August 2020 release of "Learning Hammerspoon" is out!

August 10, 2020

I am happy to announce a new release of my new book "Learning Hammerspoon", including a brand new chapter _Hammerspoon Cookbook, Tips and Tricks_ and many other improvements.

image from August 2020 release of "Learning Hammerspoon" is out!

How to insert screenshots in Org documents on macOS

August 9, 2020

As I'm taking notes or writing in Org-mode, I often want to insert screenshots inline with the text. While Org supports inserting and displaying inline images, the assumption is that the image is already somewhere in the file system and we just want to link to it. In this post I will show you how to automate the insertion of images from the clipboard into an org-mode document.

New release of "Learning Hammerspoon" is out!

April 8, 2019

I am happy to announce a new release of my new book "Learning Hammerspoon", including a brand new chapter and many other improvements.

image from New release of "Learning Hammerspoon" is out!

First release of "Learning Hammerspoon"

October 16, 2018

I am happy to announce the first release of my new book "Learning Hammerspoon", a book devoted to using Hammerspoon to make using your Mac easier, faster and more fun.

image from First release of "Learning Hammerspoon"

Just Enough Lua to Be Productive in Hammerspoon, Part 2

November 1, 2017

In this second article of the "Just Enough Lua" series, we dive into Lua's types and data structures.

Just Enough Lua to Be Productive in Hammerspoon, Part 1

October 21, 2017

Hammerspoon's configuration files are written in Lua, so a basic knowledge of the language is very useful to be an effective user of Hammerspoon. In this two-part article I will show you the basics of Lua so you can read and write Hammerspoon configuration. Along the way you will discover that Lua is a surprisingly powerful language.

Using Nix's "Single-user Mode" on macOS

September 20, 2017

Here is how to set up Nix in single-user mode on macOS.

Fixing the Outlook-to-OmniFocus Script

September 11, 2017

Here’s how to fix the breakage caused by one of the recent updates to Microsoft Outlook in the Outlook-to-OmniFocus AppleScript included with my SendToOmniFocus spoon.

image from Fixing the Outlook-to-OmniFocus Script

Using Spoons in Hammerspoon

September 1, 2017

In this second article about Hammerspoon, we look into _Spoons_, modules written in Lua which can be easily installed and loaded into Hammerspoon to provide ready-to-use functionality. Spoons provide a predefined API to configure and use them. They are also a good way to share your own work with other users.

Getting Started With Hammerspoon

August 21, 2017

This is the first installment of a series of posts about Hammerspoon, a staggeringly powerful automation utility which gives you an amazing degree of control over your Mac, allowing you to automate and control almost anything. In the word of Hammerspoon's motto: _Making the runtime, funtime_.

image from Getting Started With Hammerspoon

Fast translation with Google Translator

March 7, 2016

via https://medium.com/@mrdoro/fast-translation-with-google-translator-and-mac-osx-817e32233b7a

https://medium.com/@mrdoro/fast-translation-with-google-translator-and-mac-osx-817e32233b7a

Nice article about how to create a service to automatically translate selected text from any application. I use this all the time, I have a “German-to-English” service bound to Command-Alt-Ctrl-Shift-E, so I can just select text off the screen, press the shortcut, and a window with the translation will pop up. Very handy.

Clicking on the MacBook Pro is entirely artificial

October 13, 2015

via http://sixcolors.com/post/2015/10/apple-magic-trackpad-2-review/

This is probably old news for most, but it still blew my mind: only now I realized that the clicking feeling and sound on my MacBook Pro’s trackpad is artificially generated. I did the experiment of turning on “Silent clicking” and turning off “Force click and haptic feedback” on the trackpad preferences panel and, indeed, the clicking is gone. Wow (/ht @jsnell)

To aid in the process, the Magic Trackpad apparently even generates its own artificial clicking noise (as the Force Touch trackpads in the MacBook and MacBook Pro do). If you think that’s weird, you can enable Silent Clicking in the Trackpad system preferences pane, and the artificial sound will shut off. (There’s still a sound when you click, though, thanks to the vibration—but it’s much subtler.)

As on the MacBook, it’s kind of hard to believe that the Magic Trackpad 2 isn’t actually clicking when you push down. The glass does flex with the pressure a little bit, but that clicking feeling is entirely artificial.

Fixing Emacs problems with the fish shell

May 14, 2015

I started getting errors from the TRAMP Emacs package because I was using fish as my default shell, and it does not recognize certain standard syntax elements (such as && to separate commands), and Emacs runs subcommands under the default shell. I fixed this by:

Changing my account's default shell back to `/bin/bash`
Changing my Terminal.app preferences to run `/usr/local/bin/fish` when a shell opens, instead of the default login shell:

image from Fixing Emacs problems with the fish shell

Find all single-note tags in Evernote

January 14, 2015

I’ve been working on cleaning up my Evernote, and noticed that I have a lot of tags assigned to a single note. I had successfully used Veritrope’s excellent Evernote empty tag remover applescript, so I made some small changes to write the attached script, which will find all single-note tags in your Evernote and list them in a new note, including links to each note. This makes it much easier to go through them and see which of those tags could be removed.

Just download the script, open it in Script Editor and run it.

Tip of the hat to Justin for his excellent collection of scripts at Veritrope!

How to solve truncated docker output in Mac OS X using boot2docker

May 12, 2014

If you are using docker on Mac OS X using boot2docker (http://docs.docker.io/installation/mac/), you may see truncated output from docker run, and also may have noticed that docker attach does not work properly, producing only some output and then exiting. This bug is documented here: https://github.com/boot2docker/boot2docker/issues/150, where I also found the following workaround. Documenting it here in case anyone finds it useful:

Instead of using the default value of DOCKER_HOST provided by boot2docker up, establish the docker connection through an ssh tunnel:

How to stop com.apple.dock.extra from "using significant energy"

March 4, 2014

I’d been having for some time a problem with `com.apple.dock.extra` appearing in the “Apps using significant energy” section of the battery menu. I just learned the solution (from http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1651662): remove BusyCal 1.6 (I upgraded to BusyCal 2, but left the old version around in case I had to go back to it). After removing it and restarting the Dock, the problem stopped.

From the same thread, it seems the problem was caused by BusyCal’s “animate transitions” preference. I didn’t try that, but if you are still using BusyCal 1.6 and have this problem, it’s worth trying.

HowTo: Changing the available display formats for Evernote's "Insert Date" command

November 13, 2012

Evernote introduced some time ago an "Insert Date" keyboard shortcut, which is very handy. However, the options for the format of the inserted date seemed limited (only four options). I finally learned how this works, and how to change it on the Mac. The formats offered are those that are configured in the "Languages & Text" preferences panel. If you go to "Region" and then click the "Customize button" in the Dates part of the panel, you will see and be able to customize the formats for short, medium, long and full date representations. Those are the options that are offered to you by Evernote. Just change them to whatever you want, and they will be available for selection. What I specifically wanted to do was to use the YYYY-MM-DD format, so I changed it to the following:

image from HowTo: Changing the available display formats for Evernote's "Insert Date" command

Changing "message:" protocol handler from Sparrow back to Mail.app

January 25, 2012

After using Sparrow for a while, I have decided to switch back to Mail.app. However, even after setting my default email client to Mail.app, all my message: links (for example, from messages dragged from Mail.app into Things) were opening in Sparrow.

After some experimentation, I figured out what happened: I switched the default email client from Sparrow to Mail using Mail's preference panel:

Apparently this switches the application for the mailto: protocol, but not for message:, nor for .eml files. The solution was to use Sparrow's preference panel to set it again as the default email client, and then disable it. Then Sparrow correctly sets all the protocol handlers back to their default values.

image from Changing "message:" protocol handler from Sparrow back to Mail.app

Fix journal in an HFS+ file system

December 15, 2011

Yesterday my external Western Digital disk (which I use for Time Machine, among other things) stopped mounting automatically when I plug it in. This may *cough*definitely*cough*have something to do with me unmounting it forcefully while it was doing a backup, since I was in a hurry.

Disk Utility reported everything was OK with the disk, but it still failed to mount. Upon poking a bit deeper, I found these messages in the logs:

Remapping Mac modifier keys on Emacs 23.3

November 27, 2011

I just switched from Carbon Emacs (which is old Emacs 22.x) to Emacs for OS X Modified on my Mac (which is a Cocoa app, and Emacs 23.3).

One of the unwelcome changes was that the Emacs 'Meta' modifier is now by default mapped to the Option key and not Command as before. But this gave me the opportunity to learn how to map the Mac keyboard modifier keys arbitrarily. I now have the following in my .emacs:

Installing cfengine on Mac OS X

August 5, 2011

Cfengine (tested 3.2.0) installs easily on OS X (tested 10.7), given that it's Unix. One problem I encountered was that it does not compile with the bundled version of Berkeley DB (it recognizes it during configure, but produces compilation errors). The solution is to use some other DB engine. I chose Tokyo Cabinet. Using homebrew, the process is simple

brew install tokyo-cabinet

After this, configure --with-tokyocabinet, and then compile and install as usual.

My thoughts about the Lion upgrade process

July 22, 2011

I just finished upgrading our Mac (my wife and I share it) to Lion. It looks very nice. This has been the OS X upgrade to which I have given less thought: purchase, download, backup, install, done.

I think a lot of this has to do with the online distribution. We are used to installing things downloaded from the Internet without much thought (of course there are security considerations, but that's another topic). On the other hand, new OS versions used to be special: you go to the store, or you order it online, it comes in a box, and there used to be an ominous feeling about it. It may wipe all your data, it may make your machine unrecognizable, it may kill your pets.

CopperExport development paused

December 11, 2009

I want to post a short update aimed at users of my iPhoto plugin CopperExport. I have received multiple reports of it failing in recent updates of Snow Leopard, and I have also verified personally that it does not work properly in iPhoto'09.

Unfortunately, since the big move, I find myself without easy access to a Mac for development (I had a Mac at my previous job, and I use Windows at my new job), which pretty much makes fixing these bugs impossible. Until I get a new machine, I will not be able to provide updates to CopperExport. Of course, if any developers out there want to make the appropriate fixes, I will happily accept patches that you submit, and produce a new release myself.