your favorite little computer program hoonja-doonja (mac version)

efax.com

i just need to send, not receive. worth signing up?

you used to be able to send faxes free for a trial period but that seems not to be the case any more.

aha, very cleverly disguised free trial offer

http://www.efax.com/Free-Trial

didn't old osx have a print-to-fax option? (you had to have one of those modem cards)

it does, and i don't

(thx ed, i'm doing the trial)

don't forget to swallow sadness

anyone know a program which can automate the slicing up of pdfs for kindle consumption? Ie. to turn double page scans into single page. It seems like such a thing should exist... but does it?

oops found one already, for anyone else's reference there's Briss which seems to work a treat

http://briss.en.softonic.com/mac

How is that different than Acrobat?

And why did they have to call it that?

yeah gross eh

it's free, I only need to do this one task with pdfs ever, and it seems to have a good system - it superimposes all the pages in the doc, so you can draw crop boxes that include everything.

testing out Total Finder right now:

http://totalfinder.binaryage.com/

Adds tabs to your finder windows. I'm already addicted to SizeUp for window management. This may be the next step. I mostly hate spaces, only use it occasionally. This seems like a better way to keep many different things open and organized without using Spaces. It also has Dual Mode, a single window with two finder browsers in it, and a bunch of other hoonja-doonjas. I think most people think this is inferior to Pathfinder, but I found Pathfinder annoying. This is such a minor tweak, aesthetically and workflow wise, that can make a big difference, instead of Pathfinders whole application based method of browsing with sidebars and all kinds of nonsense.

what is best rss reader these days

Reeder

(it costs money)

hmmm

also finally just looked at evernote. whoah.

reeder looks like a windows refugee's idea of an ipad app, but it is fast.

I like Reeder on my iphone, but always just go back to Google Reader on the mac. There's some new extension that makes it look pretty but I kept forgetting which icon meant "mark all as read" so I went back to google.

Still rockin' my old version of NetNewsWire from before they stuck in the ads

There's also Gruml (free). I used it a lot last year – there were some trivial bugs and it lacked a couple of features but it's had a few updates since then. As with Reeder you need a Google Reader account.

reeder on iphone, reeder on ipad, reeder on mac

awww yeah

https://github.com/kennethreitz/osx-gcc-installer

ok that's great; I often want to write just little tiny programs & haven't ever bothered to figure out Xcode (I learned to program before GUIs were common).

Anki---this is pretty awesome. seemed a little cumbersome at first, but once you nail down how models/templates work, it's totally boss

witch!

mac's alt.tabbing always bugged me and witch fixes it.

― czn, Monday, July 23, 2007 4:04 PM (4 years ago) Bookmark

really liking this. also figured out how to configure Spaces in a way that actually keeps things where they're supposed to be

anki is my religion

it's pretty great! wish i'd discovered it in the first two years of med school

I don't have a need for Anki (Pleco does the job on my iphone and ipad) but it really is great. Best thing is the huge variety of free flashcard packs all over the web.

Spaces is too stupid now, I gave up on it. Most of my apps are just in full screen mode now.

spaces works fine for me?

Best thing is the huge variety of free flashcard packs all over the web.

I'd love to use flashcards for French but haven't found anything. So I call bullshit on this.

call bullshit on u

do you use anki, TH? i spent <15 sec (i managed to type 'fre') and found a deck with 3500 cards in it. i just learned what "agacer" means!

nb that was searching from within the application

bullshit!

I've really benefitted from doing the 4500 card 'german vocab' deck. One problem is that you have to generate 'reverse' cards to properly learn spelling, genders etc. but the english sides of the cards aren't always properly differentiated enough from each other to serve this purpose. There are also mistakes, and an weirdly high number of christian theology words. Still amazing, though. I've learnt thousands of words.

cant remember which apple thread it was but i seem to remember someone (Ed?) having a two computer system (desk/lap) that involved checking out an svn repository of his User folder or something? to keep the two in sync?

how does anyone else do this?

Oh I didn't know you could search from within the app. I was looking on Google and found a bunch of forum posts from like 2008 where people were complaining that they couldn't find French vocab words. Plus an insane site from some guy who recommended literally typing phrases in by hand.

probably not svn: a centralised repo like svn seems particularly badly suited to synching, and svn doesn't do anything special with binary files, which is what most of your home directory is.

i do keep bits in version control, and check them out when i get/sit at a new computer, but not my whole home directory.

i use this thing for my dotfiles (vim, bash, etc.), which uses git: https://github.com/technicalpickles/homesick (the repos are on github if anyone is interested).

i use mercurial for my code because that was the thing when i migrated from SVN (linux hadn't moved to git yet, and i liked the fact that mercurial was written in python).

with both of these it is a manual process to "sync" two machines though, so maybe it's not what you're talking about.

asked in the other apple thread

is there a way to control itunes one on computer from another? found a barebones remote app called iTRC but it was ~butts~

making yr own is good for stuff like medicine, where the process of making them itself is useful for memorization. also, i haven't seen many decks (ie i haven't looked) with the kind of complexity i need. my, eg, pharm cards have a model where each drug has six fields, and each field has a template, so Anki can generate six cards for me for each drug i enter.

cf language drills, where there's a pretty simple binary. this is this.

xp caek i guess the only reason i would want any kind of 'syncing' would be for, as you say, dotfiles and "documents in progress." your solution for the former seems good, and i suppose dropbox would work for stuff like writing or w/e. another, possibly thornier issue, would be dealing with apps like LR. say i bring my laptop on vacation, take some pics, edit them, whatever. i suppose there's a 'merge' function in LR3, but i've never gotten in too deep with the file management end of things over there.

isn't this why we have the cloud

all my serious writing i keep in version control (along with source code) so synching is just checking out.

all the casual stuff i put in http://notational.net/ and store the NV file on dropbox. occasionally i use google docs. i would probably do something different here if i had an iphone.

all my super serious writing i put on ilx

yeah i'm using notational velocity and syncing with simplenote (on iphone), i like it

and, really, i'm not doing any "serious writing" right now, and certainly nothing long enough to merit needing version control. figure the "version control" afforded by dropbox is probably good enough

(the main difference as i understand it being that true version control tracks changes)

as an aside, i always thought it was weird that my old job didn't use some kind of version control for all the copy we wrote. not even 'track changes' in word (yuck).

in addition to tracking versions, which is surprisingly useful...

if you're comfortable on the command line a modern distributed VC (like git or mercurial) provide a good way of keeping things in synch, and if you're ever in a situation when you're working with other writers then it would be handy, since it manages merges (although whether the way it does that is suitable for prose is another thing).

but it sounds like it would probably be overkill 4 u.

haha, totally. i fuck with this stuff out of sheer nerdiness, not because of any actual need

haha otm me too a lot of the time

I'll say one hoonja doonja I've never figured out is Path Finder.

not sure where to ask this - when using Reeder fro Mac, I've been having two problems: (a) I cannot get to download links included in posts (whether in text or in HTML formats) (b) whenever I click to open a post in my web browser, it will launch a new window rather than a new tab in the one that's already opened.