Ryan Bates’ TODO List Textmate bundle

By Sharpy | Published: January 16, 2010

todolist-tmbundle

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 use:

  • A project is defined by a regular old line of text
  • All tasks start with a character followed by a space
    • A regular task starts with a hyphen “-“
    • A completed task starts with a “x“
    • An important task starts with a “!“
    • Etc…

Simple To-do list

Ryan himself says that it’s just a simple way of managing what you need to do for a given project.

Would be great for a new year’s resolution, some yardwork, or just about any old thing.

(For a piece of software that manages this in a very Mac OS X way, try Hog Bay Software’s TaskPaper. Much more accessible, very nice to use, and inexpensive. I highly recommend it if you don’t have access to TextMate.)

Posted in Computing, Programming, TextMate | Leave a comment

Hiding the GrowlTunes menu bar icon

By Sharpy | Published: December 29, 2009

GrowlTunes Icon

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 annoyed me about GrowlTunes is the relatively useless icon in the menu bar taking up space. For such a small and simple task, all I wanted GrowlTunes to do was show me what track was playing.

Well, today I found this really simple tip on bpeople.org which solves the problem splendidly. Just type into a Terminal window

defaults write com.growl.growltunes GrowlTunesWithoutMenu 1

restart GrowlTunes.app, and hey presto: GrowlTunes is very unobtrusively doing its job.

Before:

GrowlTunes menu bar icon

After:

Menu bar Without Growl Tunes Icon

Seeing as you no longer have access to the menu commands to stop GrowlTunes, you can do so by opening Activity Monitor (usually located under /Applications/Utilities), finding the GrowlTunes process in the list, and cling the Quit Process button.

Note: If for any reason you wish to undo this change, just type the same command above but with a ’0′ instead of a ’1′.

Posted in Computing, Growl, Mac OS X | 1 Comment

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

By Sharpy | Published: December 18, 2009

The general idea

  1. Teach myself Vim by using it exclusively for 1 month
  2. Write my first (somewhat) useful Ruby script to show me how long I have left (i.e. how long until the month is complete)
  3. Use GeekTool to display the regularly-updated results (via cron) on my desktop

But why?

I need to learn Vim, and this is a cool way to tie in some other things that I would like to learn, like how to use cron. I’m also currently building a website using Rails, so some knowledge of Ruby would be ideal.

But on the other hand…

I’m a nerd. I want to learn some new, cool things.

Basically that’s it.

To Do

  • Complete the vimtutor tutorial
  • Create a Ruby script that writes to a file the amount of time left that I need to exclusively use Vim
  • Use cron to schedule this script to run hourly
  • Use GeekTool to put the results on my desktop

This is going to be a bit of a pet project of mine, and I’ll try and update this post regularly with my progress.

Enjoy.

Posted in Computing, 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. Sounds fairly straightforward, but unfortunately it was not.

To give you some context, this is the how-to article I was following, from GitHub. Git installed with no problems at all, but I ran into problems when building either of the following make targets:

make man
make install-doc

At this stage, make would freeze whenever it reached an xmlto command (xmlto is a dependency for building the git documentation, I installed it with MacPorts). This is where it got stuck for me:

me@localhost$ make man
make -C Documentation man
    SUBDIR ../
make[2]: `GIT-VERSION-FILE' is up to date.
    XMLTO git-add.1

Blinking cursor. No action. Bad.

So I found this really helpful post about xmlto issues, but it did not help me. From the post:

…Turns out, the latest version of xmlto uses a cp -a command which is a no-go on OSX.

The fix is simple enough, on line 11 of format/docbook/man, change “cp -a -- ...” to “cp -- ...” and you’re done.

My xmlto_directory/format/docbook/man file contained this at line 11

cp -R -P -p -- * "$OUTPUT_DIR" 2>/dev/null

So cp -a wasn’t my problem.

I ended up just downloading the pre-built man pages. You can find them here (just navigate to the version of git you’re using). Once I had the man pages, I followed these steps:

  1. Extracted the package
  2. Copied the man1, man5 and man7 directories to /usr/local/man
  3. Edited my man.conf file (located at /etc/man.conf) to include the path /usr/local/man
    • Find the lines beginning with MANPATH
    • Add a new line MANPATH /usr/local/man if it doesn’t already exist

I could now access all of the git man pages. Yay! (*cough* 12:30 AM *cough*) You can test it with man git or man git-log, etc.

Posted in Computing, Git, Programming | Leave a comment

Kubrick returns

By Sharpy | Published: November 21, 2009

I wrote a little while back that I was trialling a new WordPress them, Wu Wei. After using it for a little while, I’ve decided to return to the WordPress default, Kubrick, for a little while (I have made my own minor modifications).

Why? A couple of reasons: widgets such as Archives and Categories didn’t play well with the theme; I like having a sidebar for quick access to said widgets; and it just didn’t quite feel like a complete package.

Once I have some time I’m going to resume my search for a new theme, so if you have any suggestions of what you like, feel free to comment below!

Posted in Blogging, Computing, WordPress | 1 Comment

Blogging from TextMate

By Sharpy | Published: November 1, 2009

And, by way of follow-up to my post yesterday, here is my very first post written entirely in TextMate, and entirely in Markdown. Pretty awesome stuff.

So here are a couple of links for you:

On a final note, and in response to this post I wrote a month or so back, TextMate is seriously awesome. I bought it. They gave me 15% off. (What will I do when I’m no longer a student?) And I cannot believe how seriously core this is becoming in my workflow. It’s nuts. Can this text editor do everything?

I’ve just added blogging to the list, along with coding and taking sermon notes, and journalling. Maybe I should write a journalling bundle? That would be pretty awesome. Just build in some native FTP support and I will be super happy! A project which is an FTP mirror of a website, with automatic uploading and all that…would seriously be cool.

So here’s to TextMate!

—Sharpy

Posted in Miscellaneous | Leave a comment

PHP Markdown

By Sharpy | Published: October 31, 2009

While watching a video about blogging from TextMate, I went on further to discover this pretty awesome PHP version of Markdown. After then downloading PHP Markdown Extra and installing it on my site, this is my very first attempt at a blog written purely in Markdown syntax, with no HTML at all.

Hope it works!

EDIT: looks like it worked! Sweet :D

Posted in Blogging, Computing, Mac OS X, TextMate | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Waxing thematic

By Sharpy | Published: October 27, 2009

So. Whilst visiting imjustcreative.com I read this post about WordPress themes which lead me to this article—a list of some pretty cool minimalist/typographical designs.

I couldn’t go past this one: Wu Wei, by Jeff Ngan.

There’s just something about the gorgeous, chunky Helvetica (well, actually it’s Helvetica Neue—if you have a Mac you’ll be seeing what I’m seeing). I love the colour scheme too, with it’s subtle blue tinge, and the outstanding hyperlinks.

There are a few things that I’m not so sure about:

  • The original theme uses lowercase for headings—I’ve changed that already
  • The sidebar is pushed all the way to the bottom of the page, making it useless for navigation (though the new set of links at the top of the page is very nice)
  • Long widgets such as archives and categories don’t line up well with teeny tiny widgets like search

I’m going to dive in and do a bit of customising I think, but in general I am very inspired by this theme! I hope you enjoy it, and I hope it gives a bit of life to the blog.

Make note: one day I’ll develop my own theme for this blog, and it’s designs such as this one that really do inspire me. There’s a lot of power in typography.

—Sharpy

Posted in Blogging, Computing, The Web, Typography, WordPress | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Ben Stein’s “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed”

By Sharpy | Published: October 17, 2009

Came across this film in the CMI newsletter this morning, and it looks to be worth investigation. From the newsletter:

Expelled is a very entertaining yet thought-provoking film that will shock anyone who thinks all scientists are free to follow the evidence wherever it may lead. As you are well aware, evolution as the explanation of our origins ultimately undermines the foundational basis for the Christian faith, particularly among young people who are taught evolution / long ages as fact.

The film follows Ben Stein (lawyer, comedian, game show host, US presidential speech-writer and actor) as he travels the world in search of answers about the origin of life.

Check out the trailer:

And, of course, the website.

A little bit of investigation revealed that for those in my locality, there is a single screening in Geelong (Waurn Ponds) at Reading Cinemas on Thursday, November 19. If you’re interested in coming along to see it, register your interest in the comments below. I’ll keep you posted about details of session times.

—Sharpy

Posted in Christianity, Creation | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Why you and I are obsessed with Facebook

By Sharpy | Published: October 5, 2009

Note—that’s not a question. I daresay that if you are on Facebook (Twitter, YouTube et al.) you are addicted. Maybe you don’t agree. Unfortunately, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re correct.

Now, don’t get me wrong. For those of you who know me (and also those who don’t), I’m not attacking you with this comment. Actually, if anything I’m trying to help you.

  • If you are able to use Facebook etc. in a healthy way, that does not impact with other areas of your life negatively, I applaud you.
  • …but if you’re not sure that you can provide a positive response to that statement, keep reading, and try to keep an open mind!

Read More »

Posted in Computing, Miscellaneous, The Web | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments