March 2013
1 post
1 tag
Setting a date with TextExpander
I suck at dates. Badly.
Thankfully, there are a few ways to get around this in software — not least TextExpander, Smile’s ace text-substitution program. (I don’t use it nearly enough, but I’m looking to fix that.)
TextExpander has a lot of date placeholders, so it’s obvious that I’m not the only one that needs help with this — but I may well be the first to be this bad. Here’s a list of the...
February 2013
1 post
1 tag
Blackjack!
For the last few months I’ve been working, on and off, on a little web project — a basic blackjack game you can play in your browser. It’s not going to win any awards but it was a fun exercise to teach myself some JavaScript, HTML and CSS.
I got the idea for it after finishing Codecademy’s original JavaScript course, where you spend some time working on the basics behind such a game. At the very...
October 2012
3 posts
1 tag
Dishonored by the numbers
Dishonored is so good. So incredibly good. It’s really fantastic. It came out (here, at least) on Friday and I’ve already completed it, with my first playthrough taking about 22 hours.
It’s so good I was playing it until 5am yesterday morning and until 4am this morning. I just couldn’t stop, I couldn’t put it down.
I can’t really think of a comparison, as in “If you liked game X then you’ll...
1 tag
Restart in Windows: Revenge of the Script
Want to quickly restart your Mac in your Windows Bootcamp partition, without having to hold down option/alt as the computer starts?
Click this link, which will open an AppleScript in your default editor, and replace “YourBootcampPartition” in the first line with your Windows partition’s actual name (making sure that is exactly the same, as it’s case sensitive). Then save it as a .scpt file in...
1 tag
What’s in the box!?
Accessing AppleScript records using a variable
AppleScript gets a lot of stick for being a rubbish language. And it is. But before last night there wasn’t anything that really threw me and made me think “wow, that’s incredibly, impressively, mind-meltingly dumb”. (Admittedly, I’m not a programmer.)
But it happened. Here’s the example code:
set myRecords to {Abc:"1", Def:"2", Ghi:"3"}
set...
September 2012
5 posts
“Learning AppleScript can really pay off. Once you’ve suffered through its oddities enough to be able to write it without weeping, you’ll be tempted to write scripts that achieve things you can do with copy and paste, like this one.”
Maybe I should have thought harder about that first line.
2 tags
Everyday automation
Learning AppleScript can really pay off.
It isn’t always the easiest language to work with, as anyone who’s ever used it will tell you. Commands that look like they should work sometimes don’t, you occasionally have to use bizarre methods to refer to that thing right there. It’s not a picnic.
But I’ve been using it for a little while and am pretty comfortable with it. I’ve ended up using it...
1 tag
I’m on GitHub →
I’m planning to write about the AppleScript work I’ve been doing but for now this is the best place to look if you’re interested.
GitHub and the GitBox Mac client have really influenced me to share this stuff, as well as to think about learning new languages. More on that later.
1 tag
Update: Restart in Windows
UPDATE 06/10/2012: Please ignore this post and look at my most recent post about the script.
I came a across a more sophisticated method of getting your Bootcamp partition’s device ID for my restart in Windows AppleScript, so you may want to grab the new code (also below).
It no longer uses my hack to pull the device ID from a certain character position in the result of a shell command —...
July 2012
2 posts
I am easily the biggest geek on Tumblr’s “bootcamp” tag page at the moment.
4 tags
Restarting in Bootcamp the easy way
UPDATE 06/10/2012: Please ignore this post and look at my most recent post about the script.
I’ve used a Mac — and Windows on a Mac — since 2007 but I’ve just, only just, figured out a way to quickly restart from OSX into Windows.
And it’s really easy to use it on your computer too, even if the words code or script make you freak out a bit. (If they don’t, skim the post for the meat but make...
March 2012
1 post
February 2012
2 posts
1 tag
2 tags
Endnotes: The Call of the Weird
Louis Theroux’s first and so far only book, published in 2005, is the funniest thing I’ve read in a long, long time. We’re talking out-loud laughs. The kind of laughs that make you not want to read it on the Tube because other people will think you’re crazy and stare at you but you can’t put it down and end up looking mental anyway.
It’s great. Really great.
Theroux goes back to the US to...
January 2012
1 post
1 tag
Netflix Roulette
Netflix launched in Britain a week ago and I was really excited to sign up and check it out, after years of hearing how great the US service is.
Put simply, it’s a disappointment. On a technical level it’s great but that’s ruined by the gaps in its content library.
A few probing searches to see how bare its cupboard is turned into what I call Netflix Roulette — you keep searching until you get...
