Posts
Grep the network with ngrep
I’ve just started playing with this, & so far it looks really neat-o: ngrep, which is short for network grep. … (Read More)
Shorten your URLs with YOURLS, & then set up Tweetbot & Netbot to use YOURLS
I’ve been using URL shorteners for quite a while. Yes, I know the critiques, but URL shorteners are pretty much essential if you use Twitter or ADN or any other micro-blogging service. I want to know what people click on, how many people click, & so on. I’ve been a Bitly user for years, especially once they allowed you to use your own short domain name for free. Once that deal started, I linked granne.me to Bitly and really started using it heavily. … (Read More)
A posthumous prank by a jazz master
Paul Desmond was one of the great jazz saxophonists & composers. Even if you don’t think you know who he is, you undoubtedly know his greatest composition, the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s “Take Five”, embedded below. … (Read More)
Maurice Sendak on appreciating art
Terry Gross of NPR’s Fresh Air loved interviewing Maurice Sendak—the creator of Where the Wild Things Are & so many other wonderful books—& did so many times. In return, he let her know that she was one of his favorite interviewers. … (Read More)
How to restart Screen Sharing on a remote Mac
At home I have a Mac Mini connected to my TV & my Synology NAS; to control it, I connect to the Mini from my MacBook Pro using Apple’s built-in Screen Sharing. Every once in a while, for no apparent reason, Screen Sharing is unable to connect to the Mini. Spin city. I can still SSH in to the Mini1, though, so in those cases I run the following command to restart Screen Sharing on the Mini: If I can’t SSH in, then I’m having bigger troubles than a simple hiccup with Screen Sharing. ↩ … (Read More)
Use Keyboard Maestro to open your Mac’s Keyboard Viewer & Character Viewer
As is his wont, Topher Kessler published a useful post the other day on MacFixIt: “How to access the character palette in OS X”. Here were his 3 methods: … (Read More)
When you vote, don’t use electronic voting machines
On election day, please don’t use an electronic voting machine if you want to ensure that your vote is counted. Instead, ask for a paper ballot. To put it simply, electronic voting machines are buggy, insecure, & inaccurate. … (Read More)
RSS feeds for web developers
One of my students in my Web Development course asked me yesterday morning about RSS feeds. I told him I’d write something up, & I did. It’s on my personal website, at RSS Feeds for the Web Developer. They’re all feeds to which I subscribe because I find them to be useful, so consider that my seal of approval. … (Read More)
How to tell WordPress to stop turning a Twitter URL into an embedded tweet
This is the story of a poor UI that wasted three hours of my life, & how I fixed it. It’s here so you hopefully don’t have the same experience. … (Read More)
Turning a list of domains into a Markdown-formatted ordered list with regular expressions
I’m teaching a course called From Blogs to Wikis at Washington University in St. Louis. One of the things I like to show them is a list of the 500 most popular websites in the world, so they can see how many of them (a) are related to social software, & (b) aren’t American. I grabbed the latest data, as I do every year, & massaged it with regular expressions so that it could go on my course website in Markdown format. It took me 3 passes to do it, which I’ve outlined here for others interested in regex … & the 500th most popular site on the Web! … (Read More)
How to use a key command to import passwords into 1Password
I love 1Password, & we use it every single day at WebSanity. In particular, one of us will generate a password for a client’s site, export it (File > Export Selected > 1Password Interchange File…), Skype it to the others, & then we’ll import it into our 1Password databases. … (Read More)
It’s easy to sideload books into Apple’s iBooks
Mark Crump, in a review at GigaOm of iBooks 3, said this: … (Read More)
Some good tutorials on TextExpander
I mentioned TextExpander the other day. I found a good tutorial about that essential program: TextExpander for Web Developers. I like this one because it does a good job explaining some of the cool yet arcane features in TextExpander. … (Read More)
Funniest joke in Borderlands 2
My favorite game over the last year has been Borderlands1. There are several reasons for this, including fun gameplay, cartoony yet beautiful graphics, well-done multiplayer, different kinds of missions & play (puzzles, action, combat, duels, & more), & the humor. Oh, the humor. I find Borderlands to be pretty darn funny & clever, with a good combination of obvious jokes & sly, you-have-to-think-about-it drollery. Prior to that it was Left 4 Dead & then Left 4 Dead 2, but those particular games have been left to essentially stagnate by Valve, which is weird & unfortunate. No Left 4 Dead 3, Valve? Nothing? ↩ … (Read More)
A list of contractions with curly apostrophes for TextExpander
I’ve memorized a few keyboard shortcuts for use on my Mac: … (Read More)
How to export & import GlimmerBlocker rules
I’m a big fan of GlimmerBlocker, an ad-blocking proxy that works beautifully to block ads & annoying JavaScripts, fix issues on various sites, & in general make web browsing far more pleasant. The best thing about it is that it’s a proxy, so that means two things: it works with all my web browsers (you just tell them to use your Mac’s Network proxy settings), & I only have one set of rules to edit & update, instead of a separate set of filters for every different browser’s ad-block extension. Convenient! … (Read More)
Social software for nerds: RegExLib, a regular expressions library
This looks very cool: … (Read More)
Fix a Markdown file that has had 2 spaces stripped with search & replace
I created a rather large file marked up with Markdown (heh) & then, a few hours later, stupidly opened it in a text editor that I had evidently set (some time ago) to strip extra spaces off the ends of files. I made a change, not realizing what I’d just done, & then, a day later, I opened the file in Sublime Text. … (Read More)
Align your code with the Alignment package for Sublime Text
I’m having students in my web development courses use Sublime Text as their editor. As a result, I’ve been digging deep into Sublime Text & writing up what I’ve learned on my personal website, which I use with some of my classes. This post is a pointer to some of those pages. … (Read More)
Host your own centralized git repo on a server that acts as dedicated storage
I’ve been learning a lot about Git over the last few months, & I wanted to start sharing a bit of what I’ve learned. We’ve been using GitHub at work, & it’s great, really great. But I wanted to be able to centrally host a git repo on our servers that acts as dedicated storage. I’m not going to use the git repo on the server as an actual development environment, just as a place to store the files that everyone else will use. In other words, I wanted to duplicate the GitHub experience on our servers. Here’s how. … (Read More)