Posts tagged ‘productivity’
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…
The siren song of Vim
November 28th, 2011 at 10:23 pm by Dr. Drang
The internets are conspiring against me. First, I saw this 20th anniversary appreciation of Vim at Ars Technica. Then came this short post promising me that switching to Vim would be quick, painless, and even fun. Finally, today I read Brent Simmons’ post about navigating in various Mac text editors—he compares them all to Vim,…
Extending the last output script
November 26th, 2011 at 10:57 pm by Dr. Drang
As threatened at the end of my last post, I’ve extended the script for putting the output of the last command in Terminal to handle Octave and Python sessions as well as bash sessions. I often need to include results from these sessions in reports and other documents, and a quick keyboard command is faster…
Last output from Terminal
November 24th, 2011 at 10:31 pm by Dr. Drang
Getting the last input in a bash session in the Terminal (or in any terminal emulator, like iTerm) is easy: just press the ↑ key. Getting the last output, though, isn’t so easy, because there isn’t anything built into bash for the last output. But you can put it on the Clipboard with a little…
A script to speed invoicing by email
November 22nd, 2011 at 8:38 am by Dr. Drang
For years, I printed out my invoices on paper and sent them off to clients by snail mail. Now that my clients have all embraced interweb thing, I “print” my invoices as PDFs and email them with a brief message. The message is boilerplate, generated by a TextExpander snippet described in an earlier post. Although…
Again with the checkcards
November 17th, 2011 at 10:15 pm by Dr. Drang
Sometimes it seems like all I do is rejigger my checkcards script in response to changes my local library makes to its website. When the script stopped working last week, I put it on my to-do list but was too busy to get around to it until today. Quick recap: checkcards is a script (actually…
The return of TaskPaper
November 14th, 2011 at 8:05 am by Dr. Drang
Several months ago, I got so sick of TaskPaper asking me for my password so it could sync that I stopped using it entirely and went back to keeping my to-do lists in Markdown files synced via Dropbox. On Halloween, a new version of TaskPaper came out that—finally!—drops the homemade syncing system and uses Dropbox…
