Category Archives: Computing

Saving the world with Facebook

By Sharpy | Published: July 6, 2010
“Internet guru” Clay Shirky on new media: Look, we got erotic novels, first crack out of the box, once we had printing presses. It took a century and a half for the Royal Society to start publishing the first scientific journal in English. So even with the sacred printing press, the first things you get [...]
Also posted in Social Media, The Web | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Why I’m not a fan of ClearType

By Sharpy | Published: May 20, 2010

A quick comparison of how different the amazing font Inconsolata looks in Mac OS X versus Windows. (Spoiler: not so amazing in Windows.)

Also posted in Mac OS X, The Web, Typography | Leave a comment

My new MacBook Pro (15″, 2.53 GHz Core i5, w/ Hi-res antiglare display)

By Sharpy | Published: April 28, 2010
Got a shiny and new MacBook Pro today. It’s a beautiful machine: incredibly durable, a dream to type on, great antiglare display, powerful graphics and processor, and more battery life than any Windows laptop owner could probably dream of. It’s everything I need, and more. I’ve had my trusty white late-2007 model MacBook for two [...]
Also posted in Apple, Personal | 1 Comment

Could the iPad be the tipping point?

By Sharpy | Published: February 8, 2010
Update: To get where I’m coming from here I highly recommend that you read the following articles from Joel on Software: Strategy Letter II: Chicken and Egg Problems and Strategy Letter III: Let Me Go Back!. The tipping point, Joel on Software: One thing you see a lot when there is a transition from an [...]
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Software is hard

By Sharpy | Published: February 8, 2010
Allan Odgaard’s Textmate Blog lead me to the linked article: If you’re doing top-down design, you produce a specification that stops at some level of granularity. And you always risk discovering, come implementation time, that the module or class that was the lowest level of your specification hides untold worlds of complexity that will take [...]
Also posted in Programming, TextMate | Leave a comment

Thematic

By Sharpy | Published: February 4, 2010
Wrote a post a little while back saying that I’d returned to the default WordPress theme Kubrick. This is no longer the case. (I can’t actually remember when I switched away.) Now I’m actually using the theme framework known as Thematic. It’s got a nice minimalist default stylesheet, with great support for extensions and customisations [...]
Also posted in Blogging, WordPress | Leave a comment

Ryan Bates’ TODO List Textmate bundle

By Sharpy | Published: January 16, 2010
After wracking my brains to try and remember a random website where I’d watched a video about TextMate so that I could find the To-do List bundle he mentioned, it turns out a simple search solved my problem. The wonderful GetBundles for TextMate returned what I was after, Ryan Bates’ todo-list.tmbundle. It’s pretty simple to [...]
Also posted in Programming, TextMate | Leave a comment

Hiding the GrowlTunes menu bar icon

By Sharpy | Published: December 29, 2009
Update: You can now find this hint on macosxhints.com, along with some (hopefully) helpful comments. GrowlTunes is a nice little app included with the default Growl distribution. It watches iTunes and then whenever a song changes pops up a notification window giving details about the track, album art, your rating etc. Something that has really [...]
Also posted in Growl, Mac OS X | 1 Comment

A month of Vim (including Ruby, cron and GeekTool)

By Sharpy | Published: December 18, 2009
The general idea Teach myself Vim by using it exclusively for 1 month Write my first (somewhat) useful Ruby script to show me how long I have left (i.e. how long until the month is complete) Use GeekTool to display the regularly-updated results (via cron) on my desktop But why? I need to learn Vim, [...]
Also posted in Programming, Ruby, Text Editing | Leave a comment

Installing the Git man pages locally

By Sharpy | Published: November 21, 2009
(NOTE: The following applies to git under Mac OS X 10.6.2 (Snow Leopard). I can’t make any guarantees for other versions, but you still may find the article helpful.) So, today I spent an insane amount of time trying to get my git install completely up-to-date, which meant installing the documentation locally on my machine. [...]
Also posted in Git, Programming | Leave a comment