Posts
Mountain Lion annoyances
As you probably know by now, what was formerly iCal is now Calendar, & Address Book is now Contacts, the better to match iOS. I actually have no problem with the new names Apple chose in Mountain Lion, other than the fact that iCal was at least slightly interesting, as opposed to Calendar1, which is utilitarian but borrring. OK, I will agree that calling an app iCal was pretty confusing considering that the app used the iCal file format as well, but that was something only nerds really knew or cared about. ↩ … (Read More)
Archiving your past tweets as Markdown with a good text editor & a few simple bash commands
Over the past week or so, several very smart folks have been blogging about using the way-cool multi-service If This, Then That (IFTTT) to automatically archive all of your tweets to a file in your Dropbox. I’ve learned lots of useful info from these articles: … (Read More)
Windows 8 is going to be a disaster
Michael Mace, in “Fear and Loathing and Windows 8”: … (Read More)
IPv6 & Apple: good news & bad news
From Ars Technica’s “The future is forever: the state of IPv6 in the Apple world”: … (Read More)
Notes & more from a 4-part lecture series I’m giving on technology & society
Throughout May I’m delivering a 4-part lecture series on technology & society at Ladue Chapel Presbyterian Church in St. Louis, Missouri, on Sunday mornings at 9:45. It’s part of the Adult Education courses that the Church offers throughout the year. I’ve spoken there before, & I thoroughly enjoyed the beautiful setting & an intelligent audience that loves to ask questions. The 4 parts are: … (Read More)
Check the safety of a website using several different services at once
ScanURL is a nifty new website that describes itself as follows: … (Read More)
Fantods is a real word—who knew?
David Foster Wallace was a genius & one hell of a fine writer. In his finest novel, Infinite Jest, he refers to a character having the “howling fantods”. I always assumed that fantods was a made up word, easily understandable through context. … (Read More)
Fun with inputrc, part 1
If you’re using Linux or any other UNIX, the following should work just fine & dandy. If you use a Mac, you need to perform an extra step. Mac OS X doesn’t ship with any inputrc file, either at /etc/inputrc or ~/.inputrc. First let’s create one, at ~/.inputrc & then open it with your favorite text editor & add the following (or, open your text editor, add the following, & save it to ~/.inputrc): … (Read More)
A search engine that understands symbols & special characters
SymbolHound: “SymbolHound is a search engine that doesn’t ignore special characters. This means you can easily search for symbols like &, %, and π. We hope SymbolHound will help programmers find information about their chosen languages and frameworks more easily.” … (Read More)
Quickly open any Mac menu command with your keyboard
Windows has long had a quick & easy way that keyboard junkies can open menu commands: press Alt+[Letter], where the letter is underlined in the top menu, then press another (underlined) letter to select the sub-menu item1. So, for instance, to quickly close the current document, you might press Alt-F to activate the File menu, then C for Close2. Microsoft in recent releases of Windows has (stupidly) chosen to hide those underlines for some reason. Dennis O’Reilly, in an article for CNET, explains how to re-enable them; scroll down to the section labeled “Show shortcut keys on menu items” for how. Windows 7 users, see “Hide or Show Underlined Letters Shortcuts On Windows 7 Menus and Applications”. ↩ Yes, you could also (probably) press Ctrl-W, but I couldn’t think of any other examples off the top of my head. ↩ … (Read More)
How can you tell if a file is UTF-8 encoded or not?
Say you want to know if a particular file is encoded using UTF-81. On a UNIX box, you could just use the file command: If you don’t know what UTF-8 is, read the Wikipedia article. Here’s the upshot: you want all your text editors & operating systems & web browsers to support & use UTF-8 by default. It makes life a lot easier. ↩ … (Read More)
Print to PDF on your Mac using a super-fast key command
Now this is a fantastic tip from MacSparky by way of MacOSXHints: how to easily set things up so you can print to PDF by pressing Command-P Command-P (that’s Command-P, then P again while still holding down Command). Works like a charm. … (Read More)
A better script to kill CrashPlan when it starts using too much RAM because it’s a Java app
In a recent post about using CrashPlan for backup but getting the java process to behave, I said to create a file named kill_java_mem.sh in ~/bin/cronjobs & put the following in it: … (Read More)
Mount remote drives via SSH with SSHFS
NOTE: A long time ago I used to blog for The Open Source Weblog, part of the Weblogs Inc. network, which was eventually bought by AOL. Recently I was looking up an old post I wrote, & I discovered that AOL let all my posts disappear. The only way to access them now is through The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. In the interest of preserving history, I’m republishing some of those posts here. Some I’ll edit, & some I’ll present in their original forms, untouched by time. This post has been edited from the original published November 3, 2005, in order to bring it up to date. … (Read More)
How to use CrashPlan but keep the Java process from constantly using ridiculous amounts of RAM
I use CrashPlan for my online backup, & it’s great: reasonably priced, secure, easy to use. But there’s one problem. For better or worse, CrashPlan is a Java app, & one of the problems with Java apps is that they are greedy pigs when it comes to RAM usage. I’ve often noticed that Java was using close to 400 MB of RAM, even when nothing is happening (to be precise, when CrashPlan is just hanging out & not actually backing anything up). … (Read More)
An easier, quicker way to edit the known_hosts file when an SSH server changes its host key
If you SSH to servers that change a lot (they’re hosted at Amazon Web Services, for instance), you may see this warning when you try to connect1: I’ve changed the names & numbers to anonymize things, so no, I’m not SSHing to 1.2.3.4 with the user name of user. ↩ … (Read More)
Subscribe to Twitter via RSS
A friend of mine asked me today if it was possible to subscribe to a person’s tweets via RSS. After a bit of poking around, I found the answer. Use this, replacing my Twitter name (scottgranneman) with the Twitter name of the user you wish to follow: … (Read More)
How I archive my tweets
Ars Technica has an interesting article up today, Liberate your tweets: Archiving without Twitter, in which they cover some solutions for saving your tweets for posterity. There’s some good stuff in there that I’d never heard of & which I’m now going to check out. … (Read More)
Google’s 7 business areas
From Farhad Manjoo’s “Google’s Grand Plan” in Slate: … (Read More)
Database of HTTP status codes with IETF and Wikipedia descriptions
Nice site: httpstatus.es. And oh so useful. … (Read More)