I yearn for the old days of HyperCard, which I started learning back in the glory days of the late 1980s. I’m trying to learn how to use the monster currently maintained by Apple that is AppleScript Studio. It is the flawed scripting language AppleScript, which has some similarities with the scripting language of HyperCard, [...]
I’m happy to announce the results of a few hours of tinkering: The Pinyin Tone Widget. This OS X dashboard widget will take a series of Chinese pinyin words with tone numbers appended at the end of each syllable and will add the tone marks where appropriate (e.g. zhong1guo2 becomes zhōngguó). Many years ago, before [...]
The song name, artist, and album tags in many music files (whether they are acquired legally or otherwise) from Chinese and Korean sources are completely garbled in iTunes on a Macintosh. I assume this is because iTunes assumes that the text is one encoding (Unicode or MacRoman?) and they were in fact encoded in another [...]
I’m split between using Safari and Firefox. The former provides a faster and more pleasant browsing experience but sometimes Firefox renders certain pages better, has the indispensible Zotero, and I have a specific kind of integration with del.icio.us that I like better than alternatives available for Safari. To save me a few keystrokes I wrote [...]
I keep a journal of sorts, but wanted to filter out some of the quantitative or repetitive data I occasionally record about myself (how much I’m sleeping, my weight, exercise stats, etc.) into separate files that can be easily manipulated in something like Excel and displayed in charts if I ever choose to do so. [...]
I got a cheap used Griffin AirClick for USB to control my older laptop Macintosh by remote control. Another remote I like better (KeyPOINT) has been acting up so I got the Griffin as a replacement. The downside with Griffin is that it has fewer buttons, no mouse control, and a limited set of applications [...]
My last few postings have all been tech related. Since most of my history related postings are also Asian history related postings, I post those increasingly at Frog in a Well. I’ve been in a hacking mood in the last few weeks, especially since I’ve been working on some new projects at Frog in a [...]
In my last posting I shared a script I put together to use with the shortcut application Quicksilver to quickly create To-do items in iCal. I am now using this all the time. I have separate scripts, based on the same which create a medium priority “READ: ” to-do for things I want to put [...]
While waiting for a plane here at the airport I got bored and decided to make a little Applescript for Quicksilver. For those of you who don’t already use Quicksilver and use a Macintosh computer, I recommend it as a way of significantly increasing your productivity. It is hard to explain what it is but [...]
I just found out (Via Antti’s posting on it) that you can imbed your Del.ici.us tags easily into a webpage. Mine are below (Because it is shown via javascript they will not show up in the RSS feed for this posting) but are completely disorganized thanks to the hodgepodge of often irrational (or misspelled) categories. [...]