PanaGeek

I know, long time, no post.  Contact me offline to receive a refund for your subscription to this blog.

Just a quick post to talk about a cool website called Hulu.  This is a great and legal place to see video clips, full length TV shows, and even movies.  As I said, it is a legal service (there are others out there that look a little questionable) that is supported by a few short ads in each show.

One of the things I really like about it is that the site can remember where you were in watching a show, so you don’t have to watch a show from beginning to end in one sitting.

There are only two (very small) negatives: first, the selection is currently limited – not every episode of every show is available.  Second, you can’t save what your watching, so downloading a show to watch on a plane isn’t possible.

Overall, the plusses are strong and the negatives aren’t show stoppers.  Hulu is a great way to catch up on some great shows!

I used to be a die-hard Camino fan (starting back in the Chimera days). A few weeks ago I started using Safari. The reason is that I can copy snippets with text and images from Safari into Mori, where Camino only lets copies the text. Anyway, I decided to do an empirical test, to see how the browsers use resources. I’ve done this in the past, and Camino usually won. Now, Safari is getting the better of Camino in both CPU and RAM usage. I opened six identical web sites on both browsers and here’s what I’m getting:

Browser | CPU | RAM Camino 46.6% 72.4M Safari 25.6% 49.6M

and Camino is not responding, according to Activity Monitor. It makes me a little sad, considering that I’ve been a Camino fan for so long. Oh well, the browser of the day is Safari.

Shoes is a lightweight GUI framework for Ruby, created by _why. I don’t always understand his unique sense of humor, but he has created a great little package for creating simple GUI’s.

To use it, download the package and install it where ever you want. I put it in “Applications” on OSX, and in my user directory on Windows. Then just double click the icon; this will bring up a menu allowing you to select a file to run. Shoes comes with a healthy collection of samples that you can work through to learn the Shoes syntax.

The basic syntax is pure Ruby goodness – clean and simple. Here is a simple example of a button and a text field:

Shoes.app :height => 200, :width => 200 do
stack :margin => 10 do
button “Button One” do
@mytextfield.replace “Button One pressed!”
end
@mytextfield = para “This is a test.”
end
end

Which looks like this when it runs:

Try it out. I think it’s a great tool for creating simple GUI’s!

I know, long time, no post – and now just a short post. Well, things have been pretty busy here, and I have a lot of things to post about, so here goes.

A couple of months ago, a friend showed me his Nokia 770. And I thought, “I don’t need anything like that.” So, it was only a matter of days before I found one on eBay. The bottom line is that it is like a ‘92 Jeep Cherokee – sure there are newer, fancier models out there, but this one got it right.

In a nutshell, it’s a handheld PC that runs Linux. It’s not a PDA by design, but it has a lot of really neat apps that make it a great all around geek must-have. I can sync my Google calendars, read spreadsheets and documents, download Google maps, and even make phone calls with Gizmo!

These listed for several hundred dollars when they first came out, but since they have been superseded by the Nokia 800 and 810, they are a real bargain on eBay.

I have written about TextMate before. In a nutshell, I find that TextMate is a great text editor for OS X (I think it is the best, but I don’t want to start a flame war). One of the things that makes it such a great application is its extensibility. Even a user with limited coding skills (like me) can easily add new features or modify how existing features work. I created a GTD bundle for it, using other bundles for code and coding examples. Perhaps the most difficult part of creating a new bundle is sorting through the TextMate blog, wiki and mailing list for help. The answers are there; Allan Odgaard (the creator) and the mailing list regulars are extremely helpful. The only problem was that you needed to search for answers. I say this in the past tense because a new book brings all of the answers together.

TextMate: Power Editing for the Mac, by James Edward Gray II, is more than a collection of the tips and tricks that you can find on the various web sites; it is a users guide and a programming guide too. The users guide section is great – James really emphasizes the importance of key commands. This is good for those coming to TextMate from the emacs world and miss the arcane “control-c control-x” functionality. It is also good for new users who like TextMate in general but may be overwhelmed by the plethora of key commands. The book them goes into a discussion of the basic bundles that everyone should know.

The second half of the book is the programming guide. This starts with the basics of snippets and tab commands and goes on to walk through creating language files – the place where the grammar of a language is described. The importance of language files is that they tell TextMate how to highlight text in a given language. One nice feature is that James builds a non-trivial example of a bundle as he goes through this section. The example bundle is like a picture – it’s worth a thousand words of explanation!

The bottom line is that this is a great book. I thought I pretty much knew everything I needed to know to develop bundles for TextMate, but I was wrong. After going through the book, I realize that I had only scratched the surface of the features of TextMate. I now have many ideas for new and improved features for my GTD bundle!

Well, I succumbed to this sale and bought a copy of DevonThink Pro (DTP). It’s an expensive application, even with the discount, but I think it’s worth it.

A discussion on another blog laid out the concept of a pensieve as a GTD collection tool. Well, DTP is my pensieve. I can collect articles from the web, as text files, web archives, or simple links; I can sync with my documents folder; and I can also link in my E-mail inbox and address book. Basically, I can add in anything that I want to reference in one place. The feature that is supposed to make DTP shine is its Artificial Intelligence search engine. I’m still learning my way around this, but it seems to work as advertised.

Anyone else tried DTP?

The kids’ school had an auction Saturday night, and I won a Leatherman Juice XE-6. I have used Leatherman tools for more than 15 years. They are a pretty good knife, and a great all-around tool, and this is one of the new breed of Leathermen (Leathermans?).

It seems to be an interesting compromise, it is shorted than my old PSTs, but almost twice as thick and heavier. The extra weight is a result of several new blades being added, including a serrated blade, an awl, and a cork screw. It also has a nice pair of scissors and a diamond file.

I’ve had it for a couple of days now, but haven’t needed a knife yet, so I’m not sure how it is going to work out. Has anyone else tried on of these new tools?

Update: I’ve been carrying this knife for about a month now, and I’m pretty happy with it. Yes, it is still heavy, but the blade configuration makes it much more useful as a knife – not just as a pair of pliers. I used to carry a Leatherman for its tools, and a folding knife for a knife blade. Now I can get by with just the one knife, so I suppose it saves weight after all!

Tangerine, from the Potion Factory, is a very interesting application. It somehow analyzes your iTunes library and can create custom playlists based on the tempo of the music. I’ve played with it a little, and the one feature I’d like it to have is the ability to limit which part of the library is used for the playlist selection. Otherwise I end up with a fast Barry Manilow song getting mixed in with Kiss and Golden Earring (actually, my iTunes library is 100% Barry Manilow free – really). Has anyone else tried Tangerine?

I like text editors. They’re kind of like word processors, except they focus more on function than form in what you write. I have used SubEthaEdit for a couple of years, mainly because it is fast and does a good job of text coloring. In XCode, I was using the built-in editor but I didn’t like how the auto-complete works. It is very aggressive, so that I often had to go back and delete text that it had inserted. Then I read an article about TextMate in MacTech Magazine. TextMate is a highly customizable editor that allows you to do all sorts of cool stuff when coding. While it has a lot of methods for doing this, the end result is that you save time and reduce error by inserting blocks of code. This goes above and beyond most text editors that complete a command, or a command and its arguments (like XCode does). For example, typing “class” and hitting the tab key produces this (while typing python code):

class ClassName (object):

def __init__(self, arg):
    self.arg = arg
    pass

You can’t see it here, but TextMate highlights the word ClassName, allowing you to overwrite it with the actual class name. Then, when you hit tab it highlights the word “object” again allowing you to type in your code. In short, it is great for me when I forget how to write a class in a given language. Additionally, TextMate can be used as the default editor in XCode, giving the cocoa programmer the best text editor in the best development platform.

What make all of this coolness happen are bundles. Bundles are modules that address a specific coding language. Users can modify existing modules or write their own. I saw a bundle called TODO yesterday that looked interesting. It allows a coder to place comments in code, such as “TODO” or “FIXME” that the TODO bundle can parse and create a To Do list. While this is cool for coders, I also thought that the functionality would be cool for GTD.

I created a GTD bundle using the TODO bundle as a base. I added custom functions to add tasks, change tasks to complete, and that sort of thing.

This is a great tool. In my opinion, it is emacs for OS X, without the psychoanalyst!

<title>iGo, iGo, it’s off to write a review I go…</title> A couple of weeks ago, I bought an <a href=“http://www.igo.com”>iGo</a>, which is a kind of universal power adapter. I liked the idea of having a backup charger, and the idea of having a way to charge several devices at once is appealing with the upcoming move. At first I was a little skeptical – this thing has all kinds of wires, and wraps up into a pretty big bundle, just the opposite of what I wanted for traveling. Well, it proved its usefulness last week, when I thought that the movers had packed the charger to my cell phone. Instead of having to get a $20 – $25 replacement charger, I bought the correct tip for the iGo for $10. Add in the fact that I can now also charge my cell phone in the car and the iGo is looking pretty good, albeit in a geeky sort of way.