Posts tagged ‘productivity’
Über
February 2nd, 2012 at 10:17 pm by Dr. Drang
This was a little disconcerting to see in my Twitter stream: Nice. @TextExpander übergeek @drdrang has turned his attention to @PDFpen + AppleScript. Productivity nerds rejoice! smle.us/wFBGv9 — Jean MacDonald (@macgenie) Thu Feb 2 2012 Übergeek? Really? I mean, I really like that script because it uses PDFpen to turn a tedious, 2-3 minute task into…
Automatic W-9s with PDFpen
February 1st, 2012 at 10:35 pm by Dr. Drang
I resisted PDFpen for a long time. I already had OmniGraffle, and while it certainly wasn’t convenient to fill out PDF forms in OmniGraffle, I could do it. This worked fine as long as filling out PDF forms was a rare task. But as the companies I work with began using PDFs more and more,…
Locating your photos on Google Maps
January 27th, 2012 at 9:21 am by Dr. Drang
Back in October I wrote a little script that added GPS location information to photos. My idea was to be able to take one photo with my iPhone, which would capture the location in its EXIF metadata, and use the script to transfer that information to all the photos I took with my regular camera…
Old problem, new trick
January 26th, 2012 at 10:49 pm by Dr. Drang
I went on a business trip to upstate New York this week and tried out a new system for keeping track of my expenses. It’s simple enough that I might actually stick with it. There are a bunch of expense tracking apps for the iPhone. Most of them either require you to open some sort…
Affiliate links with Fake
December 26th, 2011 at 10:05 pm by Dr. Drang
One of my regrets is not reading Gabe Weatherhead at Macdrifter earlier. Like Clark Goble and Brett Terpstra, he has one of those consistently interesting and helpful blogs for people who like to use scripting to show their Mac who’s boss. This past weekend, he wrote a post on how to use Todd Ditchendorf’s Fake…
Text files and me V - Markdown
December 25th, 2011 at 8:25 pm by Dr. Drang
If it seems like this series has been going on forever, it’s because it has. Part 1: From text to word processors and back Part 2: Linux, troff, and SGML Part 3: The LaTeX years Part 3½: Plates and pdflatex Part 4: BBEdit and TextMate My Christmas present to myself is finishing this series off…
Ignoring my own advice
December 23rd, 2011 at 9:34 pm by Dr. Drang
Back in June, I wrote a post in which I pointed out how much easier it is to catch errors in your writing if you use the Mac’s Text to Speech feature. At the end of the post, I said Despite the effectiveness of these tricks, I don’t use them nearly as often as I…
Mechanics lipsum
December 14th, 2011 at 11:11 pm by Dr. Drang
In yesterday’s Back to Work, during the commercial for Smile Software and TextExpander, Merlin Mann talked about a snippet he uses that inserts a specially-crafted lorem ipsum that’s exactly 500 characters and 100 words long. Most people use lorem ipsums (or lipsums) as placeholder text when designing the layout of a publication or web site.…
Awk and calendar events
December 7th, 2011 at 1:16 pm by Dr. Drang
What follows in another post in which I use some computer-y tools to hammer one of my boys’ sports schedules into a format I can import into iCal. This time it’s my older son’s swim meet schedule, which started as a table on a website and is now parked comfortably in all of my digital…
More shell, less egg
December 4th, 2011 at 10:50 pm by Dr. Drang
My TextExpander/shell script post of last week reminded me of Doug McIlroy and some unfinished business from back in October. So let’s talk about shell scripts and Unix again. In the comments to my October post about the early Unix developers and what good writers they were, Bill Cheswick mentioned Doug McIlroy, and said it…
