
I wanted a handdrawn design on my website for quite some time, and then Michael Nobbs tweeted a site with a whole list of handdrawn designs. This of course meant I should get my act together and do it.
I spent the entire day doodling, and working with my graphic tablet. Soooo tired.
And so very happy with how it turned out!
I think everything works as it should, feel free to comment if it doesn’t.
I wanted an easy way to shorten my URLs through one of the URL-shorteners out there. I liked bit.ly, because it's nice and short, has an easy to navigate web-interface (without a mouse) and I can use its magic with my terminal (cURL).
I also very much like TextExpander and after googling a bit, I ofcourse found an Applescript for TextExpander and Bit.ly. That link also shows how to set it up in TextExpander, very handy! The script does not however use your actual bit.ly account so you can keep track of the URLs you shorten. I tweaked it and made adjustments and it took hours and ofcourse, then I find this which is almost exactly what I had, except with URL-encoding (yummy). The only problem with that one was that I couldn't get it to have the URLs show up in my recent history. The 'history=1' didn't seem to work.
I tweaked some more and came up with something that completely does what I want. I use OmniWeb so I replaced the
set the PageURL to (the clipboard as string)
with
tell application "OmniWeb"
set PageURL to address of active tab of browser 1
end tell
If you use safari, use
tell application "Safari"
set PageURL to URL of front document
end tell
Continue reading “Bit.ly + TextExpander + Applescript = WIN!” »
I started decluttering my e-mail. I thought over 1gb worth of e-mail took up too much space, and what the hell did I save in those folders anyway?
I found I also had a huge procmailrc that filtered through my messages and put them in many nested folders.
Before I started I made a small inventory of what I had:
I use IMAP exclusively, and my accounts have about 1GB of space each, so I had the space to save it all. I also have the space to stack my living-room full of boxes, but I'd rather not.
So, I took the necessary steps to clean it up. Continue reading “Cleaning up my mailboxes, and useful procmail-bits.” »
After several days of OmniWeb use I remember why I so happily used it before. It zooms through pages and (yes, get this!) I can actually watch (YouTube) movies again. For months every time someone sent me a link to a YouTube or other movie I'd either have to say 'Sorry, can't watch that' or forward the link, I'm almost afraid to say, to my iPhone so I could watch it there.
Yes, you got that right, I could watch internet-movies on my iPhone but not on my laptop. Yes, I have an old laptop, but I love it.
With OmniWeb I can actually watch most of them (though a bit staggering sometimes) because the browser itself doesn't eat up too many resources (looking at you again Firefox! this hate will soon pass but I will indulge in it a bit). So far I have not once had to close my browser or other programs to reclaim memory / cpu. Closing a few tabs does the trick. Now, I may have to do this every once in a while, but having to do it every two hours (you know who I'm talking about) gets really really annoying.
Aaah, the small pleasures in life... YouTube movies...
Once again I got frustrated with Firefox and Safari for numerous reasons. I went over to the OmniGroup site to check out OmniWeb cause I really liked using its demo. I wanted to see what price they charged and see if I would want to part with that (next month) to solve my frustrations with The Other Browsers.
And they made it free. I suck for only finding out now, three weeks after they made it free, but at least it means I can have my lovely browser that supports applescript and Services (looking at you, Firefox!), doesn't take ages to load a page (again, looking at you, Firefox!) and supports non-mouse browsing (Firefox! no wait, that's actually Safari....).
Very happy :D
For a while I've wanted to easily postpone tasks in OmniFocus because sometimes, I just want to procrastinate a little.
Last night I started fiddling and playing with AppleScript to get this done and after a few hours of that I wanted to rip my hair out. I went to bed instead because I quite like my hair intact and had a few other things to do today, so didn't get around to it until now. I applied my google-foo to try and fix the problems I ran into.
And 'lo and behold! I found Dan's site who did not only make a script to postpone the due date (defer it), it also gives you the option to defer the start date and he made a nifty little snooze script to basically hide projects / tasks from your view until you have to do them (by adjusting the start date).
I've tossed both in my ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/OmniFocus folder and set up a hotkey in QuickSilver and tried it out on a few tasks. Works like a charm!
To make my blog easier to navigate and fix some issues I had with the lay-out or how things worked in general, I looked into optimising as much as possible. I installed the plugin to make it easier to view my website on a phone-browser. With the help of Joost's guide to Wordpress SEO I tweaked more things, including making my urls shorter (I like that), upgraded my theme to allow the new threaded comments in Wordpress 2.7, installing a plugin to check on old links that may not work because of the changes I made and a pager at the bottom to more easily navigate to older pages.
Apart from this I also installed several of Joost's plugins because very handily he had made the ones I looked for (social bookmarks, breadcrumbs).
Lastly, I went and made a favicon that fits me. Anyone recognise it? :)
Because the scratch-resistent part of my iPhone scratched I decided to get some protection, may or may not work, but I figured it wouldn't hurt.
I ordered a shield for the front over at Zagg and thanks to a bit of looking around I got a nice discount (and they now offer a 30% discount till 2008-12-31) and free shipping. For more discount codes check out Chris Pirillo's site. I also have two codes for a 20% discount valid until 2009-01-25, so if you want one drop me a note.
I have not yet tried these shields, but I hear they work really well. They sell them for all kinds of phones and cameras and laptops.
This gallery contains 2 photos.
In an attempt to make my site more iPhone-friendly (and other phone-browsers) I installed MobilePress. It seems to work very nicely, displaying the last five posts and offering a link at the bottom for the full version. Images also get displayed nicely, and you can even leave comments. Comments don’t display automatically, you’ll have to [...]
sleepy :-)
Just a test to see if I can post from my phone. I will remove this :-) (or not. Check out the pretty mushrooms. Wonder if they became illegal on the 1st with the mushroom-ban)
Many people have written about this before, and many more will follow. What can I say, I couldn't help myself.
I like staying on top of my finances, it reduces stress and makes life in general a lot easier. I won't go into the psychological reasons why people get into debt and how to use psychology or blackmail to get yourself out. I merely want to give my thoughts on some of the software for macs out there.
I always look for the best software to fit my needs. I like computers and I feel they should make my life easier. Software can actually do that (and also make us hate it so much we want to drag it outside and beat it to a pulp).
I've tried several financial programs for my personal finance:
First a list of what I want in personal finance software:
The software should also not crash and lot eat up my data. Saving my data in some type of file that I can access outside the program scores a lot of extra points. Exporting to .qif or a similar common format sounds good to me as well.
More points get acquired if the program works well on a smaller screen and older mac. I have a iBook G4, a bit of an oldie now, which still works pretty well, but I don't need some fancy new software that only runs on an Intel with 3gb of ram. Personal finance software should not push my mac to its limits.
Behind the cut I will describe my experiences with these four programs and wrap it up with a winner.
I will do the following actions to judge the program:
The sample file has data on a savings account, a credit card and a joint checking account.
Today I read this article over at the Neat & Simple blog about ToDo-lists. Ariane explains we're all different people and we all have different ways to have a ToDo list work for us. We also all have different reasons why some things just don't work for us. She gives some great tips to create the list that works for you and find the right tools to do it.
I wanted to add my own experiences and tricks to it so I whipped up this post.
After nearly a month away from my site, it told me to update to Wordpress 2.6. I figured, why the hell not (I like living on the edge). I went through the very easy update-process and thought it all went well.
Unfortunately, it didn't. At first I thought everything had broken, all my single pages gave a 404, even the non-blog ones, and all my links to tags and archives stopped working as well! Panic!
Luckily, I found out pretty quickly that I only needed to fill in the 'tags' and 'category' field in the Permalinks section, which solved most of my problems instantly.
The last problem, the archives that didn't work, took pretty long to figure out. I googled trying to find if anyone also had their monthly archive links throw them back to the main page I set the Permalinks to the ugly default, and that didn't work.
By now I started to worry and considered rolling back to 2.5.1 just to get the monthly archives links to work again. Before I did, I did an install in a different directory as a test and that one had working monthly archive links. As the new install did not have any but the default plugins, I started disabling plugins in my default installation until I found the culprit: the robots meta plugin. Once I figured that one out, it didn't take long to find a notice of the creator of the plugin, stating that the update revealed a bug and ladida, problem fixed, just update the plugin and set all your settings again. Which I did.
The plugin has a 'disable date archives' option that got checked. In fact, everything got checked. I unchecked unwanted things, saved, and my monthly archive links work as they should again.
And there I did it. I switched from Movable Type to Wordpress to manage my site.
It actually went really smooth and I actually like Wordpress so far. No unnecessary complications. Movable Type started acting up on me, not letting me edit post titles. I upgraded and then it wouldn't let me edit post entries anymore. Or post anything new... So I decided to give Wordpress a shot. So far, I like it. :)
