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Using Spotlight from the OS X Commandline
One significant productivity-enhancing feature that arrived with Tiger was Spotlight. On its own, it changed the way some (if not most) Mac...
Vim Creep
It all started out innocently enough. You experimented with it once or twice in your first year of college, but Nano and Pico were easier—closer to what you had already been using during high school on the Windows machines and Macs. But as time went on and you got more experience under your belt in the college-level…
Light Table Playground Levels Up
I’m happy to announce the release of v0.0.7 of the Light Table Playground . This version is a serious upgrade to the Instarepl that brings the ability to manually evaluate things and work in your own projects.
Mousetrap: Keyboard shortcuts in Javascript
Mousetrap is a simple keyboard shortcut/event library written in Javascript.
It's Playtime - Light Table Playground released
I’m happy to announce the official release of the Light Table Playground ! You can find instructions for getting it here: http://app.kodowa.com/playground
Python Packaging: Hate, hate, hate everywhere
A sad example of how easy it is to dismiss certain design principles because it does not seem relevant at the time.
A standing desk for $22
I’ve been interested in standing desks for a while. I keep reading things like: he who sits the most dies the soonest. All the options online are expensive. Until now. Ryan Witt and I combined our brains to see if we could come up with a better solution: Introducing
Actually using Ed
The classic ed editor is a really good example of a sparse, minimal, standard Unix tool that does one thing, and does it well. Because there are so many good screen-oriented editors for Unix, there’s seldom very much call for using ed , unless you’re working on very old or very limited hardware that won’t run anything…
Using unix as your IDE
This series has been independently translated into Chinese , Russian , Turkish , and Korean , and formatted as an ebook .
Beautiful Tools
We do this software development thing. I don’t have to tell you at times, it’s a very trying process. You shouldn’t have to deal with tools that get in your way or make your experience any less pleasurable. Okay. So you got the fancy chair. How about
Vim: Buffers, Windows, and Tabs
If you’ve moved to Vim from an editor like Notepad++ or TextMate, you’ll be used to working with the idea of tabs in a text editor in a certain way. Specifically, a tab represents an open file; while the tab’s there, you’ve got an open file, as soon as you close it, it goes away. This one-to-one correspondence is…
The Most Successful E-mail I Ever Wrote
2008 blast from the past: me, Mike Wallin, and Derek Sivers, the subject of this post. (Photo: A3maven) [Total read time: 3-5 minutes.] Derek Sivers is one of my favorite people. He is a programmer who lost his stage fright by doing more than 1,000 gigs as a circus ring leader (!!!). He’s also a […]
Back That Gmail Up
I’m not leery of Google shuttering its Gmail service, but I can imagine a scenario where they cut off my access to Gmail and I have no way to plead my case to the search behemoth. So I went looking …
Protecting a Laptop from Simple and Sophisticated Attacks
How I secured a ThinkPad: a Windows honeypot with Prey for thieves, TRESOR against cold boot, a USB boot stick for evil maids, and a separate Firefox user.
GCC Explorer
Introducing a new way to stare at the disassembly of your compiled C and C++
Confessions of a recovering lifehacker
I used to be a lifehacking addict, and in some ways I still am. I have a perverse love of systems and efficiency: analyzing, configuring, optmizing, categorizing, defining, and parameter-setting. (…
30 minutes a day
The simple act of reserving a tiny part of your day. Perhaps just 30 minutes. Of pure, uninterrupted focus. On the idea you want to make become reality. Will ensure at least some extent of progress. I guarantee you.
The Grammar of Vim
Like a lot of people, I have gone retro when it comes to editors, using Vim for most of my day to day work. I’ve been doing most of my development these days in a terminal window, logged directly into a VM where I test my code. For more, see this article. I have been a somewhat casual vi user for at least 15 years…