I Can't Control My Brain

"Open to View" vs "Open to Edit"

Sun, 14 Mar 2010 12:00:40 +1000

Some files can be opened in two perfectly valid ways: opened to be viewed and opened to be edited. The two big examples I can think of are images and HTML files. You either want to look at an image or you want to edit it in Acorn or whatever. You either want to load a webpage or you want to edit it.

Is there some easy way that I can tell OS X to open a file with a different program using some modifier key?

Here’s what I want: if I need to open index.html, I just open the file as normal (with Safari). If I need to edit index.html, I cmd-double-click it or something (with a keyboard-friendly option available too, of course) and it opens with TextMate. Does that kind of functionality exist? I know that you can right-click the file and go “Open With” and then select the application you want to open the file with, but, really, who has the time?

merlin: Check out TextExpander’s new “Fill” functionality. In....

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 11:50:00 +1000

merlin:

Check out TextExpander’s new “Fill” functionality. In. Sane.

…

Really nice screencast, as always.

I’ll just take this opportunity to once again mention the awesome bit.ly TextExpander script that takes a URL from the clipboard and pastes a bit.ly link to it. But you already knew about it, didn’t you?

http://fiatdev.com/2008/07/29/quicklook-preview-for-markdown

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 11:20:31 +1000

http://fiatdev.com/2008/07/29/quicklook-preview-for-markdown:

Markdown plugin for Mac OS X’s Quick Look. Super handy.

Nukem — Another Quality Home Game From Butler Brothers...

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 23:00:56 +1000

Nukem — Another Quality Home Game From Butler Brothers (from Robocop (1987))

DAUGHTER: You crossed my line of death!

MOTHER: You haven’t dismantled your MX stockpile!

SON: Pakistan is threatening my border!

FATHER: That’s it, Mister! No more military aid!

The ad was only there for a little while, but I saw it. Kinda...

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 18:44:00 +1000

The ad was only there for a little while, but I saw it.

Kinda funny considering Mr. M was a guest on this week’s The Conversation two-parter all about advertising.

I believe this is what people call irony.

(btw, I don’t really believe that Merlin deliberately put that Google ad on his site. Even if he did, that wouldn’t stop me from reading KFG. Anyway, I know he changed his Tumblr theme, so I figure that maybe that ad was there by default and I loaded the site before he was finished customising it or something. Still, funny coincidence.)

Oh, and I also got this kickass poster.

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 01:09:00 +1000

Oh, and I also got this kickass poster.

Last night, I did something that I never thought in a million...

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 00:53:00 +1000

Malkmus.

We want two states! North and South!

Nastanovich singing "Conduit For Sale"

Last night, I did something that I never thought in a million years I’d be able to do. I went and saw Pavement live.

What’s more, I saw them in a little venue — on the order of hundreds, not thousands. I was standing in the second row. I could literally shout something and Malkmus would have heard it. They played for 2+ hours and did two encores. They played all the songs I wanted to hear. Did I mention I was standing right at the goddamn front?!

It. Was. Brilliant.

Anyway — the photos aren’t all that impressive (it was my iPhone, and I hate being Mr. Douchey-Mc-Douche-Block-People’s-View-With-My-Camera Guy), but at least I have something to remember an awesome night by. I got a few little videos on my Flip as well, but they’ll go up a bit later.

"Five minutes of rocking [a day] would be enough, because it would be five minutes more than just..."

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 10:43:00 +1000

“Five minutes of rocking [a day] would be enough, because it would be five minutes more than just about anyone else.”

- Seth Godin. This is one of the things I try to remind myself when I’m sweating programming or writing or something else — the fact that you actually think and care about getting good at this stuff means you’re already ahead of 90% of the pack. Not that I’m congratulating myself. But still.

Idea

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 02:39:38 +1000

Idea: a t-shirt, on the front of which is an Alien (you know, the one in-between the facehugger and the holy-shit-that-thing-is-fucking-huge stages) bursting out from what is seemingly the wearer’s chest.

No jokes, no witty one-liner on the back, no snarky cross-reference to a video game — just a simple homage to a classic film.

(I did 0.0 research before I posted this — if this already exists, link me up — I’d probably buy one in a flash.)

Reverse Garage Sale MM: I also like the idea of what I would...

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 12:29:00 +1000

Reverse Garage Sale

MM: I also like the idea of what I would call the Reverse Garage Sale, which is: I place an ad, and then maybe I just bring a whole lot of stuff to your house and we hang out for a while. You get a few rolls of nickels, you brew some coffee, and we argue about the value of what I have for a few minutes. There’s nothing that says that it has to be my garage we have the sale in.

SS: That’s good. I like a reverse.

MM: Maybe, maybe I go to your work or job site. Maybe repeatedly. “Hey, you seem pretty interested in that CB — you off work soon?”

From Mr. Owl

An Excerpt From Microserfs, written by Douglas Coupland,...

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 14:15:32 +1000

An Excerpt From Microserfs, written by Douglas Coupland, performed by Matthew Perry

Matthew Perry recorded the audio version of Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs. I love the book (so does Joel Spolsky), and I like Matthew Perry (I really wish Studio 60 got a second season), so it’s a pretty good fit.

The only copy of this audiobook that Amazon has is on cassettes. It’s also $124USD. If you don’t want to pay hundreds of dollars for an out-of-print cassette tape, I happen to know that you can get an MP3 version of the audiobook to fall off the back of a cyber-truck. You know where to look for it.

Oh, and by the way, if you haven’t already seen it (and even if you have), you need to go and watch this horrendous Windows 95 instructional video starring Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry. It’s 30 minutes long, and it is hilariously bad.

It’s a start. Got the must-make-something bug again....

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 13:52:01 +1000

It’s a start.

Got the must-make-something bug again. Maybe I’ll have something new in a day or two.

Previous & Next We read letters, words, lines and pages in...

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 22:53:00 +1000

Previous & Next

We read letters, words, lines and pages in a book from left to right. However, with a blog, someone is writing a “book” and the homepage is where the author is up to in writing the book, so the reader starts at the “back” of the book.

To progress forward and read more, the reader has to go backwards through the book. That’s why navigating pages is a problem on a blog.

In the screenshot above, tell me where clicking on either of those buttons will take me. If I click “Previous,” will I see newer posts or older posts? “Previous” could refer to the time of publication (“posts published previously,” indicating older posts) or to a direction (left, back towards where you started, meaning back towards the homepage, towards newer posts). It could refer to your history (things you were looking at previously) or the blog’s (things published previously). It’s ambiguous.

The solution: don’t be ambiguous. Somewhere, indicate that “hey, this link goes to older stuff, and this link goes to newer stuff.” Some people make the word “older” the actual link, some have arrows be the link and have “older” be the title-text. Whatever you do, don’t just write the words “previous” and “next.” (Alternatively, you could do away with pages altogether and navigate in a Tumblr-esque endless scrolling manner.)

My name’s Scott, and I took 1 (one) whole usability course at university.

http://www.martinjetpack.com/

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 23:42:34 +1000

http://www.martinjetpack.com/:

And people say we’re not in The Future yet.

http://oonce-oonce.com/

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 11:42:18 +1000

http://oonce-oonce.com/:

Warning: full-page Flash.

Totally worth it though.

http://github.com/philc/vimium

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 11:39:12 +1000

http://github.com/philc/vimium:

Chrome + Vim = Vimium.

Vimium is a Chrome extension that provides keyboard based navigation and control in the spirit of the Vim editor.

Tried it this morning and it works great. If Chrome was my main browser, I’d probably be all over this.

4%

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 22:12:00 +1000

Wikipedia on converting 24p to PAL:

The most popular method [of converting] is to speed up the material by 25/24 (4%). […] As for audio, the ~4% increase in speed raises the pitch by 0.7 of a semitone.

That speed increase doesn’t happen with Blu-ray or DVD, but I get it on television where I live (Australia is a PAL region). I’ve noticed that pitch variance very occasionally.

I can’t help but think that online video distribution will fix these kinds of technical issues. There’s no need to convert to PAL or NTSC or whatever when it’s just 1s and 0s going across a network, right?

Throttle I scratched my own itch again. Throttle is a little...

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 22:48:00 +1000

Throttle

I scratched my own itch again. Throttle is a little Mac OS X app I wrote that (surprise!) throttles your Mac’s bandwidth.

It’s a little spartan (not Spartan) at the moment, but it works.

You can get Throttle from here.

http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface/generator

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 10:45:00 +1000

http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface/generator:

Converts font files (.ttf, .otf) into EOT and SVG fonts.

Context: the only monospaced programmer-y font on the iPhone is Courier New. How could I let a site involving Mac and iPhone software development be rendered in Courier New?

Point is, SVG font + @font-face = Monaco on the iPhone. Boom.

[[NSPodcast alloc] init]; If I was going to host a podcast about Mac OS X and iPhone software...

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 03:05:00 +1000

[[NSPodcast alloc] init];

If I was going to host a podcast about Mac OS X and iPhone software development, y’know what I’d call it?

NSPodcast.

I explain a little bit more on the site, but I’m considering making a show for and about Mac/iPhone software development. Not a big thing — just some interviews with developers that I think make neat software. I think that’s a reasonable goal to shoot for.

More news on NSPodcast as it happens.