I had a realization the other day. I’ve always thought of myself as a mapgeek and/or roadgeek. However, there’s another aspect of it – location geek. I like knowing where I am and where I was. I take my GPS everytime I’m going someplace new so I can add it to my map (and maybe someday I’ll share that map here). I count counties I’ve visited. I’m playing a game (ownthisworld.com) where you gain territory by going to places. I check in on Gowalla. I once went out to the CT-MA-RI tripoint just because it was there.
Yes, I like knowing “where” of things, especially me. I find it fascinating to know what other strangers have been to the place I’ve been – the way our paths cross without really realizing it (or being able to without them participating in the same way).
One of the things that drew me to the Mac was Applescript – the idea of a scripting language that would work with most of the programs in the OS was… well, pretty freaking cool.
However, “most of the programs” eventually means “not the program I was using.” Then I came across this article – by using the Automator “Watch Me Do” recording function and a little bit of trickery, you can get the Applescript code to do whatever you need.
Random Useful Mac OS X User Tips: “I lamented this in one of my posts about Leopard, but I noted that there didn’t seem to be a way to directly access the AppleScript code from the Watch Me Do feature — Automator only creates run-only plugins or scripts. This is annoying if you want to modify the UI script later to do something slightly different. In this situation, you’d have to redo the whole set of actions all over again.”
Way cool.
Another one for the “Things I Want” category:
Alexander Kjerulf posted pictures of the Best Business Card. Ever.
(Via Geekdad.)
Introducing The Dread Pirate Roberts Action Figure
I so totally want the “Hello My Name Is Inigo Montoya” shirt.
I just was cleaning up my Applications folder and opened up Yojimbo, which I had stopped using once I realized I had DEVONthink Personal. It alerted me to the fact that my trial time had expired and had the usual options – buy a license, enter license information or quit.
What caught my eye, though, is that it also offered the option to export the data it had – so that if I needed to, I could quit and still have access to the data through another software package… rather than holding my data hostage.
So, while I don’t need Yojimbo, I’ll certainly keep Bare Bones Software towards the top of the list for other packages I might want.
