A year ago I received an OLPC XO (the “$100 laptop”) through their Give One Get One program. I played with it for a few days and found it essentially useless due to unstable and slow software (and lack of WPA support), so it quickly began gathering dust on a shelf (it has since improved).
Last [...]
The Problem
Most Mac OS X power users know about the “open” command line tool which opens the files specified as arguments in their default (or a specified) OS X application. Additionally, many OS X text editors, such as TextMate (”mate”) and SubEthaEdit (”see”), come with command line tools which can be used to open files.
These [...]
In the course of working on projects like server-side Objective-J, jack, and now narwhal, I’ve often had to write shell scripts that needed to know their location in the filesystem. Rather than hardcoding it, I prefer to infer it automatically at runtime. Unfortunately this isn’t as easy as you would expect.
If the script is invoked [...]
I recently heard about an RSS reader (can’t remember which) that had a feature to mark all messages older than a certain threshold as “read”. I thought this was an incredibly useful feature, since I often forget to check my feeds for days at a time, and end up with hundreds of unread items that [...]
BugMeNot is a great little service for bypassing the registration process for websites that really shouldn’t require it (ahem, nytimes.com). The bookmarklet brings up BugMeNot for the current website you’re viewing, and gives you login/password pairs which you can then copy and paste.
But wouldn’t it be better if it automagically filled in the username and [...]
This is an updated shell script / AppleScript for opening a new tab in your current directory (or the specified directory). The last version was for the pre-tabbed version of Terminal.
#!/bin/sh -
if [ $# -ne 1 ]; then PATHDIR=`pwd` else PATHDIR=$1 fi
/usr/bin/osascript <<-EOF activate application "Terminal" tell application "System Events" keystroke "t" using {command down} end tell tell application "Terminal" repeat with win in windows try if [...]
One very nice thing about JavaScript is it’s support for first-class functions and closures. Crockford calls JavaScript “Lisp in C’s Clothing”. I’m no Lisper, but I enjoy I discovering new tricks or applications of functional programming in JavaScript.
I wanted to hook all the browser’s asynchronous JavaScript “entry points” : events, timers, asynchronous XMLHttpRequests, script tags, [...]
A few months ago I started working on a JavaScript to Objective-C bridge. We had already implemented Objective-C in JavaScript, so I figured “why not?”
Well, I never got very far, but thankfully Patrick Geiller apparently had the same idea and actually executed it: He announced JSCocoa today. It looks like it’s a solid bridge, about [...]
My friend Andrew recently posted a teaser for a new project he’s working on, but with part of the headline pixelated to obscure what the project actually is. My curiosity got the best of me and I decided to do what any self-respecting geek would do: write a program to figure out what the censored [...]
I find it incredibly annoying when an embedded YouTube video can’t be made fullscreen, and I have to switch to YouTube.com just to watch it.
So, I wrote this simple little bookmarklet which modifies the embed code for any YouTube videos to allow fullscreen. It could also easily be made into a user script for GreaseMonkey, [...]