txt2dat online
Hot on the heels of Bitsticker, I’ve made an interface for Ross Crawford’s txt2dat program: txt2dat online. You just enter some text and click a button to download a custom LDraw part with the text stamped right on it. Bring some literacy to the lives of your virtual LEGO people with labeled street signs and storefronts.
Posted on Sunday, March 4th, 2007.
PSA: Mac OS X Text Editing Shortcuts
These tips work in just about every modern app that lets you edit text.
If you hold down Option and press the left or right arrows, the cursor moves left or right one word instead of one letter. If you hold down Option while pressing up or down, the cursor moves up or down one paragraph instead of one line.
Hold down the Command key while pressing left or right to jump to the beginning or end of the current line. Hold down Command and press up or down to jump to the beginning or end of the file or field.
Holding down Shift at the same time will cause the corresponding span of text to be selected. In conjunction with the well known shortcuts for cut, copy, and paste, these controls provide a handy way to manipulate and navigate text right from the keyboard. If you’re into that kind of thing.
Posted on Thursday, March 1st, 2007.
Bitsticker
As recently announced elsewhere, I’ve released Bitsticker, a little script that converts bitmap images into virtual “stickers” that can be used to decorate LDraw models.
So. Art on your LEGO. On your computer. What’s not to love?
Posted on Thursday, March 1st, 2007.
Man oh Man
This little AppleScript prompts you to name a term (typically, a command line program) to look up in your Mac’s man pages. Rather than display the manual text in a tedious little terminal window, you can peruse it in your web browser using Bwana (a free prerequisite) or render a high-quality version suitable for printing with Preview.
Here are examples of the cp manual page as rendered by both output options:
- Bwana Example (HTML)
- Preview Example (PDF)
You can download a plain text version of the script or a precompiled version ready to drop in your ~/Library/Scripts folder.
Just a handy helper for you programmer types.
Posted on Wednesday, February 21st, 2007.
Road Trip Recap
Here is a highly abbreviated summary of the road trip Dan and I took in January. The trip lasted two weeks and covered 3672 miles (thanks to space truck).
- Monday: Binghamton, NY to Hagerstown, MD by way of Pennsylvania.
- Tuesday: Hagerstown, MD to Huntington, WV by way of Charleston, WV.
- Wednesday: Huntington, WV to Nashville, TN by way of Lexington, KY.
- Thursday: Nashville, TN to Hattiesburg, MS by way of Birmingham, AL.
- Friday: Hattiesburg, MS to New Orleans, LA by way of Biloxi, MS.
- Saturday: Volunteered gutting flood-damaged homes in New Orleans with
a bunch of hippiesthe Common Ground Collective. - Sunday: Ditto.
- Monday: Good food and authentic New Orleans jazz.
- Tuesday: New Orleans, LA to Pensacola, FL.
- Wednesday: Pensacola, FL to Lake City, FL.
- Thursday: Lake City, FL to Myrtle Beach, NC by way of Georgia’s Golden Isles.
- Friday: Myrtle Beach, NC to Charlottesville, VA.
- Saturday: Charlottesville, VA to Front Royal, VA by way of Shenandoah National Park.
- Sunday: Front Royal, VA to Baltimore, MD by way of Washington, DC.
- Monday: Baltimore, MD to Binghamton, NY.
The linked photos were not necessarily taken at exactly that location, but they were taken at that general point in the trip.
Posted on Friday, February 16th, 2007.
B-Wing Variant
The first in a series of alternate spacecraft built from the pieces of the LEGO B-Wing kit.
From certain angles I think it even bears a slight resemblance to some WWII-era fighters:
Bricksmith CAD screenshots:
The MPD file is available, as are more photos.
Posted on Thursday, February 8th, 2007.
Pasteboard Accumulator Service
Daniel Jalkut’s Xcode Pasteboard Accumulator script can be packaged without modification as a service available to all applications with Jesper’s ThisService. Just select the “Acts on input” service type. The script implements an alternative copy function that appends the selected text to the clipboard.
Posted on Monday, February 5th, 2007.
Yojimbo Tag List
Here is a little AppleScript that lists the tags you’ve used in Yojimbo. If you select some tags, it will copy them to the clipboard concatenated with commas.
-- get list of known tags
set _tags to {}
tell application "Yojimbo"
repeat with _tag in tags
set end of _tags to name of _tag
end repeat
end tell
-- show list to user
set _choice to choose from list _tags with title "Yojimbo Tags" with prompt "Select tags:" with multiple selections allowed without empty selection allowed
if _choice is equal to false then return
-- concatenate and copy chosen tags
set _dtid to text item delimiters
set text item delimiters to {","}
set the clipboard to ("" & _choice)
set text item delimiters to _dtid
You can copy and paste the above code into a new Script Editor document, or you can download the script directly:
- Yojimbo Tag List 1.1 (2.3K)
Unzip the file and put it in ~/Library/Scripts to access it from your system’s script menu. If there is sufficient interest I may try to integrate it with my other Yojimbo script.
Posted on Sunday, February 4th, 2007.
Linking to an informal group of Flickr photos associated by date
I’ve wanted a way to link to batches of Flickr photos associated by date without grouping them explicitly. There are probably cleaner ways to do this, but Flickr’s search mechanism can be used for this purpose, as demonstrated in a couple of my recent posts.
Start with http://flickr.com/search/ and add the following criteria as parameters:
Whose Pictures?
Restrict search results to a particular user ID (such as yours) using the w parameter. You can look up user IDs easily using idGettr. If present in the user ID, the “@” symbol should be escaped as %40.
w=93931947%40N00
Of What?
Define a search query with q and specify what should be searched with m. The possible values for m are text and tags. In my case, I’m just looking for photos tagged as drawings.
q=drawing m=tags
From When?
Use the d parameter to define a date range to search. Only photos that fall within this range which match the query defined above will be returned. The date range is given in three parts delimited by hyphens.
First, either posted or taken is used to specify whether you’re talking about the date the photos were posted to Flickr or actually taken. Then the starting date is given, followed by the ending date.
Dates are given as eight-digit strings in the format YYYYMMDD (year, month, day, padded with zeros if necessary). To search a single day, give the same date for the start and finish, as I have:
d=posted-20070202-20070202
Display Mode
If the z parameter is given the value t, the results will be displayed as a grid of thumbnail images. If omitted, matching photos will be presented in a less compact annotated list format.
z=t
Putting it All Together
Separate each parameter=value pair with an ampersand (“&”) and use a question mark to indicate where the parameters begin. The final URL will look something like this:
http://flickr.com/search/?w=93931947%40N00&q=drawing&m=tags&d=posted-20070202-20070202&z=t
As I said, it’s quite likely there’s already an easier way to do this. If not, I suppose I could write a little script to do the trick.
Posted on Saturday, February 3rd, 2007.