This one's from Douglas Adams.
There's a set of rules that anything that was in the world when you were born is normal and natural. Anything invented between when you were 15 and 35 is new and revolutionary and exciting, and you'll probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're 35 is against the natural order of things.
A guy who worked on Mac repairs and maintenance told me a good way to test whether a Mac’s hard disk is working reliably. “Oh”, he said on the phone, “you can kinda stress-test it by opening the Applications folder and doing Cmd-A Cmd-O”.
It took me a moment to click just what he was saying: Cmd-A selects everything in the folder. Cmd-O opens things that are selected. In the case of apps, it will run them. So these two quick keystrokes will try to launch, simultaneously, every app installed on your machine.
“It usually takes 5 minutes or so, depending on the machine”, he continued. “But if there’s something wrong with the system this will usually find it.” Yes, I said, I imagined it would.
Now, I admit I haven’t tried this with my machines yet, but I did try it last time I was in the Apple store. And it’s a really good way to demonstrate the difference between hard-disk- and SSD-based machines!
Two things worth knowing if you try this experiment:
While computing in the ‘cloud’ brings us a lot of good things, there’s one area in which it is often not very strong: longevity.
For me this is most apparent as I peruse the archives of my blog — in which, for example, none of the Google Video clips can now be played — or look back at tweets from a couple of years ago which often linked to things using the cli.gs URL-shortening service, many of whose links already no longer work.
And my last company, Camvine, used Google Apps for Business. The company has now gone, and so, with its Google account, have all the associated documents and emails. Thousands of them.
It’s easy, at the time, to think “I can link to this safely, or store my documents safely here, because Google isn’t about to vanish overnight”. Well, all of the service providers I’ve been tripping over in looking through my archives are still around. But for one reason or another, the links no longer work.
It’s obvious, but it’s worth repeating: Using, or linking to, someone else’s service, may be a good strategy for today, but don’t rely on it for anything you might want to access tomorrow. The only data I can be sure of is on servers I run (and backup) myself.
Nobody likes AppleScript. Well, almost nobody. It’s an attempt to make a programming language look like a natural language, which means that knowing what constitutes valid syntax in any given situation is almost impossible. I once suggested that what the world really needs is a Perl-to-Applescript translator, because Perl is a language that’s pretty easy to write but impossible to read, and AppleScript is easy to read but impossible to write. The syntax is a bit dependent on the apps with which you’re trying to interact, too, and the debugging options are exceedingly limited.
But the most annoying thing is that, on occasion, it’s exceedingly useful, and there aren’t really good alternatives for the kind of things it can do.
So just in case anyone out there is googling for this kind of thing, here’s how I made it change the default options on a dialog box that I use every day.
I’ve been inspired by David Sparks’s e-book Paperless, and my new-found fondness for the kind of things you can do with the Hazel utility, to get a better, more automated workflow for scanning in documents.
A key component, of course, is that you want them to be OCRed so that you can search for them, or search within them, later. I want something that does this automatically, or can be made to do it automatically, when a scan ends up in a folder on my disk, with minimal manual intervention. Good OCR programs are fairly costly on the Mac – Abbyy FineReader, at £79, is generally agreed to do the best OCR job, but the Mac version is not very scriptable. PDFpen, at £47, does a reasonable job and has better scriptability, and if I were starting now I’d probably use that.
But a while ago I splashed out on NeatWorks, which has good OCR, plays nicely with my wonderful ScanSnap scanner, and provides a complete filing system for my documents, with flexible metadata options. It’s a nice package. But the problem is that I no longer want a complete filing system for my documents – I want to do that myself.
So for the moment I’m using NeatWorks to capture my scans, OCR them, enter some metadata and then export them as PDFs to the folder where Hazel and other things take over. They typically stay in NeatWorks for about a minute.
OK – that was a long run-up to explain why I regularly – often several times a day, do File > Export… and get this dialog:
At this point I can almost just hit [Return], except for one problem: the default is to export all the items in the currently selected folders and I just want to export the thing I last scanned. So every time I do this, I have to switch from keyboard to mouse, click the little radio button by ‘Selected items only’ and then carry on.
AppleScript to the rescue! I used Automator to create a service that just applies to NeatWorks and runs the following AppleScript:
This runs ‘File > Export…’, clicks the appropriate radio button, and then clicks the Export… button.
Finally I used the Keyboard section of System Preferences to assign a keyboard shortcut to this service.
Now, I drop some paper into the scanner and press the button on the front. NeatWorks pops up and OCRs it. I type in a title, document date and any other keywords I fancy, then just hit my magic keystroke and check the name and folder before hitting return to save.
At that point, Hazel takes over and does something like “if this file was created by NeatWorks, and has a name containing the word ‘Telemarq’ and the word ‘receipt’, then file it away in the appropriate folder of my receipts directory with a suitably reformatted filename”.
“Can we arrange a time for a conference call with you?”, said the enthusiastic email that landed in my inbox last year from some company’s marketing department. “We're very excited to tell you about our new viral videos!”
To which my response, of course, was that if they were really viral, they wouldn't need to tell me about them!
I thought of this while watching Euan Semple's keynote from the State of The Net conference in June, which, in contrast, has a gentle, understated style yet includes some nice ideas that come from years of careful thinking about corporate communications, both internal and external.
Euan Semple is the author of Organizations Don’t Tweet, People Do.
On Aug 5th, the Curiosity rover landed on Mars. I hadn’t really absorbed, at the time, just what a technical achievement this was: not so much getting the thing to Mars, but landing it safely and ready to roll shortly after it hit the Martian atmosphere at 13,000 miles per hour. It weighs nearly a tonne. The Jet Propulsion Lab had, of course, made CGI simulations showing how the process would work, in advance of the landing, but in this brilliant piece of video editing they intercut it with footage of the control team on the ground celebrating its arrival. I suggest you turn the volume up and watch it full-screen.
Rose’s aunt used to work at JPL, and, when I visited many years ago, one of the directors made an offhand comment which basically amounted to a job offer. At the time, it was all very quiet, and though I was interested in the work, the elderly rows of SPARCstations tracking satellites didn’t grab me as particularly thrilling. Now, however, there can’t be many organisations that could put together a recruitment video like this!
Well, OK, the title’s a little misleading, but here’s a very handy hint for anyone running Lion or later. It’s to do with moving files.
Though the Finder has, for a very long time, supported the copying and pasting of files from one folder to another, it has never allowed cut and paste. I could never fathom why something so simple wasn’t in there until I realised that, actually, there is a problem with implementing the concept cleanly: normally, when you cut things, they disappear. What happens if you cut a file but never paste it? Especially accidentally? (What happens on Windows? I forget…)
Still, this was an annoying omission, particularly if you’re used to Windows, or if you have a small display without much space for dragging things about.
Well, now you can do it. Instead of the normal cut & paste keystrokes (Cmd-X, Cmd-V) you do a copy and a kind of alternate paste (Cmd-C, Alt-Cmd-V). Intuitive? No. But I guess it makes a kind of sense.
Thanks to the excellent David Sparks for the hint.
There are a handful of utilities on my Mac that I use all day, every day. I’ve written about most of them before over the years — try the search box on the right — but since people liked some of my past posts about favourite iOS apps, I thought I’d gather these into a quick list here.
It would be terribly presumptuous to think that my readers, not satisfied with whatever I might burble about today, might want to go on to explore the Status-Q archives…
However, the fact remains that there are over 2200 posts here now, and I certainly can’t remember everything I’ve written, so it’s fun for me, at least, to browse a bit. The ‘related posts’ at the bottom of each entry’s page often pop up things I’d completely forgotten, but now I’ve added a ‘From the archive’ box on the right: a completely random selection of five posts from the last decade, updated every few minutes.
Go on – have a browse. Whatever you find is bound to be more interesting than what you’re reading now!
John Gruber points out this very nice visualisation comparing the budgets and box-office returns of the different Bond movies.
Make sure you check the ‘adjust for inflation’ switch.
We’ve always rather liked Timothy Dalton, who is a Real Actor, but it’s clear that the public in general didn’t share our enthusiasm, perhaps for him or perhaps for the plots of those movies, which only gave a four- or five-fold return on investment. Still pretty good when compared with your average savings account, but Diamonds are Forever paid back its investors sixteen times over. Ah well, watch his excellent Mr Rochester in the best production of Jane Eyre, instead…
This is also a fine example of the kind of web design that would have been inconceivable without Flash not long ago…
Well, my tweets last night were mostly either bemused or rather negative, so I should emphasise that there were bits of the Olympic opening ceremony I thought were rather good.
I liked the levers of the industrial revolution hoisting enormous smoking chimneys into the sky, though one gets the impression that nothing good came from this Saruman-style destruction except the forging of five giant gold rings to rule us all. A pleasing effect, but some other industrial achievements might have been nice: Stephenson’s Rocket, perhaps? The spectre of Voldemort hovering over children in hospital beds, until chased away by Mary Poppins, was quirky but amusing, though perhaps he was really hovering over the NHS? It, like so much of the ceremony, must have been completely bewildering to hundreds of millions of viewers.
I cringed at some of the inevitable political correctness, was proud of the music we used to produce until about 20 years ago, was pleased by Her Majesty’s involvement in the Bond escapade and felt sorry for her obvious boredom at having to sit through the rest of it. It’s good that Tim Berners-Lee finally gets appropriate global recognition, tweeting ‘This is for everyone’ from the middle of the arena; given his natural humility it must have been a challenge to get him to agree. And the cauldron was, indeed, very pretty.
To give a true history of modern Britain, I thought, we should have had a huge influx of Polish people at the end! And then I realised that they had probably been there all along, behind the scenes, making everything work. And work it did; it was certainly an impressive technical achievement, and it looks very good in the BBC’s six-minute edited highlights.
Then the athletes came in, and many of them looked like rowdy drunken yobs coming out of… well… a sporting event. Still, I suppose that’s something else that the world knows us for.
Now, I know I’m not the target audience for this stuff; I’ve made my feelings clear about the financial outrage that is the Olympics. For the same money we could have given a shiny new MacBook Pro to every schoolchild in the country. Or employed 1000 teachers for 400 years. Or… well… take your pick of better investments. So I tried to divorce my feelings about the ceremony from its association with the bigger picture. And as my friend Jeff Jarvis put it, to set the context for his tweets last night: “I cannot abide opening ceremonies or folk dances”.
And I’m also very out of touch with popular culture – I recognised about half a dozen faces last night: the Queen, Rowan Atkinson, Sir Tim B-L, Daniel Craig and Kenneth Branagh. OK, five. But it would have been six if I’d stayed awake long enough to see Paul McCartney. So I imagine there were probably lots of sports personalities, soap-opera stars, rap ‘musicians’ and winners of X-Factor that might have been recognisable to others.
So it’s probably better to rely on others’ commentary than mine. I liked:
Allesandra Stanley in the New York Times:
It’s hard to imagine any other nation willing to make so much fun of itself on a global stage, in front of as many as a billion viewers. It takes nerve to look silly; the cheesy, kaleidoscopic history lesson that took Britain through its past, from pasture through the workhouses and smoke stacks of the Industrial Revolution to World War I and, of course, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” was like a Bollywood version of a sixth-grade play.
But bad taste is also a part of the British heritage. The imagery mixed the glory of a royal Jubilee with the grottiness of a Manchester pub-crawl. Britain offered a display of humor and humbleness that can only stem from a deep-rooted sense of superiority.
…
The NBC anchors Matt Lauer and Meredith Vieira did their best to get in the spirit of British nuttiness, but at times their energy flagged, and their bewilderment became obvious. After a hospital sketch that morphed into a children’s nightmare — and a giant fake baby floating on a bed — Lauer said, “I don’t know whether that’s cute or creepy.”
The whole show veered from cute to creepy and from familiar to baffling, including a pop music tribute to Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. Most of all, it showed a love of movies that celebrate British eccentricity. “Isles of Wonder” seemed most inspired by a scene from the movie “Love Actually,” in which Hugh Grant, playing the prime minister, explains that Britain is still a great nation because it is “the country of Shakespeare, Churchill, the Beatles, Sean Connery, Harry Potter, David Beckham’s right foot.”
Andrew Gilligan in The Telegraph:
Some of the rest was bitty and disjointed; the sub-mobile-phone advert style of the digital section was particularly weak. It was more political than I expected. Voldemort loomed over the NHS. Tonight marked perhaps its final transformation from a healthcare system into a religion. Dancers made up the CND symbol. The Royal Family looked bored, but the new Right-On Royal Family – Doreen Lawrence and Shami Chakrabarti – got to carry the Olympic flag.
The NHS segment in particular underlined how surprisingly parochial this ceremony was. The idea of the Health Service as a beacon for the world is, bluntly, a national self-delusion. Most other Western European countries have better state healthcare systems – and healthier people – than we do. Does the average Chinese person even know what the letters stand for?But I suppose the whole Olympics is in a broader sense parochial. Three weeks ago, I was in Libya witnessing that country’s first free election in sixty years: an end, or at least a beginning of the end, to decades of madness and tyranny which killed tens of thousands and blighted the lives of millions. To borrow the words of tonight’s over-excited TV commentators, that really was an inspirational and historic moment. Tonight, by contrast, was just a show.
One of my favourite podcasts at present is The Skeptics Guide to the Universe. Highly recommended, if you don’t know it. I liked this quote from a recent episode where they were discussing the Higgs particle:
“I read this great book about antigravity. I couldn’t put it down..”
© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser
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