A new command line utility that ships with OS X Mountain Lion that prevents your Mac from falling asleep.
Handily, you can apply it to a specific command, like so
caffeinate longrunningcommand -x -y --zedand
caffeinatewill keep your Mac awake until it’s finished.Via Ask Different.
The official @alfredapp cheatsheet.
On my vacation a friend told me how he archives a directory listing of the disks containing his movies for backup. Since movies can be replaced easily by redownloading the content, it’s normally not worth keeping a backup of the movies themselves somewhere.
I found that quite smart. I’ve been using ls -R to keep a history of my ~/Downloads for a while now, but wanted something that looks a bit nicer than ls.
treetree is a command line utility1 that lists directory contents in a tree-like structure, but has the disadvantage that when you output the command to a text file, the encoding throws off TextEdit.
Luckily some people point to this article by Murphy. He uses sed to format the output of find nicely:
find . -print | sed -e 's;[^/]*/;|____;g;s;____|; |;g'
The result looks pretty! To make this a command follow Sumedha’s instructions. Only replace the find line with the original from Murphy.
Then just type
`tree ~ > tree_home.txt`.
You can now automate the process with Hazel, Keyboard Maestro, or a Launch Agent (hint: Lingon).
It’s safe to run this command maybe once a day or a week. Honestly, how often do your movies change?
I use this command to output a file containing the date and time the command has run:
tree /Volumes/extHome/ > "$HOME/Documents/History/$(date "+%Y-%m-%d %H-%M") extHome.txt"
Recommendations:
Available in Homebrew, MacPorts and Fink. ↩
AppAnalytics is a jailbreak app that shows you how much time you’ve spent in which app. You can easily identify the apps you never launch, and find the ones that you launch often.
There’s another app that does the same thing, but it’s older and doesn’t look as good. (AppAnalytics has a great design!)
TradeDoubler now has a very rudimentary iPhone/iPad app available on the App Store for free. Basically integrates the Dashboard so you can have a quick glance at what’s going on with your affiliate links. The idea is nice, the app itself is less than I expected.
Neat!
Via @rwenderlich, @thatswinnie
I was going to write a couple of posts about missing, moved and removed features of Mountain Lion until I found…erm…Wikipedia. They got all the information you need in this regard. So I might not have to write as many posts after all.
We have some regulation in Germany that prevents YouTube from showing specific videos here, without paying royalties.
Because we’re the only ones suffering from this issue the following post will be GERMAN ONLY as an exception.
Mit dem YouTube Unblocker ladet ihr euch eine Safari/Chrome/Firefox Extension, mit welcher sich YouTube Videos einfach anschauen lassen. “Völlig legal, werbefrei und selbstverständlich kostenlos”.
Not all of them are “superb”, bust most of them look very pretty.
The Problem
Not too long ago I setup SickBeard and SABNzb. Everything works wonderfully. It grabs all my tv shows automatically, renames them, puts them in the appropriate folders that Plex Media Server (PMS) is supposed to scan and find changes and auto add the content to my library. For…
Some simple steps to change the short name of a user. Repairs and sets new permissions automatically.
45 minute NanoStudio tutorial by BitBurner
via iOS Musician
Decim8 uses various distortion algorithms that you may recall when your old digital camera couldn’t save the photo. The effects are quite intense. You can’t change the filters, though you the filters can be rearranged in order.
I wrote about the Auto Correct groups for TextExpander 4 on the Smile Blog. Let’s see if we can build more groups for other languages as well.
"Apple may be happy to have the nerds along for the ride, but they are not their target market. Normal people that just want to use a few apps and don’t care about tweaking their experience are Apple’s new target demographic."
It’s fascinating that the sandboxing problematic, plus iCloud, makes things so obvious. Developers leave the App Store behind to have enough freedom developing apps with “power”.
Software Ambiance, the developers behind Daisy Disk, recently wrote:
"In 2011 everyone wanted MAS versions of their apps. In 2012 users prefer to migrate from the app store."
I still stand by my previous statement that Apple is working on fixing the sandbox though.
[onethingwell](http://onethingwell.org/post/27051972695/xpostfacto:
"Apple has chosen to limit the machines which are supported by Mac OS X, but XPostFacto can help get Mac OS X working on some older machines.”
Via Egg Freckles enconium to the ‘Wallstreet’ Powerbook.
Nice work by Matt Thompson.
The One More Thing presentations are now online. Speakers Marc Edwards from Bjango, Shifty Jelly, Savage Interactive, Matt Comi (Big Bucket) and others.
If you’re up for “alternative” email clients, give Postbox a try. I just don’t write so many emails, I guess.
A utility for OS X that lets you compare two iTunes libraries, generating a report of songs that don’t appear in both libraries and (optionally) making a zip archive of the missing tracks.
I don’t know what I tweeted recently, but since Friday or Saturday when I get up and look at my iPad I have a screen full of new followers, all seem to be spam accounts. Today I tweeted the problem, and @teilweise replied back mentioning TwitBlock the tool scans your followers and allows you block and report those spammers very conveniently. Thanks for the tip!
Finally a reason to try out the most-hated-newsstand-app-you-cant-remove.
I recently saw the posts by David Sparks and Michael Schechter who made an effort to make entering tasks into OmniFocus “easier”. I’ll oppose their workflow and I’m going to explain why below.
The setup generally looks fine. The snippets MacSparky try to make it easier to add general tasks into OmniFocus. For instance:
The problem I have with this is that the titles of these tasks are too general. They have no clear outcome. I tried this in the past but soon (about 1 week) I realized the tasks slip under my radar, because I just couldn’t remember them.
Why is that? I don’t know exactly, but after giving it some though I realized that I just need to make a conscious decision or else I don’t care. When I make things “easier” I need to take into account whether it’s something I really really really want it. In case I really want it, then I also set better tasks in my task management system.
"Set meeting with" may sound fine for most people, but when you look at it closely, it says zero to nothing what I actually want to achieve with that meeting. It’s just a task I’ve added so that it’s out of my way. I never even considered whether it’s something I want to do in my life.
It just came to me after reading their articles, when I did my ritual closing of unnecessary tabs in Safari. I look at one and try to think why I left it open in the first place. When it’s something like, and this is something that could be generalized with a snippet, “I want to come back to later” then I just decided that I still want to defer my decision until later. Later when I look at the thing again, this time in OmniFocus, it annoys me again because I still don’t know what to do with.
I never do meetings without a purpose. When I set a meeting, I want to achieve something. Meeting people is pointless otherwise. Calling someone re something is wasted time too. “Call Fiona to set a date when we go out for lunch later this week” is a task with a set outcome.
Read more on setting SMART outcomes.
It seems to be a bit hidden that the Mac’s Disk Utility is able to resize and convert disk images (.dmg’s).
To resize a disk image simply open Disk Utility and drag your .dmg file to the sidebar.
Then hihglight the image and in the toolbar you’re going to see two symbols:
It should be pretty straight forward from here on. One thing to remember though, if you can’t resize your image (the dialog just goes away without anything happening) you may need to convert it before. Compressed images can’t be resized directly, those need to be converted to read/write images before.
One of the things I always come across when using OmniFocus is the need to quickly find and open/focus a particular project. While OmniFocus has it’s own search capabilities and of course allows you to navigate to and focus a specific project. However, this typically doesn’t cut it for me since it…
I really like the idea of this Extension for Alfred. The only disadvantage is that it searches for all projects (even completed ones). So sometimes you get a long list of projects that you’ve completed already.
Anyway, thanks for the script.
SwitchResX, one of the most essential screencasting apps, is currently on sale on MacUpdate.
The app allows me to switch my monitor’s resolution to “custom resolutions” which I need to set my Mac’s screen to a (real) 720p resolution. Normally the resolutions only come close to standard movie resolutions, but for my screencasts I need them to be exact. SwitchResX is an app that does that.
There’s another app that also changes the resolution, is free, but is far less usable.
One thing that caught my eye in this article immediately was this line:
"I haven’t seen hordes of Mac users, pitchforks in hand, storming the gates of Cupertino, demanding that Apple release third-party software from its shackles. In fact, I haven’t seen much in the way of user complaints at all."
That’s about how I see it. It’s not noticable what’s going on. Users are waiting. Most of them aren’t affect directly by sandboxing, they just lose a ton of software “temporarily”. And why should Apple care? They could just wait for someone to build a new app under the new regulations. Maybe a similar software to replace the non-sandboxed version, maybe not. I mean in the new world, if there’s a need for it, there’s someone who’s going to build it.
On a sidenote though. In episode 46 of Core Intuition Daniel and Manton talk about sandboxing as well. They explain the term Apple used; “Temporary Entitlements”. Something they were told at WWDC 2012. Temporary in this regard apparently doesn’t mean they are temporary and will just go away. They are temporary, because Apple is working on something to replace the temporary solution.
So maybe the situation isn’t that bad after all? It’s just bad “temporarily”? Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking as well.
Two scripts for BBEdit to directly duplicate and rename files.
A couple of basic scripts to duplicate or rename the currently selected file in the Project Bar in BBEdit. These are extremely basic, and come with no guarantees. They work for me, but all suggestions and improvements are welcome.
I use MindNode to plan a lot of things, sometimes just to visualize see a problem “from above”, before I act on it. My Hazel tutorial was also planned out with MindNode.
Here’s an easy tip how you can have todo items in your mind map.
Simply add a special character sequence, in my case “!!!”, to the beginning or end of nodes. This way you can easily search for three exclamation marks and all todo items show up.
You find the search in MindNode touch in the outline view popover. Just scroll to the top to make the search field appear.
Address Book has, apparently, a built-in feature to show duplicates. Much like iTunes has.
