Plain Text. Gadgets. Art. Geek. Speculation. Mac.
I don’t know how I stuck with the super annoying default notification sound for a successfully expanded Text Expander snippet for all these years, but I finally got around to finding a suitable and non-intrusive replacement.
Here’s the sound in .mp3 format, for previewing it; and the .aif sound file to download and drop into your ~/Library/Sounds/ folder (both are Dropbox links).
Notifications sounds on macOS have to be in .aif format, and it’s a bit convoluted to do it with iTunes.
If you, like me, use the weird symbols on your keyboard to help you sort files in the Finder, then you’ll be happy to find that I went through the trouble of not only naming a folder full of folders with top-row keyboard characters so you can see exactly how they sort, and then naming those folders so you know what key commands will produce them, but I also made it downloadable so you can just use it yourself. I put this folder on my Desktop for quick reference.
See here for a web table for every last keyboard character in alphabetical order.
Enjoy.
While I regularly maintain a daily journal, and do so in plain text (while also keeping a concurrent journal in the Momento app on my iPhone for the search and tagging features), often I find that I never actually read any of the old entries. Which is fine, as I mostly just like the habit of recording the information. Recently, I developed a system that is proving to be immensely useful. Continue reading “Yearly Recaps: A Monthly, Contextual, Plain-Text Journaling System”
“Cryptid Command“, my latest embroidered patch set is now live on Kickstarter until October 31, 2015. The patches feature Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster and Aliens/UFOs all with a fun military-themed look. Continue reading ““Cryptid Command” Bigfoot/Nessie/UFO Embroidered Patch Set on Kickstarter”
I like to see the Big Picture. Most calendars suck for that. I also have idiosyncratic wants. Here’s the list of criteria:
I found this near-perfect solution to my desires, but being near-perfect, I wanted to make it perfect. So I did.
Handy info for running Photoshop actions via Applescript on your Mac. I used this so I can send an image to Photoshop via the Acquire iPhone app (my “scanner”), and then have Drafts save a text file in Dropbox that Hazel picks up and tells Photoshop to run my default scanned sketch Photoshop Action on the artwork image.
So you want to send the audio from your iPhone to your Mac, and be able to control the playback functions on the iPhone from the Mac? Airfoil and iKeyboardRemote will do the trick. Read on for how to do this, and why you would even bother. Continue reading “Play & Control iPhone Audio on Mac”
I enjoyed Shane Carruth’s “Upstream Color”, the followup to his excellent debut film “Primer” — but it mostly made me want to watch Primer again. If you’ve not yet seen it, you may want to stop reading as spoilers will abound below. None of this will make any sense if you’ve not seen it already anyways!
If you are a fellow Photoshop user, and have experienced an unexplained loss of accessing the Hand tool using the spacebar keyboard shortcut, this may have been caused if you are running password manager software 1Password and have used the “Hide” menu option.
I would have never found this had it not been for the warning on TextExpander‘s menubar icon, and the resulting blog post they published regarding TextExpander and Secure Input.
Quitting 1Password and relaunching it fixed the issue for me, so I can only assume it was indeed the culprit.
Continue reading “Secure Input & Photoshop’s Hand Tool Spacebar Shortcut”
Probably the best improvement I made this past week for my productivity and focus was turning off that Pavlovian dopamine delivery system that is the “new e-mail” sound.
The Overthinker 