Miscallaneous

How to Display Events or Tasks on Your Desktop With icalBuddy

I don't really have any statistics about this but I'm quite sure that an overwhelming majority of the users of my icalBuddy program are using it to display calendar data on their desktop via GeekTool. Several tutorials on how to get this done have been written by different people, mainly for relatively non-technical users, which I think is great. The problem seems to be that many people don't know how to configure icalBuddy to give them the kind of output they'd like and end up copy-pasting the commands from these blogs (some of these blog posts also contain outdated information about a bunch of things). Hopefully this short tutorial (and the usage examples page) will offer an easy way to make a more informed decision about how to get this done.

Getting a List of Installed Fonts with Flash and Javascript

When implementing the feature in the icalBuddy examples page where the font used for the output examples could be changed interactively I needed to get a list of all the fonts installed on the current user's computer. This blog post from 2006 explains how to do it, but it refers to the deprecated ActionScript 2 API so I had to figure out how to do it with AS3.

Prevent iTunes websites from opening the iTunes app using GlimmerBlocker

A few minutes ago I clicked on an iTunes store link on a website and had to again completely lose it because of the iTunes app popping up without me asking it to. This is a common annoyance that people have found a bunch of different ways to combat, ranging from messing with the system's (or the browser's) mapping of URL protocol handlers to rewriting parts of web pages via a browser plugin (e.g. GreaseMonkey) or a localhost web proxy (e.g. GlimmerBlocker).

Quick File Tagging in OS X with Punakea (& Tagger)

Even though I am a little pedantic in some ways (like most engineers are, I suppose,) I always seem to have trouble organizing the files on my computer(s) with any kind of reasonable folder structure or naming convention. I often find myself desperately trying to find a specific file that I know I have somewhere but I'm not sure where, and sometimes I just want to find a bunch of files that are somehow related but not actually saved into the same folder. These are problems that tagging is trying to solve (and doing a reasonably good job at it, I might add.)

Fixing the Nokia N82 iSync Plug-In

I Recently updated my cell phone to a Nokia N82. The most positive points about it are the relative snappiness of the user interface (most Symbian S60 devices are dog slow in that department) and the quite exhaustive feature list. The build quality feels alright and the camera takes excellent pictures for a phone. One of the biggest things that I enjoyed with my previous phone (a Nokia 3230) was the nicely working synchronization with Apple's iSync, so naturally I made sure that this would also work with the N82. Apple has included built-in support for syncing the 3230 in the iSync that ships with Leopard (it was in the Tiger version as well,) so I didn't need to install anything extra to get it to work. The N82, on the other hand, is not supported out of the box, so I needed to get an iSync plug-in for it from Nokia.