Introduction

After a month of using my Hazel-based filing system, I’ve made a minor improvement that has had a big benefit.

Whilst the automated clean-up mechanism mentioned in My Mac and Me – Filing #1 has been very useful, one problem is that it takes a day for content to be tidyied up. Sometimes, there is a file on the Desktop that you want to be tidyied up immediately.

Solution

The solution is pretty simple.

I’ve added a new rule to the Desktop folder in Hazel. This new rule is triggered when the color label for a file is set to red. When Hazel detects this, it removes the color label, and moves it immediately to my Notes folder – which then triggers the filing system described in My Mac and Me – Filing #2.

Introduction

This will be a bit of a brain dump, but I wanted to set the scene on how I’m using my Mac, so that I can follow up with some more interesting posts.

Plain Text

I’m a big plain text geek – I write pretty much everything in a plain text editor (Notes / Emails / Documents / Ideas / SourceCodeScratchPad).

Why? There a number of reasons:

• I’ve wasted far too many hours of my life trying to get bullet points (amongst other things) to line up correctly in MS Word. I’m sure it is all my fault, but it doesn’t stop it from happening. And it is always annoying!
• With switching quickly between Win, Mac, iOS and Web, there really is only one format that you know you can always rely on using: plain text.
• I’ve always liked the idea of separating the content, from the presentation. It’s is how we write well architected code, so there is no reason why it shouldn’t apply to documents / notes.
• What file format can you interact with using scripts and other tools.
• In 10 years time, what is the likelihood that all of the current complex file formats are still going to be readable? Plain text will almost certainly still be usable.

I’m currently using a few different text editors; Byword (Mac+iOS), Sublime Text 2 (Mac), Textastic (iOS), WriteUp (iOS), and iA Writer (iOS). They all work slightly differently, and I keep changing my mind on which I prefer to use, but the beauty of writing everything in plain text is that it really doesn’t matter what app I use .

Content + Markup

In theory, HTML+CSS already gives a very flexible (and plain text based) mechanism for creating content. The problem is that it is a pain to directly write HTML from scratch – especially when you are using a smartphone text editor. Added to that is the fact that it isn’t particularly readable as raw HTML, you really have to present it to be able to easily read the content.

The solution I use is Markdown [1]. It has been around for a long time, but seems (at least to me) to have really taken off in usage over the past few years. I’m sure a big part of this is related to the increase in the number of devices that people are exposed to, and the lack of support on them all for the complex file formats.

File Organization

I recently took the plunge and bought Hazel for Mac. Before I bought it, I’d been thinking that because it seemed such a simple app, I could do everything it did myself. After buying it, I’ve realized that the previous sentence is still true, but the difference is that I can forget about all the plumbing bits, and focus on creating some interesting mashups. It is a cool app, and I’ve only really scratched the surface.

Tasks Management

I’ve been using OmniFocus for my task management for quite a while now. I’m still not as efficient as I should be, but it has definitely improved since I started using it.

End

So, that is a bit of a background, my next post will describe how I’ve been using some of these tools to improve productivity.

If, like me, you accidentally use NSURLCredentialPersistencePermanent, like below, and run it on the iOS Simulator the credentials will be stored permantly – as you might imagine. The problem is that there is no (as far as I could find) obvious way to get rid of those permantly stored credentials.

    -(void)connection:(NSURLConnection *)connection 
      didReceiveAuthenticationChallenge:(NSURLAuthenticationChallenge*)challenge {

        if([challenge previousFailureCount] == 0) {

            NSURLCredential *newCredential = [NSURLCredential 
                credentialWithUser:self.username 
                          password:self.password
                       persistence:NSURLCredentialPersistencePermanent];
            [[challenge sender] useCredential:newCredential 
                   forAuthenticationChallenge:challenge];
        } else {
            [[challenge sender] cancelAuthenticationChallenge:challenge];
        }
    }

Solution

The simple solution to removing those store credentials is to manually delete the KeyChain DB file from your machine. As of 28th August 2012, the KeyChain file is stored in: ~/Library/Application Support/iPhone Simulator/5.1/Library/Keychains

I deleted the file: keychain–2-debug.db, but yours may be called something different.

Problem

My youngest son (12 months) decided our TV remote would be good to chew on – he is really rather like a dog at the moment!

He didn’t have it for too long, but managed to do enough damage that the remote was repeatedly sending button presses to the TV.

I tried the usual tricks: taking the batteries out and putting them back, using a hairdryer to try and get rid of moisture, and mashing the buttons. Nothing worked.

Next, a quick check on eBay suggested I could get a replacement for £15, so not too bad, but worth me having a go at fixing it.

A search on Google didn’t turn up anything useful to help fix it, so after a few experiments, I managed to take it to pieces, and thought I should post here in case anyone else has the same problem and wanted some help.

How To

First, you need to get the back cover off. It slides up, so you can replace the batteries, but at this point it isn’t obvious how to remove it. There are two ways; you can either use a flat metal blade (I used a table knife, but you may wish to use something safer!) and insert into the seam between the back cover and the main body and then slide it up and down until you pop open the catches, or, the better way, is to half slide up the back cover and you’ll notice little grooves that it slots into to help you get it off.

Next, remove the six little screws. Even with these removed, it is still locked together because of internal catches. I couldn’t find a simple way to get this off, so had to use the same flat blade trick as before.

After you’ve got this apart, you can clean the rubber keys and the contact board, and hopefully this will fix it for you. Then, just put it back together and you are done.

Hope this helps.

Jeez, it gets worse.

I finally managed to get things moving my installing RVM and Homebrew. From this I installed Ruby 1.9.2, Rails 3.0.7, and MySQL 0.3.2. Unfortunately, if you use MySQL 0.3.2, you need to use Rails >=3.1. So, I downgraded to MySQL 0.2.7.

Then, I got some annoying MySQL connection error.

Finally, after three evenings of trying to resolve the error, I’ve have removed RVM, installed the MySQL2 gem into my system and configured the link to the MySQL lib, and finally, after a reboot, I’ve got it working.

Phew. I’ve not had this much hassle since I tried to install OpenNAS on my Linux box.