By Ryan Dotson
Rebalancing the analogue and digital in my life A few years and a couple of jobs ago, I spent much of my life on digital pursuits while work existed in the analogue world. Being old enough to have spent most of my childhood without a proliferation of technology to hand every moment of the day, this was a fine balance for me. Nowadays, that’s reversed. My work is all digital and filled to the brim…
I loved using labels in ‘Classic’ Mac OS to colour-code files and folders in Finder. We lost this in the modern era, replaced by tags. In earlier versions of Mac OS X, they nearly filled the gap, because the whole name was coloured, but the dots of today’s Mac OS don’t quite fill the gap for me. I much prefer a strong visual indicator. Fortunately we can still arbitrarily replace icons using the…
This update introduces an expansion of FastScripts’s own built-in scripting additions, with three powerful new commands for searching, replacing, and splitting text with regular expressions. What a fantastic addition to a tool I use every day. I still spend more time than you might imagine writing AppleScript. For dealing with text manipulation, I’ve both called out to Perl or done the ‘native’…
I published a modest update to BBStylish today. In version 2, you can now customise the font to use for headings and set a background colour for quotation blocks. There are also a few small tweaks to make BBStylish just a bit more stylish . Instructions for how to use and customise BBStylish are in the CSS file. I hope you enjoy using it. Download BBStylish here or from GitHub . Link:…
Hold down the Control key and press a brightness key (F1 and F2) to change the brightness of an external display. Probably only works with Apple displays. The Mac OS X Hints community is still providing immense value after all these years. Link: http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20120114184609800
Learning to embrace the inevitable It’s been ten years since a massive earthquake struck off the north-eastern coast of Japan. I had only moved to Japan a month prior. Hundreds of kilometres away, I still felt it. In part, I couldn’t help feeling excited. It was the first earthquake I’d ever experienced! It became painfully clear in the hours to come how devastating it was for those nearer the…
Kris Sowersby’s art, his drawings of letters, move me just as much as any other art. If you’re reading this directly on my site, you’re steeping yourself in them. At this scale, your eyes float along, probably not thinking about them much. Look at them scaled up, though, and you start to see the beauty in the details. Kris Sowersby: The Art of Letters is a book that solves this problem by…
Peter Lowe makes a list of servers that provide adverts on the web so that you can block them using software. He recommends using the hosts file for your operating system. It works without any extra software and it’s free, but it’s a little inconvenient. If you use Little Snitch like me, Peter provides the list in its rule group subscription format . Little Snitch can also update the list’s rules…
Finding creativity and rediscovering GarageBand I haven’t used GarageBand since it was released in 2004. Not for any particular reason, mind. I’ve never been much of a music maker , so I didn’t have any occasion to use it. Clearing out my iPad last night, I realised I still had the app installed. Bored, I opened it to have a look around. I’m glad I did. I was immediately taken by the magic and…
Jeff Johnson, author of StopTheMadness : …DuckDuckGo still uses JavaScript to intercept your link clicks, and there's no good reason for it. One consequence of this clickjacking is that your Safari browsing history gets messed up. …To stop DuckDuckGo clickjacking, install StopTheMadness , create custom website options for duckduckgo.com , and then enable the “All mouse clicks” option. I find…
A remembrance I seem to love endings, and due to some flaw in my nature, the messier and more unsettling the better. When I was a teacher, it was like I had a subscription. Every year, more goodbyes. And in most cases, for forever. Maybe not forever forever, though. Maybe. There are no maybes today. Erin is gone. She was my best friend, my pseudo-sister, my platonic soulmate. She left Japan and…
Automate entering GitHub & GitLab issues into OmniFocus If you needn’t read more, download GitFocus from GitHub . I recently started a new job where all of our documentation is managed through git and a lot of my work comes from issues and merge requests filed on GitLab. To keep track of them, I turn to OmniFocus, no surprise . It was clear by the second day that I didn’t fancy making all the…
I’ve never been happier with an RSS reader on iOS than I am with NetNewsWire 5. I’ve been using it for two months, and not just because I was writing the Help Book , I haven’t used another RSS reader since. Nothing else feels as natural on, or fits in to, iOS than NetNewsWire. As someone who finds little joy in using iOS these days, this pays off. The interface and I are not adversaries.…
If you spend any time at the command line, it’s worth spending time to learn how it works, and customising it to help you work faster. Now is the perfect time to do that, as Mac OS begins the transition to using the Z Shell ( zsh ) as the default shell. Though the zsh documentation is plentiful, it’s technical and dense – I wouldn’t suggest anyone read it except as a reference. Armin Briegel’s…
BBStylish – attractive, customisable BBEdit Preview CSS To repurpose a Douglas Adams line: It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression ‘As pretty as Times New Roman.’ I’m being uncharitable, of course. And besides, in this case, it’s not Times New Roman, but rather Times . Though you’d be forgiven for mistaking the two. Be that as it may, Times is, to…
There’s nothing unlucky about BBEdit 13 I’ve heard tales of other text editors for the Macintosh but I find such stories hard to believe. To my mind, there is no other text editor than BBEdit. It’s been my companion for over twenty years. I’ve never seriously considered any alternative – BBEdit doesn’t let me down, and is never anything short of helpful. Today we welcome a new version, BBEdit 13.…
Options for using old Movable Type today I’m a fan of Movable Type – the de facto blogging platform …of the 2000s. Movable Type is a static site generator by default, but since its fall, the web has moved on to much lighter static site generators. None of them is as elegant in design or templating to my admittedly nostalgia-tinged eyes. (I dare not consider the other side, with the PHP behemoth.)…
Fishy zishy Armin Briegel, author of Scripting OS X , has been writing a series of articles on his transition from Bash to the Z Shell ( zsh ). So far there are seven parts, touching on a number of things encountered in zsh : Configuration files Shell options Aliases and functions Completions Prompt customisation Miscellanea I’ve really been enjoying reading these articles. There’s at least one…
Rosemary Orchard and Scotty Jackson, two of my favourite people, have a new podcast, Nested Folders . We’ll discuss all manner of productivity topics, mostly centres around philosophies, techniques, and approaches, so that listeners can benefit from our experiences, regardless of apps or systems they might use. Also, a huge thanks and shout out to Josh Hughes for the amazing cover art. Love this!…
The EFF are working to protect people’s rights online. They also produce and support Certbot . It automates the process of installing Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates on a web server. A donation of any amount is welcome, I have no doubt. From US $20, you can get a gift in exchange for a donation. For the next two weeks you can get a set of four pins depicting the EFF logo and four symbols…
Richard Berry, an academic in the field of radio and podcasting asks and answers: When is a podcast not a podcast? When it’s a paycast. No argument from me. Link: http://richardberry.eu/podcast-or-paycast/
Lee John Phillips is cataloguing and illustrating every item in his late grandfather’s tool shed. The objects are mostly incredibly mundane – screws, washers, pliers – but his delicate drawings make them incredibly interesting . You can see some of them on his site, but also in various interviews and profiles around the web. His site says that he anticipates the project will take five years to…
This is an interactive map of the world’s lighthouses showing their flashing pattern and colours. I don’t know why, but I find it difficult to pull myself away from it. Of note on the map is Europe, which plainly loves lighthouses, lighting up its coastlines like a Christmas tree. Norway’s coasts, though, are remarkable – not just for the fjords. Its Antarctic and Atlantic coasts are thick with…