82times

Tiny Applescript: toggle iChat status

This script toggles your iChat status between (away, “totally walking around”) and (available, [whatever you had as your available status before]). It even works with Current iTunes Song(!).

If your status is available, then it writes your status message to a hidden file (.temp_iChat_status) in your preferences folder and changes your status to away and your status message to “totally walking around”. Conversely, if your status is away, it reads whatever’s in that temp file and sets it as your status message and makes you available.

Attach this to a keystroke trigger (via Quicksilver or the like) and life is grand.

Here’s the script. And there you go. Here’s a unicorn from Eeyore’s Birthday in Austin.

Posted in Geek, Minutia | 1 Comment »

Today I pulled this from the trash for you

Posted in Minutia | 1 Comment »

Tiny AppleScript: play iTunes video in QuickTime

I really dislike viewing videos in iTunes. It’s clunky, there’s no support for multiple displays, I’m picky.

I wrote this little script to open and play the selected item in QuickTime, increase its played count by 1 (which marks podcasts as played in iTunes), and pause any music you might be listening to.

tell application "iTunes"
set theTrack to item 1 of selection
set theFile to (get location of theTrack)
set theCount to get (played count of theTrack)
set played count of theTrack to theCount + 1
end tell
tell application "iTunes"
if player state is playing then
playpause
end if
end tell
tell application "QuickTime Player"
open theFile
activate
play document 1
end tell

Ahh, that’s better. I set this up with a Quicksilver trigger and am no longer grouchy. Ever. Download the script. For some reason, the playpause (or play, or stop, or anything else I tried) wouldn’t work if I put all of the iTunes stuff in one tell block…so that’s why there’re two of them.

Posted in Geek, Minutia | 1 Comment »

Tiny AppleScript: add current track to playlist

Three lines, real simple:

tell application "iTunes"
duplicate current track to playlist "srsly partytime"
end tell

And then you can create a Quicksilver trigger to run the script; so, anytime you hear something and think “yo, that’s my JAM” you don’t have to leave the keyboard to make sure it gets in the rotation for your upcoming birthday party. A couple of tracks that should be on there right now:

1. Crystal Castles - “Crimewave“
2. Foals - “Olympic Airways“

Posted in Geek, Minutia, Music | 4 Comments »

Bike Friday is on order

http://www.bikefriday.com

It will be canary yellow and I splurged for the Brooks leather bar tape to match the honey brown saddle. This could be the start of a product evangelism crusade for me as it is for many Bike Friday owners.

I’m also planning on heading up to the factory in Eugene, OR on the first of November to pick up my bike, meet the folks who built it, and do some day rides/light touring in the area (I’m thinking maybe a 3-day loop to the coast, over to Portland, and then back to Eugene and then ride Amtrak back home).

not my Bike Friday. imagine this one in yellow with leather accents…

If I haven’t already gushed to you about it, Bike Friday custom-builds high-end folding/travel bicycles. The coolest part may be the travel case they sell for it which checks as standard luggage on airlines and has some add-ons that turn the case into a trailer you can haul behind you. Basically, this means I can fly anywhere and ride away from the airport car-free. Not that airports are the most bike-friendly places, but you get the idea. And its not some junky folder, either. I’ve ridden a couple of these and you forget you’re on a folding bike until you look down. Feels like a legit road bike to be sure. This is something I’ve been getting excited about for months on end. I’ve never even owned a new new bike, let alone one custom-built for me.

Also, I treated myself to McSweeny’s Book Release Club and Bowl of Cherries is a very entertaining read. Imagine–a funny book about a man awaiting execution in an Iraqi prison! Sounds like a laugh-riot, no? Well, the plot also involves an eccentric Egyptologist who is researching how the pyramids were build using sound waves to move the stones (which makes me extrememly happy as I recall an episode of Coast to Coast AM years ago while driving a mail truck at 3 in the morning in Iowa during which an eccentric Egyptologist claimed they moved the stones with sound and that a low F# is the frequency of the wobble of the Earth on its axis). That’s right, I just gave a blog shoutout to late-night conspiracy theory AM radio.

About 8 people said they liked my sweater today, so that means I’m the freshest. This video is still the champion. It makes me wish I still had a copy of Lost Blues & Other Songs…which I can’t find digitally anywhere. I may actually have to buy a physical CD! Totally stone age!

Posted in Bike | 3 Comments »

ASCII party tricks; word coinage

I come across lots of new words in the readings for my information science class this term. The whole field is fertile ground for making up new words. Aboutness, findabilty, satisfice, berrypicking. The list goes on. I’ve decided to coin three new words this week.

1. memesta - A digital gangsta who has a specific goal of spreading or popularizing a new unit of cultural information, and does so through a planned and concerted effort.
2. homepwnership - Annoying maintenance/labor/money costs of owning a home. You may own the house, but the house pwns you.
3. ASCIIwall - A wall full of ASCII art, the source of which may come from a video feed.

Meme becomes a more significant term for the info-saturation age based on how agile and fanned-out our new ways of “telling” are. Write about a meme on a popular blogging aggregate website and a potentially huge audience receives it. This may usher in the day of the memesta, a digital gangsta of ideas.

I like that idea so much, I think I’ll be one. You see, here’s how homepwnership came up originally:

I looked, and the word’s been used before, but not very much as far as I can tell. Now, I’ve put it up on wordie.org, submitted it to urbandictionary (which surprised me–they have editors and I have to wait for my submission to show up!), and I’d imagine I could find some image of a tree falling on a house and put the word in block white letters near the bottom of the frame and post it randomly in fark forums and CL rants & raves. With the housing market crisis that’s been in the news lately, its pretty timely. Default on your subprime loan? This is homepwnership in a big way.

And for the ASCIIwall. A friend of mine is helping Camille Utterback (a prominent interactive video artist) with an installation in San Jose this month. I also came across QuickASCII, a Mac command line tool that renders any Quicktime video into ASCII and plays it in Terminal. We were having a party, so I set to work on an installation for the event. Here’s how it went:

1. iSight records 60 seconds of video
2. QuickASCII plays that video in Terminal, which is projected onto the wall.
3. iSight records another video while the first one is playing.
4. QuickASCII plays that second video.
5. Repeat 4eva.

Here’s the janky AppleScript I wrote to keep the party going. I liked having the minute-long delay between recording and projection. That way, you noticed the installation, thought “hey–that’s me” and moved your arm around. When it didn’t move right along with you, you had to watch a little more to figure out what was going on. DJ took some good pics here.

I’ll upload some other pictures and give them the texasparty07 tag, too. I also had people hacking the KraftPad so we could play StepMania, an open source DDR clone. That’s right, it just ain’t a party unless AppleScript’s involved and there’s a hot soldering iron.

Posted in Geek | 1 Comment »

Good times and a bad omen

Busy month!

1. We moved!
2. My mom and nieces came to visit!
3. I went to Texas for a week!
4. I bought a beautiful classic (and gigantic) road bike!
5. My SJSU Information Science classes started!
6. A bad omen showed up in our driveway!

1. Yup, the new place is littler, but is more like a house than an apartment. Plus, we have a garage which means I can collect more bicycles. It takes about 5 minutes to walk to the bustling two blocks that is downtown Sunnyvale. The bike commute is <4 miles (that is, within don’t-have-to-change-clothes range).

2. We had a blast with my mom and Allison and Krista. They’re 14 and 12 and from Iowa, like I used to be. We went to their first art museum, ate their first Indian food, rode their first city bus and train, took a boat ride under the Golden Gate bridge, saw the redwoods . Much more stuff, too. Here’s theirs’s brief recap. My iPhone pics from the week here.

3. Texas. Oh, Texas. Haley and I were in Fort Worth for a weekend together to see a musical performed by the Jubilee Theater, a black theater company that does musicals and dramas. Haley’s dad (the keyboardist and prolific songwriter Joe Rogers) has been the music director for Jubilee for many of the 20 years he’s been involved with them. The show was an emotional tribute to Rudy Eastman, the company’s founder, who recently passed away. Plus there was a beyond-rocking cast party.

After Fort Worth, I got to be in Austin for a week on business and more. I got to see almost everybody in mostly perfect settings and ways. I miss living in Austin. Day-to-day pedestrian stuff is a lot more interesting to navigate there than it is where I live now.

4. Say hello to my new ride.

A 1979 Raleigh Super Grand Prix. I bought it on Craigslist as soon as I could and returned that dreadful rental car so I could get around on a human scale like I did when I lived there. The frame is really really big, and it fits great (except for the tiny detail of standover height). Campy breaks and rear derailer, Shimano 600 front derailer, original Brooks saddle, Raleigh cranks, old old friction bar-ends, and a sweet steel ride. It’s being shipped home to me as we speak. And yes, I said derailer, not derailleur. Sheldon Brown, represent!

5. This semester’s classes are promising: JavaScript (a straight-up programming class) and “Findability, Metadata, XML, and Aboutness” (library science esoterica!). We’ll discuss some of Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability, which had a lot of buzz last year and I’ve had a copy of for a while. Its not that meaty of a book, but talks about (or dances around) important ideas regarding the future of information, how we use it, access it, find it. Be on the lookout for my newfound JavaScript-Fu.

6. The omen of doom:

I might be wrong, but if a Windows 95 install CD shows up in front of your house it is not a good thing. It has been there all week. I’m afraid to touch it.

Posted in Bike, Family, Geek, Minutia, Travel | 3 Comments »

Haley’s buying a Prius (and I’m mostly just testing blogging from the iPhone)

Safari geneally has problems with WordPress admin stuff anyway plus I’m totally geeking out with my iPhone. Perfect time for a little test. …the verdict: works OK in a pinch. My browser doesn’t recognize the body entry field on its own, so I had to seslect the title field and then finger into the main box. Plus, corrective text doesn’t appear to be functioning at all. And there’s no carridgecarriage return button since you don’t need one for the title.

Posted in Geek, Minutia | No Comments »

Sparklines, Squirrel Cage, Sunnyvale (again)

It’s been a busy couple of weeks.

I went to visit my brother and family in the Omaha metro area. Very fun visit and I took a bunch of photos at the Omaha Henry Dorly Zoo (here’s a link). The pictures are stored on my local wiki because I thought it’d be an easy way to get good captions for all the photos. You see, my brother has a family pass to the zoo and I think they go there at least once a week in the summer. Hence, my brilliant 10-year-old nephew knows the name of every animal there. Plus, he gets to learn a little web 2.0 lesson in the process. Here’s a youtube link to some little videos from the trip. Pay close attention to the ones about the famous Council Bluffs, Iowa Squirrel Cage Jail. Here’s a Wikipedia article explaining the Rotary Jail.

Its crazy, but a lot of people (particularly most of my family until now) still have no idea what a wiki is. They know what Wikipedia is, and sometimes they know that anybody can edit it, but that’s where it stops.

I must give a special shout-out to Edward Z. Yang (aka Ambush Commander), who wrote this great MediaWiki Extension that allows batch image uploading if you have good access to the server that your wiki is hosted on. SpecialUploadLocal worked like a charm to get my 80 photos into MediaWiki’s mechanical stomach.

Within 10 hours of landing back in California, I went to a one-day class in San Francisco taught by Edward Tufte, a preeminent charts and graphs guru and information design expert. Amazing day. Smart guy. Seriously, until the mid-afternoon when I started getting tired, about every 3 minutes I had some “wow, this guy is really smart” thought running through my brain.

One big idea I took home: when presenting information visually, don’t waste a single pixel on anything that doesn’t convey information. For example, does that arrow really need to be big, green, and have a drop shadow? Probably not. Make it black or gray with a thin line and your audience will focus on the things on either side of the arrow more easily, rather than being distracted by your design. That, and annotate stuff that shows causality—heck, annotate pretty much everything.

His website has very nice information architecture/design forums that are moderated and full of other smart people saying stuff (and probably fanboy disciples, too). His four books are beautiful, and I got nice hardcover editions of each as part of the class. Now that’s what I call takeaway. Here’s the Wikipedia article about Tufte for a general introduction.

SF 44-57     This is a sparkline of wins and losses for the San Francisco Giants so far this season, generated at hardballtimes.com. Sparkline is a term Tufte coined to describe data dense graphics that can be displayed inline with text. (Wikipedia link) Basically, you’ve got a little chart or line graph that’s a couple of inches long, as tall as regular text, and can convey a lot of meaningful information using potentially thousands of data points. There’s a cool PHP package available to start makin’ your own at sparkline.org. I’d love to start doing this with my own cycling statistics.

And the other big news—we signed a lease for a place in Sunnyvale and will move there in August. Oh, so much fun to pack everything up and move it all of 4.2 miles. Once we’re settled in, I’m hoping to have a free Saturday afternoon to curl up with Beautiful Evidence.

Posted in Family, Geek, Travel | No Comments »

♫ Sunnyvale 94-oh-86 ♫; stealth event drinking

OK, this was too funny not to share. I discovered The Beerbelly from this mog post about summer festival concerts.I don’t want one, but I seriously know people who will. Basically its like a sneaky sneaky Camel Pack for your front side.

That, and we spent all day yesterday looking for apartments in Sunnyvale. We really like the place we’re in now, but Haley’s new job is going to be a little out of biking range. It’d be really great if neither of us had to drive to work. That, and I want a garage (or something) so I can buy more bikes and have a place to work on them. We’re making a list and checking it twice. Beerbelly guy makes me think of Santa Claus.

Posted in Minutia | 3 Comments »