• Open Source: The first item on the list is also the most recent change as QS was Open Source relatively recently.  Unfortunately, the development has been a little big fragmented, so sometimes you have to wade through the forums and find some alternate build or what-not, but I’m a huge fan of any project willing to open-source their work.  And I’m sure things are even better now though I haven’t looked lately.  To be fair, I’ve been using QS since before that, but it never hurts.  Plus, the new license has likely helped Gnome-Do along which is convenient since I’m relying on it in Hardy Heron for some of the features I miss from QS.  It’s got a long way to go, but development has been pretty solid, so I have high hopes.
• Working with contacts: When I want to email someone, I just cmd-space (I swapped the default spotlight and quicksilver hotkeys on my machine), person’s name, tab, “email”, enter.  Voila.  Likewise for other contact info, except instead I use the forward-slash to drill into the contact item and see the detailed results.  Often times it’s nice to display an address or phone number using the “large type” action.
• Alerts: Speaking of “large type”, here’s a really sweet trick I used to use when I was at UF (not so much anymore since I can’t bring my laptop to work with me).  I send myself quick little reminders.  So say I want to focus on one particular task, and switch in an hour or at a particular time.  I activate QS, enter text mode (use a “.”, or you can have it default to text mode when nothing else machines), tab, select large type, then do “ctrl-enter”.  This does a modification on the action basically.  In this case, I tab to the third field and select “run at time” or “run after delay”.  You can give it natural text (like “five minutes” or a variety of formats for time) and it just works.  Might require some tweaking to get the options enabled.
• File manager: I use QS all the time both as a file manager itself (move, delete, open, find, etc), but also with other dialogs.  Say, for example, any time I’m in an open dialog box in any program and it’s in the wrong folder, I use quicksilver to locate the folder I want, then just drag the folder icon from the left pane of quicksilver straight into the open dialog box.  Poof, I’m looking at the right directory.  Same applies to working with files as well — if I need to move a file into a different directory, use QS to find the new directory, then just drag the file straight into the folder in the QS panel.  Incredibly handy once you get used to working with QS objects like that.
• Calculator:

<CMD>-A
.
40+38*33 (or other formula)
<tab>
calc
<enter>

Result! (for an added bonus: tab, copy to clipboard, or use the “paste” action which uses the paste function of whatever program you’re into dump the result).
• Email templates: I frequently need to send an email with the same body text.  Here’s looking at you, PR folks.  No offense intended, but I figure it’s fair since I know most of the emails ya’ll send me are templated anyway.  Regardless, QuickSilver has a nifty feature called the “Shelf” that you can place items in.  I put text snippets into it that I can then quickly place into an  
• Music: Rather than launch itunes to select a particular song, using QS to manage my current playlists, rank songs, display track information, etc.  I do this through some judicious triggers I’ve assigned to hotkeys, as well as the usual Quicksilver iTunes interface.

Ellen and Eric were just wed last Saturday and they went home before going down to the reception.  Their first dance was suddenly interrupted!  “Oh no,” said Ellen, “what will that astronaut do without oxygen?”  “Don’t worry”, Oprah said, “Obama rules the world,” so he called 1-800-FREE-AIR.  Republicans everywhere heard the stock exchange go boom.  London bridge wasn’t falling for her until just then a chaste kiss interrupted the peace conference.  London wondered whether France was interested in Eric’s Captain Underpants.  Worn outside on sunny Panamanian holidays.

Truer words may have never been spoken.

Incidentally, congratulations Eric and Ellen!

“Think of your favorite color, ok?”

(wait for response)

“Is it blue?”

(wait for response)

“Is it red?”

Finally, it would get stuck in a loop saying “is it purple?” over and over again.  At least, that’s how I remember it, but based on the hits I got for all the terms I could think of, I’m either remembering it wrong, or the internet has forgotten this particular meme.  I’m betting on the former.

So I’m going to talk about pens instead.

In theory, I’m going to get back on a roll and start updating the blog with all the other topics as well, but if not, this post will just be an island in the rough.

First of all, it’s tough having a japanese pen addiction (though this is not new). The few places online that carry the kind of pens I like often run out of stock and there’s pretty much no local place for me to go. If I lived in California or NY, there would be any number of locations I could go to satisfy my cravings, but Florida’s about as far way from both of those as you can be and still be continental United States.

I have, however, started to get a pretty good sense of what I do and don’t like in the pen import market. Unfortunately, this means sometimes the ones I like aren’t in stock anymore or even in production.

Take the Pilot Hi-Tec-C Slim Knock-S (fourth from the bottom), for example. It’s the perfect accessory for my passport wallet (Office Depot “Foray” in-house brand that is the perfect wallet since the passport side holds index cards for notes and todos and even has a small pen slot in the fold. Sadly, the Slim Knock-S is not currently available anywhere I can find. Fortunately, my options aren’t totally closed off. I can use the slightly more expensive Hi-Tec-C Couleur, or maybe the regular Slim Knock (though I suspect it might be too large — I’ll find out in a week or so).

Anyway, that whole build up is a pathetic attempt to justify how I spent much of my Christmas cash from various relatives. With orders from three separate locations, here’s how it breaks down.

JetPens order:

• 2 x Pilot Hi-Tec-C Cavalier Executive Pen Refill - 0.4 mm - Black (PILOT LHRF-15C4-B)
• 5 x Pilot G-2 Gel Pen Refill - 0.38 mm - Black (PILOT BLS-G2-38-B) (perfect to slip inside G2 07 bodies, or even 05 which is the smallest you can find stateside)
• 6 x Zebra Sarasa Clip Gel Pen - 0.4 mm - Black (ZEBRA JJSZ15-BK)

JStationery order:

• 1 x Hi-Tec-C Cavalier - 0.4mm Black Body (LCA-1SRC4-B)
• 4 x Hi-Tec-C Slim Knock 0.4mm - Black (LHS-20C4-B)

Phone order from Kinokuniya:

• 2x Hi-Tec-C Couleur - 0.4mm Grey Body (LCL-50C4-S)

One interesting side-note is that jstationery and jetpens are clearly using the same backend purchasing system. I copied/pastied the contents of their emails in to the bulleted list above. Look similary? Not only that, but here’s the “order status” url included in each one:

jstationery.com/account_history_info.php?order_id=####
jetpens.com/account_history_info.php/order_id/#####

That should keep me writing for another year or so before I binge again.

http://www.apple.com/search/?q=applescript 

Feel free to test manually by going to apple.com and searching for applescript.  An overzealous filter makes it impossible to accomplish a legitimate task.  Whoops.  The funny thing is that they don’t filter out “embed” or “object” as you’d usually expect to see along with “script”.  Of course, it looks like the page itself is generating most of the content via javascript.  If I were a betting man, I’d put money on a DOM based XSS showing up on sla.ckers.org before too long.  ;-) 

tar -zc iMovieProjectName.iMovieProject|split -b8000m - iMovieProjectCompressed.tar.gz.

This produces iMovieProjectCompressed.tar.gz.aa and .ab. I’m using DL DVDs that can store up to 8.5gb a piece, so this was fine for me. For a smaller project or a project being burnt to CDs or single layer DVDs, simply adjust the -b option to split to have the files created in smaller chunks.

Not as elegant as a built-in Mac solution would surely be, and it requires a lot of extra space on your hard drive to create the files to burn, but it works.

Oh yeah, to restore, you’ll have to copy all the pieces back to one place, then you can use:

cat file1.aa file1.ab file1.ac|tar -zx

to extract the original project.

•  De-Authorize your existing iTunes account.  From iTunes, Store/Deauthorize Computer.
• Create extra backups of contacts and your address book (file backup or export, not sure which on Tiger — in Leopard it’s moved to export archive)
• Copy your ~/Library/ folder to an external device, but /NOT/ a FAT32 drive if possible.  You’ll lose the file permissions and it’s a real hassle to set them back (lesson learned).
• Backup your Music, Photos folders as necessary (mine are moved around a bit)
• Can’t wait for TimeMachine so I don’t have to worry about much of this next time!

Once you’ve got your new Leopard up and going, you’ll want to restore the following key bits:

• Login keychain (I renamed my existing login.keychain file in ~/Library/Keychains/ and then just copied over the old folder contents into the Keychains directory)
• Watch out for this potential calendar gotcha.
• Also, despite Mail.app saying it was “upgrading” my database, when I first ran it, I didn’t have all my accounts still set up.  This might have been a result of the keychain not put back, or a permission error.  Whatever the cause, after restoring the ~/Library/Mail directory again, setting permissions, and making sure to copy back the mail preferences file as well, everything worked fine.