The third in an n-part series on "How I Use Quicksilver".

Define words

Thanks to the built-in dictionary on a mac (and optionally dict.org), I can select a word anywhere (or manually enter it in the input box), tab to the second pane, type 'dict', and get my definition right quick.

Note that this is on the weaker side of quicksilver tips; there are so many ways to get word definitions on a mac that just about anyone can do it effortlessly. Right clicking on a word usually gives a dictionary option, and the spotlight-inclined among you can type a word into spotlight to get the definition most of the time.

The second in an n-part series on "How I Use Quicksilver".

Send a file via email.

This one has been done to death in screencasts, but I do it so much I'd be remiss if I failed to mention it.

As many technology oriented people do, I send a fair bit of email with attachments. Dozens of different workflows accommodate this, but I like to involve quicksilver.

I activate this workflow in one of two ways. I either a) select a file that I wish to send in Finder, or b) I wish to send a file that is in a common location that I know is in quicksilver's catalog.

Once I have my file selected in quicksilver, I'll usually compress the file into a zip archive to get past stupid MTAs like exchange. Doing this is a quick procedure: {tab} c o m p [highlights 'compress using...'] {tab} z i p [highlights 'zip] {enter} (wait a second for quicksilver to reappear with my file selected).

At this point, I'm ready to fire off an email. One {tab} gets me to the middle box, I type 'e m a i l', tab again, then type some letters of the recipient's name, finally hit {enter} and I'm done.

In my day job, I measured I do this about 5 times a day, and without any "nifty" workflow in place, it took me about 40 seconds to navigate to my mail app, compose an email, get the name in the 'to' field, click 'attach', find the file in the following dialog, and finally send it. Even more time was required if I wanted to zip the file first.

On the other hand, quicksilver takes about 7 seconds to do this on a slow day.

The first in an n-part series on "How I Use Quicksilver".

Shorten a URL

I have a trigger set up to take whatever I have highlighted in my system, and put that in the first pane of quicksilver. (It happens to be Cmd+/ )

From there, I have to type 'sho' which will select 'ShortenUrl.rb'. (It took one trial to get quicksilver to learn that.)

Finally, I hit enter, and wait for a fraction of a second, and quicksilver comes quickly back with the shortened URL.

I can effortlessly copy this to the clipboard for later use. Or, I can then use this to post to a chatroom within colloquy [or emacs] if I so desire. Look for that in a later post.

Average time saved: 3 seconds.

For someone who is on the keyboard all day long like me, a keyboard is one of the most important tools a programmer can invest in. The wrong keyboard can give its user finger, hand, arm, shoulder, and even neck problems, but the right keyboard is, well, bliss. Or so I hear.

For the last year, I've been using a Microsoft's ergonomic 4000. It's nice, but not perfect. My hands lay perfectly on the keyboard when I'm typing normally. I can't speak enough good things about the research Microsoft did on the angle of a person's arms on all 3 axes with this keyboard.

However, I fear they've made some wrong moves. The mouse simply lies too far from the center of the keyboard. This makes it awkward to do any serious mousing. Second, the keys are a bit tall. It takes a bit more effort to push the keys down that I'd like; something I notice after working on it for 12 straight hours.

Next up in line is the keyboard I'm using to type this, the Apple aluminum keyboard. It's nice. It has been doing some weird things like screw up text that I've written, but I suspect that could be fixed with a reset and new keyboard firmware. (Sidenode: This keyboard has firmware... that's just weird.) As far as typing goes, this keyboard gets it right in the travel department. The keys barely have to move to trigger an event on the wire, and that makes for relaxed fingers at the end of the day. However, it sadly does not make for relaxed arms. Being a "traditional" keyboard, it forces its user to contort their arms to painful extremes just to line the hands up with the keys correctly.

In the end, I'm not sure where to go, but I think I'll be trying to Microsoft Comfort Curve next. It appears to be a combination of the two that just might work for me.

I was halfway through writing a post about how I was frustrated that my iPod would *always* be playing when I went to listen to it around noon. Last night, I even switched on 'hold' to ensure that buttons wouldn't accidentaly get hit. However, I just realized that I had the 'alarm' set to on, therefore, the iPod would turn on and waste it's battery each and every single day. I just hope I haven't ruined the fragile li-ion battery thus far.

After being introduced to MobiPocket Reader, I was darned impressed with the way it displayed ebooks on my Zodiac. Fonts were crisp, all of the functionality of a traditional ebook reader was there, and I was happy.

However, MobiPocket's true power does not lie in its ability to display a better image on my Zodiac. Tonight, I installed MobiPocket's creator, apparently capapble of creating ebook content from a variety of sources. I installed this program with the hopes that somehow I might be able to get regular Promethean Logophile updates that I could read while not at my computer, since I often do not have adequate time to read everything I'd like to. What I got was much more than I bargained for.

I loaded the content creator, and much to my delight, I saw a very prominent option for converting RSS feeds to news articles. I hopped right in and dropped in PL's RSS URL. However, instead of getting the RSS feed dumped straight into some ugly file, they actually opened up the most recent PL post in their own web browser control. I was directed to click on blocks of text that I wanted to appear in each individual post. Quite skeptically, I clicked on the title of the latest post, and it instantly turned blue. So I figured I'd go for the author too, and sure enough, it worked out perfectly. In twenty seconds, I had created the layout for my new "ebook." I hurridly clicked through the rest of the brilliantly designed interface, and up popped the sample ebook. (screenshot below) Turns out its perfect, complete with a table of contents.

This might be old news for everyone, but I'm very happy that I will now be able to take some content with me on the road.

Life has been crazy lately.

I've got one paper that is topping out at 3000 words (hasitly written I might add), an interesting programming project, and another programming project which is proving to be more busywork than I care for in the short amount of time I've alloted for it.

I can't wait until these next 11 days are over with, when all I'll have to worry about is my character's level and the design of my blog.

Phew.

As some of you may know, I have had some problems with skype lately. I have a microphone that works perfectly, and two different sound cards which both pick up the microphone quite well. However, in Skype in Windows, I was getting extremely low mic volume, so calls were difficult to hear for the person on the other end of the line. Skype offers very few hardware options, and I quickly exhausted all of the configuration optiions I could make within the software.

I emailed technical support this last week, and they finally got back to me. It did take about five days, but their information was surprisingly relevant. I would have guessed what I received might have been a common email they send out, but I realized the content was not in the knowledge base, so it looks like someone actually took some time to research this for me. Which is great, considering I'm paying nothing to use Skype. The technical support person directed me to an XML file in my homedir, and I had to add a few custom tags to the XML document. After this, Skype printed out its setting for "MicVolume" into the XML file, and I was able to change this myself. I increased the microphone volume by five times; hopefully this will solve all of my problems.

All in all, this is a curious situation, it seems to me like this kind of thing should be editable from within the program. Either way, its working now and I'm happy.

Exercise.

Nearly everyone is told they should be doing it, fewer actually do it, and even fewer enjoy doing it. Before tonight, I did not mind it, but I would not go so far as to say that I liked it. That has all changed; I officially do not like it.

It started out as many evenings do. I came home after work with a laundry list of things to do: laundry. (har har) Actually, it went more like this: Laundry (for real this time), write a simple two paged paper, write a program design document for an operating systems assignment, read about 100 pages of a textbook, write some blogs posts (I'm doing that now, woot), get my server back up and running, play some icesus, and that's just the things I thought I should do tonight, not to mention stuff carried over from previous days.

Based on experience, I know that I have to exercise first thing in the evening, or it simply does not happen. I get carried away on other things and it never happens. (for the record, my less than optimal diet would do much more harm than its currently doing if I did not exercise) So, I went to play some basketball as I do many evenings. I had not been on the court for more than three minutes when, all of the sudden, I landed wrong and nearly broke my ankle! Luckily, I did not break my ankle; however, I sprained it so badly that I'm about as mobile as I would be if it really were broken. After relaxing a bit, the pain really hit me and it became immensely hard to concentrate. I accomplished a mere three blog posts, and that is it. Hopefully I will be able to walk tomorrow; I will know in the morning.

In retrospect, I wish I could have been able to focus more and get some things done. However, that is in the past and all I can do is learn from the experience.

For those of you who have been following the drama (if you can call it that) of my Linux box, I have a few things to report.

First of all, memtest86 was very quick to identify a memory location on some "KingstonValueRam" that had taken residency in my computer was bad. It failed every single test thrown at it, so I took it out. I think this should solve the problem the computer had with randomly shutting down and restarting. I did find a kernel patch that would allow me to specify a specific portion of the ram to block out, but I figured ram that works on this old of an architecture is cheap, if not free, so it wouldn't be worth my time.
Note: memory that is not fastened securely in its respective slot will, most certainly, fail every test it is given.

Next: as it was speculated, this was not my problem. Not in the least. The computer still did/does not boot. I can find no obvious reasons for this. Specifically, it is failing when trying to load various parts of its network package. I questioned my network card's stability, but I loaded up a liveCD and the ethernet card worked as expected. As far as I can tell, all I have left to do is sort through mounds of logfiles. Many of them show attempted log ins, but I can't tell of any that make it through that aren't expected. (if you gracious and would like to take a look at these logs, they're on my BSD box.) I am starting to remember a problem nearly identical to this that I saw about seven months ago, but dismissed it as some "rookie mistake" I might have made, and reformatted since it was merely a test box. (Note: I am fully aware that what has happened could also be a rookie mistake)

So, I still do not have my MTA working, my webserver working, nor pretty much everything I use on my server. Hopefully I can figure out a way to get this up and running soon.