March 2013

03/30/2013 15:30:16

Geeks and Repetitive Tasks : Clark’s Tech Blog

I love this. Especially that Clark writes he sometimes writes scripts just to relax. Makes me happy that other folks do that too.

03/29/2013 08:16:02

GitStatX - Free GitStats App For OS X

GitStatX is a free GUI for GitStats.

03/28/2013 15:30:04

The Theory of Everything Full Documentary (by Mark Daynes)

03/19/2013 15:30:21

You should save a tree, too!

Remember last year when I had troubles with my hard drive and I needed a way to archive (or rather “reference”) where something was in case this ever happens again.

I’m mentioning this because a good friend of mine has decided to start blogging! Beware though: It’s really really nerdy! If you don’t think the command line can’t fix everything, this is probably not for you.

Save a tree(1)

03/19/2013 13:30:18

Do Something With the Finder Selection in AppleScript

Here’s a little code snippet that I often need. It basically iterates over the Finder selection individually and does something with the file. I use this to, e.g., label Finder items with a color using Keyboard Maestro.

tell application "Finder"
    try
        repeat with currentFile in items of (get selection)
            if condition of currentFile is "" then
                set something of currentFile to something
            else
                set something of currentFile to something else
            end if
        end repeat
    on error e
        return e
    end try
end tell

returning e at the end has the advantage that you can notify yourself in case the script has had problems.
This snippet is currently the shortest, and most efficient, way I know of.

Label Finder Items

Just for completeness. Here’s one of my Label Finder Items scripts:

(*
No color = 0
Orange = 1
Red = 2
Yellow = 3
Blue = 4
Purple = 5
Green = 6
Gray = 7
*)


set mycolor to 7

tell application "Finder"
    try
        repeat with currentFile in items of (get selection)
            if label index of currentFile is not mycolor then
                set label index of currentFile to mycolor
            else
                set label index of currentFile to 0
            end if
        end repeat
    on error e
        return e
    end try
end tell

03/19/2013 10:33:13

PDFPen 6 is now available; Upgrade pricing for the next 48 hours only

PDFPen 6 for Mac has been released! It’s currently offered with a “upgrade” price, meaning the app is down from its normal price.

PDFPen is $29.99 
PDFPen Pro is $39.99 

It sports now Auto Save and Versions as well as Retina graphics. Word export has also been built in. The app has received some cosmetic (and very welcome) changes as well.

The deal is only available for the next 48 hours. So get the app now before the price goes back up.

03/16/2013 12:30:00

Working Out at Home

I’m trying to live healthy. I go to the gym three times a week, I meditate almost daily, I’m vegetarian, I go running. A lot of my friends and colleagues can’t work out as much as I can. They complain that they don’t have the time, or energy, or equipment. I can’t fix problems 1 and 2 in this post, but every once in a while, the gym annoys me too. And then I just work out at home. Some trainers might say it’s “less efficient”, but that is not entirely true. If you’re going for an Arnold look, it probably is less efficient. If you just want to train your body and feel less stressed out, it does the job quite well. But I digress.

This is, by far, not a "get a ripped body exercise plan". I’m not a trainer. This is just a collection of some exercises I found easy to start with and which work at home.

First, I would recommend to warm up. Go running for about 10 minutes or do some light exercises. Anything, really, but warm up before you exercise!

Exercises

There are a ton of apps on the iOS App Store with databases of exercises. Every app you find will claim to have more exercises than the other. Each update adds, hold it, even more exercises. Who has the time to fiddle around with all these apps for so long? Almost all contain only gym exercises too. So that’s not helpful.

Working out at home is a real problem, because the fitness industry is only targeting the gym people. If you want to work out, you have to go to the gym. That’s not true. You can work out from home very well.

Most likely you don’t have their equipment (or the money to buy it). That’s not a problem either. An upcoming fitness trend is called “bodyweight exercise”. A fancy way of saying you’re doing exercises without weights. I recommend you do some research on bodyweight exercises on Google. I’m sure you’ll find plenty.

Another downside of working out in the gym is that movement sequences are unnatural or monotone. Bodyweight exercises don’t have this problem (generally).

In some cases it’s difficult to use your own bodyweight to get enough weight on the muscle though. In these cases you can use some light weights. Filled bottles, backpacks, bags, etc. You have to make little to no financial investment to get started. Bottles are a cheap replacement for a dumbbell.

With these two limitations set, you should find much fewer exercises now in an app. I like flies. They can be done with a lot of variety and work the upper chest, back and shoulders. Push ups are good too. I tend to do more advanced ones where my feet are on a Pezzi ball. This shows you that even as you get more advanced with your exercises that you can still do them at home. The Latissimus, or lat, is hard to work. You can do pullovers, dumbbell rows (also inverted) or do some good old chin ups or pull ups. Close grip chin ups work the biceps more, wide grip pull ups work the back. I got something like this here just for this exercise. Search for chin up bar on Amazon.

Also: Watch Scooby. He looks crazy, but his advice is spot on.

If you just get started, you don’t need fancy equipment though. You need to make your new “habit” stick.

How to form a habit

In order to make your new fitness plan a habit, it needs to stick. From what I’ve learned from all the motivation books and presentation talks I’ve read and heard, here are some of the best tips:

The average person does about one exercise (singular; not exercises) per week. So if you do more than that, you are above the average already. Congratulations.

03/14/2013 12:00:23

TuneSpan on Sale: Down From $14.99 to $3.99

TuneSpan is an indispensable app if you ever run out of space for your iTunes media library. The app allows you to “stretch” movies, music and all other media to multiple discs. It’s really cool.

TuneSpan on the App Store

03/12/2013 22:00:00

Name Mangler 3: Now Mangles With Metadata

Name Mangler 3 is out, if you haven’t noticed already. I’ve been beta testing it and it’s amazingly wickedly fast. As beta testers we were told to do some heavy testing with big files and a lot of files. So I’ve quickly generated some data off of iTunes videos and some text files. I had about 40 GB of data from 5,000 MPEG files. Name Mangler didn’t complain. Never. It took a moment or two (meaning 1 or 2 seconds), but after that moment of working it had done its work. I was impressed.

I was testing videos and music files especially because Name Mangler 3 brings a function that I was wishing for to have in a renamer utility: Metadata based renaming.

We’re producing videos for app developers. We’re producing a lot of files during a project. (also rather big ones) Keeping an overview is really hard. Some people like to name their files, unnecessarily, with _ in their name. Some write CamelCase to make files FTP-save.1 This is fine when a project is running. It makes file exchange faster2, but for archiving it’s not so good.

With Metadata-based renaming we can now look into a file’s metadata, like the Spotlight comment, and rename files based off of that. If you want to re-organize your music library you can easily do that as well. I think this feature is the single best reason you want to buy this update.

Another function that’s really useful is undo. Accidentally renamed files can simply be renamed to their original name. How cool.

All the previous features are still there too. You can create Droplets to rename files quickly. Presets if you will.

Check out the Name Mangler product page.


  1. I have absolutely no idea why my people are so careful with file names on a Mac. I told them that I put Emojis in file names if I’m in the mood. It’s not necessary to be so careful. Oh well… 

  2. I’m going to put a file naming convention in place soon. 

03/09/2013 09:44:00

Have a Keyboard Numpad with Keyboard Maestro

Uli posted a link on App.net recently that caught my eye. A kickstarter for a little app that puts the key numpad back into MacBooks.

What a perfect excuse for me to spend some time in Keyboard Maestro!

You can download 17 macros down below that are enabled via shortcut. Currently it’s set to ⇧⌃F10, but you can set it to whatever you want. Once activated you have a key numpad on your MacBook set is set like this:

77 88 99 0+
U4 I5 O6 P-
J1 K2 L3 ;*
M0 ,, .. //

So to type 4, you would press U, to type 3, press L, etc.
If this sounds too complicated for you, included is also a cheat sheet. You can have a look at it by clicking its menu item under the Keyboard Maestro menubar icon.

It’s localized to the US English keyboard, but you can easily customize it to your own needs using Keyboard Maestro Editor.

Download

https://www.box.com/s/972m12l76l7uyzhtu6ii

03/02/2013 22:00:36

History of Web Browsers

When I see graphs like that it always surprises me how constant Opera was over the years.

martyschellman:

History

via BitRebels

03/01/2013 22:00:21

How to Handle Uncompleted Tasks in Recurring OmniFocus Projects

Recurring tasks are problematic in OmniFocus for projects where certain tasks are not required to complete a project.

Take a Daily project for an example:

It’s clear that if I don’t meditate one day, nothing bad will happen, but the task should show up again next day. Ryan has been on this problem (for)ever since I tweeted about it. Just a couple of days ago he came back with this:

"@Zettt I think I finally found the best way after meeting with the OF guys. http://cl.ly/1L2d0b1k3D2B Key is “after completion””

After completion is indeed a possible solution to this problem!

I’ve been using this for a some days now and it works indeed as we/I/he originally intended. Only downside is that the project is “on-going”, which means it will never complete, therefore accumulating all completed tasks over time.

03/01/2013 16:22:24

My iPhone and iPad Homescreens from 2013-02-28

This is an update to my continuing series of iOS homescreen posts.

iPhone

The main thing that changed since last time is that I got an additional row of apps now due to the iPhone 5, which meant that I was very happy to move MindNode out of the Office folder. Reminders is also now on the main home screen, as is Due. Due is great because it sends one-minute nags for stuff like “brush your teeth”. Which sounds more like “BRUSH YOUR TEETH NOW! THEY WILL TURN BLACK OTHERWISE!!!” after 5 minutes.

I’m also using a YouTube app now regularly, named Jasmine. It’s free, but has an IAP for supporters. Downcast has been replaced with Instacast1.
Notable updated apps are Audible, which looks amazing now, but has an utterly inconceivable More Books screen that does nothing.
Zite has also had a major update, and luckily another update which got rid of the 2.0 icon.

iPad

Not much has changed on my iPad. Again, no Downcast anymore.

Now that I see it, I don’t use Newsstand anymore. I have been trying to read more magazines, but magazines just don’t contain the information I find read-worthy. Audible and iTunes U2 are more my cup of tea.


  1. I had a long rant post prepared on iOS podcasting, but deleted it recently. 

  2. Yeah, I try to learn new things in my free time. It’s stupid, I know. I’m currently doing a course on leadership, one on business planning and one on management. Coursera is cool too.