I've been trying out some cheap video podcast lights and I'd thought you might want to take a look.
So I had this crazy idea of building a slot machine game in Numbers. Yep. And it works. What good is this? Well, not much. You can certainly learn some Numbers skills from it. And maybe it can be used in a class on probability too.
Been thinking about doing some videos on Bookmarklets in Safari. Here's a practical example of one that smoothly scrolls a web page. I could use this while making some of my videos. Maybe you have a use for it too.
We all get a lot of spam email. But did you know that websites also get spam? Comment spam is when bots and people post unwanted comments to posts trying to push their products, links and other nonsense. MacMost gets a tons of this. But not as much as just a few years ago. Check out some of the stats and learn a bit about what I do to combat comment spam at MacMost.
I've read in a few places that you can use .nosync in a filename to mark a file or a whole folder as something that iCloud Drive should not sync. This could be handy as it means you can keep folders full of unimportant temporary files together with your regular files in your Documents folder, and not worry about them taking up space or bandwidth.
It is interesting to see the locations that your iPhone has recorded. A seemingly random list of locations is stored on your iPhone. Since this list in encrypted and shared with no one, there's really no privacy issue. It doesn't even leave your iPhone. But still, some people may not care for it.
You can export a web page as a PDF, but sometimes that gives you a print-styled version of the page. Here is a way to get an image capture of a long web page, without any third-party extensions.
Did you know there is a simple shutdown command you can use in the Terminal to put your Mac to sleep, restart it, or shut it down. Better yet, you can set this to happen at a specific time or at a certain number of minutes in the future. That could be very useful in some situations.
There are tons of special symbols and characters, and plenty of good ways to type them on your Mac. But as a coder, I couldn't help but wonder if there was a way to type a character by its unique number, rather than search for it in the special characters list. Turns out you can add a special Unicode input option on your Mac. Then you can hold the Option key and type the 4-character code for anything to produce that character. Geeky, I know, but I kinda like it.
This is something I actually did for a So you can send a message through the Terminal using a single-line AppleScript command. If you put that into a shell script file, you can then schedule it using the <strong>crontab</strong>. Unfortunately, you have to edit the crontab using the old <strong>vi</strong> editor, though I seem to remember there may be an easier way. Anyway, I used this to send a message at a schedule time recently. I don't think it is very reliable for important things. I'll bet your Mac has to be awake and it probably pays to test it a few times before using it for real as your permissions may be set differently than mine.
You know how you can't spell out out a word using Mac dictation? Well, you can create your own dictation commands. And you can simply assign a command to just paste in a letter. So if you create 26 of those, now you have an alphabet you can use in dictation. It doesn't work as well as it might, but it does give you something you can use.
Saw a post about someone who was trying to figure out how to do a "complex" file rename. But it turns out it was simple, just using the Finder.
Here's an improvement to a one-line script I talked about a while back. This new script will prompt you to choose one of the running apps, and then one of the windows of that app. Then it will resize and position that window. I use this to resize windows perfectly before doing tutorials. You could do the same, or maybe you have another reason to want to tame your windows. I suppose you could expand the script more with variations on the position and size that you could choose from a list. Here is the code: var app = Application.currentApplication(); app.includeStandardAdditions = true; var system = Application("System Events"); var appList = Application("System Events").applicationProcesses.whose({ visible: true}).name(); var whichAppName = app.chooseFromList(appList, {withPrompt: "Select App:", defaultItems: ["Safari"]}); var whichApp = Application(whichAppName[0]); var windowList = whichApp.windows.name(); var whichWindowName = app.chooseFromList(windowList, {withPrompt: "Select Window:", defaultItems: windowList[0]}); if (whichWindowName != false) { whichApp.windows[whichWindowName[0]].bounds = {"x":0, "y":0, "width":1280, "height":697}; }
I was looking for a new text editor to use to write code. I found the CodeRunner app, which not only lets you write code, but you can also run code. I feel like I'm on an Apple II again, where you could just write BASIC code and run it without compiling or uploading to a server. This is a great way to learn a programming language, test code, or get some work done with coding.
I tried one of the third-party printing services to get my 2019 calendar printed. Mimeo was the only one that seemed to work well, after a few false starts with other extensions. It looks like they have a ton of options and you can get very detailed by customizing each page. I'm pleased with the final product. Take a look.
I'm been playing around with JavaScript bookmarks, thinking there is a MacMost video in there somewhere. I need to come up with a better example, though. And I'm not sure it works smoothly enough.Oh, and as a bonus, you get to see what happens when I wear black and try to film a tutorial. Floating head! And here's the code I use in the example: topic=prompt("Enter a Topic");window.location="<a href="https://www.imdb.com/find?ref_=nv_sr_fn&s=all&q=" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.imdb.com/find?ref_=nv_sr_fn&s=all&q=</a>"+topic
Did you know about the Grapher app that comes with your Mac? Well, even if you did, did you know it can animate graphs? And you can export them as videos?
Here's a handy little app that adds a quick way to switch between light and dark mode in Mojave. And you can schedule it too. Link: <a href="https://nightowl.kramser.xyz" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://nightowl.kramser.xyz</a>
What do you think of the idea of me occasionally posting MacMost videos early here at Club MacMost? I wouldn't do it all the time. But for instance I just posted a Facebook 3D photo to the MacMost Facebook page as part of building a video on how to do that. I tease in the post that the video is coming soon. It should be posted Tuesday to the site/feed/podcast. But I will post it here so you guys can see it right now. Maybe I'll do this for videos I'm particularly excited about, or have some sort of timeliness aspect.I'm not sure that Patreon liked my video link for this post, so just in case it doesn't work, you can access it here: <a href="https://archive.org/download/1776FaceBook3DPhotos/1776FaceBook3DPhotos.mp4" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://archive.org/download/1776FaceBook3DPhotos/1776FaceBook3DPhotos.mp4</a>
I'm working on a demonstration of creating your own Finder Quick Action. As an example, I want to be able to select a photo file, and then have its location show up on Apple Maps.This is harder than it sounds. But using AppleScript I could get the latitude and longitude, and then using JXA I could manipulate the text a bit to make a URL. Then I could use that URL to open Apple Maps and pinpoint that location. Here are the two scripts in a text file in case you want to play with them.
