Category: Workshop

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 (often EUC_KR for Korean, Big5 for Taiwanese files, GB for files with simplified Chinese characters). I used to frequently get this problem with Japanese music files but for some reason (perhaps because Unicode is more popular in Japan?) this has gradually become less of a problem.

Fixing these tags can be a pain and some of the older tools such as once awesome “MP3 Rage” and “ID3 Editor” often make things worse due to their inconsistent handling of 2-byte non-Roman languages.

An Apple Support page, however, recently pointed me to a great shareware application ($12) called ID3Mod2 which looks like it is made by the same people that made the incredible Chinese input method QIM that I talked about in an earlier posting (I don’t know this developer personally so it is not as if I’m trying to find good things to say about their work). You can freely use the software for a number of days, during which I was able to go through and fix all of the garbled tags in music files I have collected in China, Korea, and Japan over the last decade. Amazing – I might now actually learn the names of some of the songs I have been listening to for so long and someday even gather the courage to request them on a future karaoke adventure.

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 that it works with. One of the applications that I want to use the remote with is the best flashcard program on the Macintosh, iFlash. I use this almost every day to practice Korean vocab and other languages. Since this is not one of the supported applications, this afternoon I hacked the AirClick.app program that comes with the remote to add support for iFlash. You may download my modified version of the AirClick application here.

For those who wish to add support for their own program I briefly outline how I did the hack below:
Continue reading Hack: Griffin AirClick USB for use with iFlash

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 Well in my spare time. My last two scripts are essentially shortcuts for creating iCal To-Dos. The first provides a fast way to use Quicksilver to create To-do items without leaving whatever application you are working in. The second provides a way for you to email yourself To-dos that then automatically tell iCal to create a To-Do with content from the email.

The script below is not related to To-Dos but is also aiming to increase my organization a bit. I use a program called Yojimbo (it is a great program but I think the title and its Karate Kid icon are both cheesy) made by Bare Bones, the same people who make BBEdit, the essential text editor for web programmers and coders of all stripes. Yojimbo is a program which keeps snippets of notes, web passwords, serial numbers, and best of all: you can drag and drop any web page you are viewing onto a little tab it keeps at the side of the screen and Yojimbo will download a static copy of the web-page and store it along with all your other notes. Great for when you think you might be away from the internet and want to keep the content handy for later searching.

Sometimes I’m away from my laptop, and as in the case of emailing myself To-Dos that I want created automatically in iCal, there are times I jot down notes from something and want to email myself those notes. It would then be nice for Mail to automatically detect those emails, and create a new Note in Yojimbo with the appropriate title and contents. I hacked together a little script which does just that.
Continue reading Create Yojimbo Note: Applescript for Apple Mail

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 on my reading to-do list, a “LOOKUP: ” medium priority script to remind myself of things I want to look up at some point (assigned to a different color calendar), and a high priority to-do script in its own iCal calendar.

Now, what if I’m away from home, am without my laptop computer, but have access to a nearby terminal with an internet connection, and I want to create to-dos for myself. I synch iCal with my Palm pilot so I could easily write down the to-do directly into my Palm. However, Palms are still not fun to use when you have a lot to write down. Today, I was in the Fung library reading some Chinese historical journals and wanted to remind myself to look up a few things I found there and come back and read some articles I didn’t have time for today. There were internet terminals all over the place so instead of entering the titles (in Chinese) on the Palm, which is a pain and time consuming, I emailed myself some email messages with the subject “LOOKUP: ” or “READ: ” and then what I wanted to lookup/read. In the body of the email I put more information, such as a URL or notes to myself. I decided that tonight when I came home I would hack up an applescript that used Apple’s mail filter to automatically find those messages as they arrived in my inbox, create the appropriate to-do in iCal (like the Quicksilver script) with the subject line of the email, put the body of the email into the todo’s notes, and then move the message into an archived folder. The results are below.
Continue reading Create iCal To-do: Applescript for Apple Mail

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 it acts like a launcher and provides easy ways to give shortcut commands for all sorts of tasks.

My simple goal was this: I want to be able to add a “To-Do” item to iCal very quickly. I don’t want to have to switch to iCal, press Command-K, then type in my summary (sometimes this is slow in iCal and the focus doesn’t always jump to the new item correctly, I find), and then choose “High Priority”

Instead I: a) Use my keyboard shortcut to activate Quicksilver b) Type “.” and the text for the To-do item, c) press “Tab” and start typing “todo” (the name of the script) d) press enter.

The number of steps may seem the same but it is all through the keyboard and iCal adds the to-do item in the background so I have found it to be very handy. The script adds the to-do item to the “Home” calendar to keep it simple. I may one day expand the script so you can first time a number, corresponding to the number of days until the to-do’s “due date” but I can’t be bothered.

You can download the script I wrote here. Full text of the script below:

UPDATE: There is a much more powerful script which can do much more for those who want a more advanced but more comprehensive solution. See this Hawk Wings entry for an explanation of Benjamin Harley’s new iCal action.
Continue reading Create iCal To-do: Applescript for Quicksilver