A Bash function for Markdown bloggers

I store all of my writing as separate Markdown files. A basic tagging system^tag adds more "searchability," and I can quickly locate any file with Spotlight^spot. Given the amount of time I spend in T

Quick Tip: throttling parallel batch processes in Terminal

Quick tips are random posts regarding something I discovered on my way to something bigger. They usually get longer than "quick" would imply, for which I refuse to apologize.

It starts out with mdfin

Address Book search and Skype from the command line

Here's a neat little command-line utility for searching your address book: aboo. It's not complex... it just takes a single word or phrase and searches your Address Book entries' names for it. It can

Automating HTML5 video encodes

I spent an inordinate amount of time not doing useful things today. During this non-productivity bender, I got a little obsessed with making the HTML5 video encoding process easier. I've been working

Grabbing a Mac app's icon: building blocks

I spent a few hours last night nerding out over an easy way to grab a Mac application's icon. I sent the basic Bash script and an example Automator action off to the other writers at TUAW. Then there

Grabbing a Mac app's icon: Automator style

We've covered a small truckload of Bash scripting ideas for Mac and OS X in the previous two posts. It's time to put them to use and create an Automator app that we can use as a droplet in Finder. If

Grabbing a Mac app's icon: advanced Bash usage

In the previous post in this series, we looked at the basic Terminal commands we'd use to grab a Mac application's icon from the command line. In this post, we'll flesh out the script a little and tur

Quick calculations in Bash

This is probably going to seem stupid, but every time I decide to do something in Bash that should only take me a minute, I end up losing an hour. I obsess over "better" ways to do everything. Not sur

Things tasks from the command line

If you're a Things.app user (and a Terminal user), I've got a quick function for your .bash_profile that will allow you to quickly add todo items to your inbox with notes and natural-language date par

Is your URL too short? Try our system, free!

I was sifting through my previous blog after Jeffery Zeldman kindly sent a lot of visitors in that direction for some TextMate starter tips. Whilst milling around, I stumbled upon an old trick I used

TextMate drag command for Base64 encoding images

Just a quick hit on this one... when hacking away at the styles of things one probably shouldn't be hacking away at, embedding images right in the CSS is a handy trick. It's done by Base64 encoding th

fk: redux

Just a quick change to my post on the bash function fk that I've been using. A small modification has greatly improved its usability: make the cancel option always be first in the menu. Just move "Can

My new favorite Bash prompt

I do a lot in Terminal. Sometimes, it's easier. Sometimes it's faster. Sometimes I'd just rather type it out. Whatever the reason, I've never been able to stand looking at a boring shell prompt. Bash

fk: a useful bash function

This is a function from my OS X .bash_profile. 'fk' is short for Find and Kill, and it lets you do a quick search of your running processes for a case-insensitive partial match of the first parameter