Recently I have been using one my favorite text editors on my mac to process some text lines. Below is a list of some commands I found useful:

Lowercase every character: tr [:upper:] [:lower:]
Sort the lines: sort
Show only unique lines: uniq

I rarely need to convert files on my Mac, but when I do, I seem to think I have to find some type of weird audio program to help. My usual pattern to solve this problem was to go onto google.com and put in "convert wma to mp3" and hope for the best. But tonight was different. While playing around with the program VLC, I noticed a menu item that I have never used before: "Streaming/Exporting Wizard". This option allows for doing just as it suggests, but after playing around with some options, I found out that VLC can convert WMA files to MP3 files!

Here are the steps:

1. Open the WMA file(s) in VLC
2. Goto File -> Streaming/Export Wizard
3. Choose "Transcode/Save to file" and click Next
4. Choose "Existing playlist item" and highlight the items you want converted and click Next
5. Because I was converting audio, I used the "Transcode audio" option
6. Set the codec to "MP3" and choose your bitrate (I went with default of 192) and click Next
7. Set your encapsulation to "RAW" and click Next
8. Set your destination directory and click Next and it should start converting!

Afterwards I used Automator to rename my files from "Song Title.wma.raw" to "Song Title.mp3" by:

1. Dragging the audio files onto Automator
2. Adding "Rename Finder Items"
3. Set the operation of the "Rename Finder Items" to "Replace Text"
4. Find = .wma.raw
5. Replace = .mp3
6. Click Run!

iPad + Velcro from Jesse Rosten on Vimeo.

I have been recently reading the book called Upgrade Your Life: The Lifehacker Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, Better, by Gina Trapini. In the book there are tons of suggestions on how to save time and headaches in your life. For myself, I have found the hacks to very rewarding! Somethings in my life are very tedious and need to be streamlined. Recently, I found that my email system needed a nice ironing. So, I did some quick google searches and did not find much help on how to move message really easy via the keyboard. Thus, I set out to find my own solution. That solution is keyboard shortcuts for os x mail. This helps in saving time, and here is how to implement it for one folder:

To make a short cut for moving a message to a folder:

1. open system preferences
2. select "keyboard" module
3. select "keyboard shortcuts"
4. select "application shortcuts" on the left side
5. add a new entry for the "Mail" application
6. make the menu title to be the exact spelling and capitolization as the folder you want to move messages to
7. choose a keyboard shortcut (tip: use cmd+alt+ctrl+(letter) to avoid overlap)
8. relaunch mail to recognize the shortcut(s)

update: I have noticed that sometimes, mail does not recognize the keyboard shortcut until after you have used the menu item. This is very upsetting.

Choose a message and hit your keyboard shortcut. Volia! I hope you saw your message dissapear. If not, I suggest you try picking a new keyboard shortcut and relaunching mail or making sure the shortcut is recognized. To verify if your shortcut is being recognized, try the following:

1. open your mail application
2. select the "Message" menu
3. select "Move To" menu
4. find the folder you are targeting with your shortcut
5. check to make sure your menu has your shortcut next to it (refer to the screenshot below for an example)

I have found some nice games that have captured my attention while looking to keep myself occupied in various moments of life:

• newtonica
• orbital
• tangram pro
• lemonade
• flightcontrol
• trace

This is not going to be some long post about the reasons why I am zipping up files with passwords. Also, opening these zip files with the Finder will yield an error. So, this is all work for the terminal command line. If you do not like that, then I am guessing that you have or need some type of program that will handle this all for you.

zip -e filename.zip path/filepattern.*

to unzip the file

unzip filename.zip

I have always wondered how to search for stuff in my mailboxes, and now, after reading the help pages, I have found out how to do that with some good precision!

Lets say I need an email with the keyword of "motor", from my contact named "amy", and sent after Jan 01 2009. This is what you would use in the search field for narrowing your scope of message selection:

motor from:amy date:>=01/01/09

In Mac OS X some dialog boxes or web pages that have buttons or fields are presented at many times throughout the entire use of the system. I myself use OS X all day and in most cases, all night.

Moving between these items with the TAB button has improved my productivity because the TAB button is so much closer than the mouse.

But, this feature is not turned on by default. You might think, "It is turned on and I use it all the time! I don't think you know what your talking about". Well, if that's is how you feel, but are still curious, check out the pic I shot from the Keyboard Preferences:

os x 10.5 keyboard preference pane

Take notice towards the bottom of the window where the following text of "Full keyboard access:" and the option of "All controls" is selected.

This allows you to TAB around just about everything that is clickable by the mouse! I absolutely love this option and always forget about turning it on.

Okay, I own a PowerMate gadget that I have not used in a very very long time. So this afternoon I deiced to play with it and make a couple of scripts that help me at work.

My first task was to make the thing pulse when I have unread email in my inbox. After some simple searching I found a nice entry at macosxhints.com about the script. I also found some smart posts that contained some very effcient apple scripts. One them had a nice idea of using the "say" command to make the mac speak some text! I found this to be very entertaining and started to think how I could use this when I wanted to.

Just a little side note: I have decided to stop checking my email ever 10 seconds and move that to 10 minutes. I find that checking email or seeing that I have unread email ever 10 seconds or so is very distruptive in the moment of my thoughts and projects. So I have decided to increment my email checking to 10 minutes for now. I might even increase this to 20 minutes. Not sure yet.

Back to the script. I liked the idea of a script telling me when it was checking my email but I wanted to have the ability to toggle this on and off with a prefrences setting. After a little searching, I found a great idea and put it to good use. It was so good that I had to write it down because I know I will be trying to implement this in future scripts.

Iteration 1

I came up with this design:

set mac_speak to (do shell script "defaults read com.AaronsAppleScripts.pref 'macSpeak'")

if mac_speak is "true" then
say "Processing email"
end if

try
tell application "System Events" to if (exists process "Mail") is false then
set theCount to 0
else
tell application "Mail" to set theCount to unread count of inbox
end if

if theCount > 0 then
tell application "PowerMateDaemon" to set pulse always to true
else
tell application "PowerMateDaemon"
set pulse always to false
set brightness to 0
end tell
end if
end try

if mac_speak is "true" then
say "Finished"
end if

Explanation of the preferences

To use the preferences here are the following examples of commands to type in your terminal:

set the value to true:

defaults write com.AaronsAppleScripts.pref 'macSpeak' 'true'

set the value to false:

defaults write com.AaronsAppleScripts.pref 'macSpeak' 'false'

read the preference:

defaults read com.AaronsAppleScripts.pref 'macSpeak'

use preferences inside apple scripts:

do shell script "defaults read com.AaronsAppleScripts.pref 'macSpeak'"

Installing Passenger should be very easy. Please try following my steps below and you should get some good success. I built and used the following configuration with Mac OSX 10.6. But I am sure changes in the OS/Passenger/Ruby will change in the future. You will need to have the following for this article:

1. MacPorts installed
2. No fear of using the terminal

Below are the steps necessary to do everything, after that is a list of commands I used that follow the steps:

1. Install the Passenger gem
2. Install the Apache2 with MacPorts
3. Set variable APXS for building passenger module
4. Run build and install for Passenger module for Apache 2
5. Edit Apache Conf file

Here is what I typed in (I have also attached Instructions on how to install Passenger and host Ruby on Rails with either Virtualhost or RailsBaseURI for downloading):

1. gem install passenger
2. port install apache2
3. export APXS=/opt/local/apache2/bin/apxs
4. passenger-install-apache2-module
5. edit your apache conf file to add the following lines
   1. LoadModule passenger_module /opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.0.6/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so
   2. PassengerRoot /opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.0.6
   3. PassengerRuby /opt/local/bin/ruby
6. host your rails app with either a virtual host or RailsBaseURI /path/to/app/dir
   1. virtual host
      1. text to put in your apache conf
         1. <VirtualHost *:80>
         2. ServerName www.yourhost.com
         3. DocumentRoot /somewhere/public
         4. </VirtualHost>
   2. alias with railsbaseuri
      1. cd /somewhere/already
      2. ln -s /rails_app/public /new_app
      3. text to put in your apache conf
         1. <VirtualHost *:80>
         2. ServerName www.yourhost.com
         3. DocumentRoot /somewhere/already
         4. RailsBaseURI /new_app
         5. </VirtualHost>