Mac and related fun stuff

Import URLs into Evernote with Python and Applescript

Pinboard is a nice way to store your bookmarks. Recently I wondered whether I could import these urls into evernote. There was no standard option available in Evernote to do this. Ater a some tinkering with Python and Applescript a program was created that had to be up to the task. 

After some testing and trying it worked. All 1096 of 1100 bookmarks were imported into Evernote. The four url that weren’t imported had javascript in the link. Evernote can now be used as an offline resource of interesting pages. To me this a valuable addition to my workflow. The link to code is given below. 

link to gist repository

Have fun

Import URLs into Evernote with Python and Applescript

Pinboard is a nice way to store your bookmarks. Recently I wondered whether I could import these urls into evernote. There was no standard option available in Evernote to do this. Ater a some tinkering with Python and Applescript a program was created that had to be up to the task. 

After some testing and trying it worked. All 1096 of 1100 bookmarks were imported into Evernote. The four url that weren’t imported had javascript in the link. Evernote can now be used as an offline resource of interesting pages. To me this a valuable addition to my workflow. The link to code is given below. 

link to gist repository

Have fun

Spotlight comes in handy for quickly finding files on your computer. Using keywords makes the process more powerful. Fist type kind then : then your keyword. 

Example

Kind:contacts +49

Will Yield your contacts with a german country code in their phone number. 

Example

Kind:pdf name:python

Will Yield your pdf files with python in the filename.

 Spotlight “kind” Keyword list.

    Stuff you look for  Keyword to use     Applications application, applications, app     Contacts contact, contacts     Folders folder, folders     Email email, emails, mail message, mail messages     iCal Events event, events     iCal To Dos todo, todos, to do, to dos     Images image, images     Movies movie, movies     Music music     Audio audio     PDF pdf, pdfs     Preferences system preferences, preferences     Bookmarks bookmark, bookmarks     Fonts font, fonts     Presentations presentations, presentation

  Some useful links:

http://blog.superuser.com/2011/06/03/digging-deeper-mastering-spotlight-in-os-x/

http://lifehacker.com/5900893/all-the-awesome-spotlight-shortcuts-you-didnt-know-existed

http://www.hackmac.org/tutorials/spotlight-tips-and-tricks/

Have fun,

sometimes I just want to have quick look of directory and sort  it by size. After a little tinkering and googling I came with this one. 

 du * | sort -nr | awk ‘{printf “%10.2f MB “,$1/2048};{for(i=2;i<=NF;++i)  printf “%s ”  ,$i};{printf “ ”}’

The command works in four  steps

the du command get the sizes

the output is sorted on the size of the first collumn

the first part of the awk command convert the size ot MB

The second part of the awk command prints and adapts the rest of the line

The command was tested in terminal on a Mac using Mavericks. Feel free to try and improve it.  Comments will be greatly appreciated.

  Special German characters

The German alphabet has a number of special characters like ä,ü,ö and ß. The US-keyboard layout doesn’t provide them straight away. If you produce german text on regular basis this can be real hindrance. Luckily there are several ways of getting these characters on your Mac.

Simple way

The simplest way is a longer key press. You can for example just press an the a-key a little longer and a popup menu appears with which you can choose the character you need. For the ß, call to mind it is the Sharp-S. So be smarter as I was and don’t press the b-key, but try the s-key instead. This method works fine if the text contains some words with special characters. For longer texts I find it cumbersome and annoying. However there are more ways of getting the job done.

Using the option key

Option u for example returns ü. So you can get the umlaut if you the press a-o-u an and option key you get the corresponding letters with umlaut. For ß just press option-s. It is fast but I found it hard to remember the combinations and ended with a lot of typos. You could of course use the keyboard viewer as quick help.

Windows keyboard layout

If you used to working with a windows keyboard in the past, you could change your input source to US international PC. Then you just type u; which yields ü. This provides an easy to nail down key combination.

Text-expander

As I am already using Text-Expander. I created a few snippets that mimic the above mentioned US-International keyboard layout. this one worked very well for me and I use it on a daily basis. This examples used Text-Expander, but it will work with other programs like keyboard maestro as week.

Use the keyboard viewer

What I found out making this post, is that the keyboard viewer actually shows you what you can expect if press a control key like command, shift, control and option. It facilitates learning the shortcuts. 

Another keyboard

For the occasional long text, I think it easier to just plug in a german-keyboard into an USB-port of my Mac and get one with it. The people that produce a lot of german text are bound to go to Germany once in a while. These Keyboards are not that expensive. You can purchase cheap one for About 15 euros in a supermarket. I suppose if you have a spare Keyboard you could paint or sticker your keys and make another keyboard layout. Just use the keyboard viewer to correctly map your keys.

  Links for further reading

Wikipediaß

MacMost Now 513: Typing Accent Marks On Your Mac

Casa de Joanna: Accent Strategies

Seth C. Burgess: How to Create Umlauts on a Mac

Typing Umlauts on a PC and Mac

After installing Mavericks I tried te reactivate popclip. It turned out, that the accessibility option in Mavericks has been moved to the security and privacy settings in system preferences. The first attempt failed, because popclip did not show. A reinstall was necessary to get it working.

Today I found a nice hint on lifehacker.com the site pointed to a list of Alfred workflows made and collected by Zeno Rocha. Alfred is probably the most used programm on my Mac, so I took a look and grabbed some workflows in the progress.

I very much like the Stackoverflow work flow. Lifehacker also gave a reference to this list. The youtube search workflow by Simon Støvringwas an instant hit with my kids.