QuickSilver is now open source! Check it out on Google Code..

Filed under: code code, lifehacking, osx | 0 Comments
Tagged: apps , cocoa , opensource , QuickSilver

So this just makes my geeky little heart sing. a couple days ago i discovered that i can stream internet radio stations from my cell phone to my car’s stereo! This heralds a pretty big change in my listening habits since my car was the only place left I listened to commercial radio. now I won’t have to listen to commercials anymore. yay! here’s what i’m using to get it working

• a mobile radio app (this one works on pocket pc phones but i’m sure there are similar apps for other kinds of phones. One nice thing about this one though is that I can set it to record programs at specific times (like Q’s radio show) and it’ll save the recording as an mp3 that i can listen to later…sorta like tivo for the radio)
• a 2.5mm / 3.5mm headset adapter
• a cassette/audio player stereo adapter if you don’t have an auxilary jack in your car. If you have an auxilary jack then you don’t need it.

Of course you’ll also need a data plan with your cell phone company (Sprint charges $15/mo for EVDO). Sound quality and reception are surprisingly good. It does tend to drop in certain places (especially along the 280 where my cell reception is spotty) but in general it works pretty well in the city. Aside from $20 for the radio app, there are no extra fees. Given that XM satellite radio costs about $13/ mo, this is a pretty sweet deal!

Filed under: gadgets | 3 Comments
Tagged: apps , pocket pc

BugMe is quite possibly the most ingenious mobile app ever. It’s simply a digital post-it-pad that lets you scrawl a note and attach an alarm to go with it. You can even record a voice note to go with each scribble.

The alarm can be set for a specific interval (i.e. in 1/2 hr, 1 hr, etc) or for a specific date and time and when your phone alarm rings, it’ll flash your scribbled note to remind you of what you need to do. I use it to remind myself to move my car for street cleaning, feed the parking meter, call people and other random things that I always forget to do. Setting a reminder is just as easy as jotting a simple note, except now, they don’t get crumpled in my pocket or lost among all the other notes on my desk.

Filed under: lifehacking | 3 Comments
Tagged: apps , pocket pc

This is one of those totally basic operations that is right in your face with Firefox (”download file, or open with application ‘blah’ “), but with Safari it’s a battle with MIME types, “Universal” Type Identifiers, and file extensions. For the quick fix, copy com.apple.DownloadAssessment.plist into ~/Library/Preferences in your home directory and add to the list of file extensions that you want automatically opened after download (aka “Safe Files”).

I thought it would be straightforward to write a CGI script that emits CSV and have that automatically be opened in Excel. Good lord, what a pain. First of all, Safari has no easy way to associate a MIME type with an application. But can associate an application with a given file extension by doing a “Get Info” on the file in Finder … look for “Open with:”.

So I had to find and download a helpful app called RCDefaultApp. It installs as a System Preference and allows you to change all the crazy Launch Services business (associations MIME types, UTIs, file extensions, etc).

The official MIME types for CSV are text/csv and text/comma-separated-values. Unfortunately Safar breaks this. As far as I can tell, Safari just automatically displays “text/*” inline in the browser. So I used RCDefaultApp to defined “application/csv” (yeah, I guess I should have made that “application/x-csv”), and associated that with Excel.

Here is the perl code I used to test this whole mess:

And here is the plist file just to give an idea of what it looks like:

Figuring out how to tell Safari that CSV was a “Safe File” was harder to track down. It’s totally undocumented, but a couple of hardy Mac OS X nerds have uncovered the fact that com.apple.DownloadAssessment.plist holds the key to the magic. It allows you to override the download assessments that are hard coded into Launch Services. A post over at MacEnterprise.org provides some great documentation on exactly how to set this up.

The asute reader will notice that my com.apple.DownloadAssessment.plist file has a definition for the “csv” file extension rather than a MIME type. That’s because to get things to work at all, I had to actually make my CGI script have a filename that ends in “.csv”, which is totally crazy. Otherwise Safari downloads the file alright, but it saves it with a file extension of “.pl” or “.cgi”, and then cleverly reminds us that we might be downloading a PERL executable. In fact it is simply CSV text with a “.pl” extension. So it looks like the key steps here were:

• renaming CGI script to so it downloads with the proper “csv” file extension
• use Finder to make “csv” files open with Excel
• construct and install a com.apple.DownloadAssessment.plist so Safari will automatically open the “csv” file after download.

Gosh, Mac’s are so easy to use, I can just hardly believe it :-) Sorry folks, I think this is a case where the “PC guy” wins, hands down.

Link to Modifying Safari Safe Files List
Link to RCDefaultApp for editing MIME type associations

Filed under: osx | 1 Comment
Tagged: apps

Deep wisdom from LifeHacker about the oh-so-corporate task of digitizing whiteboards….

This is a trick I picked up when I was working as a consultant. This process quickly and efficiently sends out notes from a working session to all the collaborators. The steps are:
1. Capture whiteboard notes with your cameraphone.
2. Send your images to your laptop/PC via Bluetooth (or email).
3. Use CutePDF to “print” them to a PDF file.
4. Email PDF to all collaborators.

This sounds like a lot of steps, but Dan says it only takes about 5 minutes, depending on how many images you’re distributing.

Not that I capture a lot of whiteboards, but I like my way better.

• Step 1, buy a MacBook or a MacBook Pro
• Step 2, Open lid of MacBook and press power button
• Step 3, Point the MacBook’s built-in camera towards the whiteboard as you snap a picture with PhotoBooth

I know it’s a lot of steps, but you only have to do the first two once every year, and the third one only takes about 4 seconds, depending on how many images you’re distributing.

Now that Scanr thing they are talking about that converts your whiteboard pictures into PDF and then emails them back to you … that’s pretty neat.

Link to “The MacBook Family”
Link to Scanr

Filed under: lifehacking | 2 Comments
Tagged: apps , neat

About a month ago I was going on about trying to use a newsreader to keep up with all the RSS flying around. I tried Google News Reader, hated it. I tried about 10 other RSS readers, both web based and client software (mac)… I felt like they all missed the point.

When I’m reading RSS, I actually don’t give a monkey’s tail about the RSS. RSS is stupid, unformatted, unstyled text with no soul and even less information. The way to consume RSS coming from websites is to read it in it’s richest form: from the website itself. Some client newsreaders go a short way down this path by giving you button to open the article in your web browser. But this is totally lame. I mean, a drunk dog could open up a web browser and sit there through the World Wide Wait and sift through the blink tags and advertisements and try to read the article.

I am happy to make the first public mention of TikiRobotReader, a Mac OS X application that (eventually) will handle RSS in a way that is not totally dain bramaged. TRR is Open Source, a Cocoa application, and a work in progress.

The basic idea is that for a given Article, TRR will download the link to the article’s web representation and convert it to PDF so the articles are all nice and shiny and ready for your skimming pleasure, no waiting required. Here is what I want TRR to be:

Principles of Operation

• Simple keyboard commands everywhere. Should be operable one-handed while eating lunch.
• RSS is disposable content. It’s not critical like most (personal) Email.
• Read the content as presented by the website, not some random choice of Font and Color.
• Blog posts and status messages from friends are way more important than Yahoo/CNN headlines.
• Streamline the reading process. No nagging feelings of “should I delete this article or save it?”
• Download and cache web pages as PDF. Zero latency when switching articles.
  • PDF loads immediately, vs 1-5 seconds for an HTML page to render
  • PDF is a static page, no blinking and bouncing flash ads and animated GIFs
• RSS is a source of content. Provide easy hooks for the sinks: Sharing and Research.

The current release is ugly as hell, but functional. At this point TRR is best enjoyed by running out of XCode so you can debug crashes and implement nifty features. I will be using it as my daily news reader in this fashion. But the nightly builds are functional and get the idea across. Feel free to contribute! Design ideas are helpful and code contributions are always a good thing. TikiRobotReader is meant to present RSS the way you, the discerning TikiRobot! blog reader, think is best. TRR will be a great place to implement all those Web 2.0/client features we want but can’t get anywhere else.

Link to TikiRobotReader nightly build
Link to TikiRobotReader SourceForge page

Filed under: all talk, code code, design, lifehacking, meta, osx, tiki lifestyle | 5 Comments
Tagged: apps , cocoa

Here’s a neat app I found on O’Reilly Radar today. Rentometer is a Google maps mash-up that tells you what the average rents are for your location and the type of apartment you have. It’s got a really clean UI and is super easy to use.

Speaking of apartments, I finally found a new place after weeks of stressful searching! It’s smaller than my current place and needs a bit of fixing up…but it’s in Bernal (on Park and Andover) and also ridiculously inexpensive, so I’m happy. yay! i get to play with zara more often! :-)

Filed under: cartography | 4 Comments
Tagged: apps , neat