Lately I’ve been really enjoying drawing on my iPad, Last week I bought inkPad, really nice - the developers are obviously AI users, they’ve boiled AI functionality down to the drawing part (which IMHO is what Adobe should have done when they released InDesign) anyway really decent app, drop export, multiple formats (most notably svg,png,pdf), dropbox support. But the best thing about it is the pen tool - took me less than 5 seconds to wrap my head around the subtleties of drawing corner and curved points with my finger tips. All the spots above are 100% straight from inkPad, although I could easily edit them in AI if I needed too. I haven’t used inkPad for any client work yet, but that’s only a matter of time. Anyhow check it out, it’s 5 bucks.
inkPad
So you may not know it but if you’re a subscriber to Comcast’s Broadband Internet you have a 250GB a month monthly allotment, and if you’re anything like us, you may be close to maxing that out every month.
- A small home based business (1 person)
- video chat 5-6 times a month
- 5 Computers with dropbox accounts
- 2 TiVos with netflix
- Pandora Radio
- and the occasional binge on Hulu
I don’t think that’s really excessive, that’s just life in 2011 - especially during a cold winter, we can easily watch 5 movies a weekend. But as of late I’ve been bumping right into that limit - and suspect that sooner rather than later I’ll have to make a decision as to if I’m going to continue doing business with Comcast, or move to a competitor, I’d like to continue with Comcast but I have 2 issues.
Issue One with the Comcast 250GB Cap:
I pay for increased speed (Blast package) doesn’t it make sense that with the ability to consume their product at faster speeds, the cap should increase? If they’re going to cap consumption - the math needs to be fair (and I’ll leave it to you to do the math) Calculate the time it would take to consume the 250GB at the base price speed, take that time and calculate how much each paid tier can consume in that same time period, IMHO THAT should be the cap.
Issue Two with the Comcast Broadband Cap:
They certainly don’t cap any of their other services, want to watch PPV 24 hours a day all month long - they’ll probably send you a holiday card, talk on the phone for 250 straight hours - awesome, but use the internet everyday, all day, and they’ll shut you down.
A simple bookmarklet to isolate the new posts on OneUpMe.com, a facebook driven wordplay game, I’m fairly addicted too.
Show New OUMs
(drag this to your bookmarks bar or right-click and add to bookmarks)
two things never to skimp on, shoes, shellfish - the latter might kill you, the former will only make you wish you were dead..
- original quote SAUL 2010 (who happens to be wearing brand new shoes at this very moment)
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
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
