saulrosenbaum.com / daily

if you’re working with a creative who says he can have something for you tomorrow, and you know you’ll be taking tomorrow off, or otherwise won’t get the opportunity to look at the work - let them know that, and give them the extra time, they’ll appreciate the information, and chances are you’ll get better creative.

Posting this here, to hopefully save any other SCX-4100 users some unnecessary pain, after upgrading to 10.6 my printer was recognized but was unable to print. Of Course Samsung no longer offers drivers for the SCX-4100, so after a LOT of trial and error, I discovered that the drivers for the SCX-4500 Universal Print driver work well enough that you can print. Nothing is ever easy peasy anymore.

Get the drivers for the SCX-4100 HERE

Some photos of the cats I’ve had on my desktop, top to bottom: Rueben, Pandi*, Piper, Roo*, Leeyla, Maxx! - not pictured: Bella, who maintains right of first refusal on all posted photos.

*Neither Pandi or Roo are still with us, but we think of them lovingly daily..

Search your remote Library and create a playlist based on your search - and of course play your playlist, knowledge gleaned from Doug and Rory

-- you'll want to set this line to reflect your remote machine info
set remoteMachine to "eppc://username:password@machinename.local"
set keyword to "Gogol Bordello"
display dialog "Search:" default answer keyword
set vol to text returned of the result
using terms from application "iTunes"
	tell application "iTunes" of machine remoteMachine
		set my_search_results to (search library playlist 1 for keyword)
		if my_search_results is not {} then
			set myList to make new playlist with properties {name:keyword}
			set sel to a reference to my_search_results
			repeat with aTrack in sel
				set thisTrack to (get location of aTrack)
				set dbid to (get database ID of aTrack)
				add thisTrack to myList
			end repeat
			set currentList to playlist keyword
			play the playlist named keyword
			reveal current track
		end if
	end tell
end using terms from

Two obvious TODO’s in my code - it doesn’t do muchANY error checking so although iTunes does seemed to care if you have multiple playlists sharing a name (meaning it doesn’t overwrite them) THAT might not be what you’re intention. I’ll probably be fixing that at a later date. Lastly it doesn’t offer any feedback - which I suppose is fine, but not very me so I’ll probably add some GROWL notification in regards to if the playlist was created and how many tracks were added.

Again really just scratching the surface here, and Doug & Rory did all the heavy lifting on this one.

I’ve blogged about Alfred once before, it’s a great little launcher - the fact that it uses Spotlight comments to tag/exclude/group apps and files for launching is IMHO it’s killer feature - being able to group all your tools AND files/documents together makes Alfred a awesome workflow tool, but I’m not here to talk about work, well not exactly - take a look at the pic at the top of this post - 6 small apps (whose code I gleaned from here), each app controls playback and volume of my Jukebox G4 Laptop, all linked together with the spotlight keyword ‘JUKE’ those combined with GROWL makes for a really powerful combination, I can control every aspect of playback of the jukebox - and get feedback as to what’s currently playing without ever taking my hands off the keyboard. I wasn’t able to find that exact Functionality anywhere else, and because I run Alfred and Growl anyway there’s ZERO OVERHEAD.

This only really scratches the surface of what’s doable, so stayed tuned. At some point in the future I’m sure Alfred will allow us to pass arguments to scripts (ala Launchbar) at that point I’ll write scripts that Spotlight tags selected files into Alfred groups, and the universe will recursively collapse upon itself.

(Icons by David Lanham)

I recently started to explore other mac media players, iTunes has awesome functionality, but sadly it’s a pig memorywise, so my day to day music listening software has become VOX whose small footprint and clean UI hits all the right notes for me. I needed a simple way to create m3u playlist files (which are really just filelists saved with a ‘m3u’ file extension - every solution I could fine seemed overkill, most of the Automator workflows I found were predicated on you already having a iTunes playlist you wanted to export - I wanted just a clean ‘right/control click on folder full of music - ‘save as playlist’ kind of functionality.

Attached is such a workflow. I’ve used it successfully recursively on a folders containing 10,000 songs, and (although Automator takes a few seconds to actually startup) the action it self is pretty fast.

A few notes:

• It attempts to filters out the kind of CRUFT (.txt,.jpg,.png,.nfo) that you might have in a folder if you <cough>[acquire]</cough> music via some type of distribution network.
• It asks you what you want to name it, but by default it’s going to save it to your desktop.
• it includes subfolders as playlist items, VOX ignores these so I didn’t bother to exclude them - I suppose other players might actually choke on them so YMMV.
• The attached file is the full-fat editable automator workflow - you’ll probably want to save that as a finder plugin

I haven’t had any issues with it, let me know if you find it helpful.

DOWNLOAD: Create_M3U_Playlist.workflow

Recently I switched my launcher of choice to ‘Alfred’ a nifty indie project that I became aware of via Twitter, in the past I’ve been both a Quicksilver and LaunchBar user - both extremely powerful apps that although I used them religiously, each had quirks I never could really get past (QS had stability issues, LB was stable but I never wrapped my head around it’s particular method of bringing back results, and it wasn’t going to win any beauty pageants)

Alfred is in beta, but seems stable, visually pretty, and actively developed (which I really appreciate) - And has most of the features you’d want in a launcher - but I want to talk about a single feature, that I really like, Alfred’s use of spotlight comments allows you to create groups of essentially unrelated apps, it’s so simple, so obvious (and honestly it may have worked with LaunchBar too, but I never checked) just add your desired key work to all the apps you want in a group and BOOM! done - I add ‘webd’ to Transmit, Coda, Textmate, Cssedit and Espresso and evoke Alfred and it just works, you can assign as many keywords to an app as you want, for example I add ‘ftp’ to transmit as well.

It’s a simple feature I really appreciate, and we all know how hard simple actually is. So if you’re in the market for a nifty, pretty, deceptively powerful launcher that’s only going to get better - take a look at Alfred.

If you’ve been here before you may notice the site looks noticeably different - what was once dark red, now white, the visual challenge of reading blue off red is gone - in it’s place; miles and miles of white - don’t get used to it - as I get more and more familiar with butchering, torturing and spindling WordPress (I’m a hardcore EE guy usually) - it’s libel to get very strange up in this bitch. Until them… enjoy the white :)