Noticed anything different lately? I’ve been remodeling things around here. The site has a new layout, and a new back-end. I’ve abandoned Textpattern in favor of Wordpress, which has really improved a lot since I last used it some years ago.
If you saw any weird burps in the RSS feed, sorry for the inconvenience.
I intend to start posting again, as time permits. Stay tuned.
Logger town, Ketchikan, Alaska. Colored pencil on Bristol vellum.
Completed 6/3/2007. I didn’t think to do scans for a progression.
I believe the photo was taken here.
Source image
I have been working from home full-time for nine years, and I’ve been very happy with the arrangement. But when I became a father almost two years ago, I found that working at home with a baby around brings some new challenges.
Sure, I can step away from my desk almost whenever I want and hang out with my son for a while. I can relieve my wife if she’s having a rough day or has errands to run. We can go to the park, or just play in the yard. I don’t have complete freedom from my desk, but I have a very flexible schedule.
On the other hand, some days it’s hard to get anything done. Going downstairs to play is easy and fun. Before you know it, two hours have gone by. Sometimes after a baby-induced bad night I’m too tired to think, and find myself staring blankly at my monitor.
1:02 long, 832×512 (opens in new window)
Demonstrates some iTunes and iPhoto control techniques in Quicksilver. Note that there is no audio.
0:55 long, 640×480 (opens in new window)
Demonstrates appending to a text file using Quicksilver. This is very handy to quickly add something to the end of a list or a set of notes.
Before I switched to Mac OS X, I was using a Sun Solaris machine as a desktop, and fvwm2 as my window manager. Fvwm has a nice feature called “grow window” which lets you grow a window to the full height of the display. This was occasionally useful for other programs, but I used this feature constantly for terminal windows, particularly when writing code. The extra vertical space really makes it easier to maneuver around a file. So when I came to OS X, naturally my first foray into Applescript was to port this feature so I could keep my lovely “tall” terminal windows.
This script will cycle through three sizes:
If the window isn’t in any of those states, it is set to normal size. The sizes are all customizable by setting property values at the top of the script.
Download resize_terminal.zip
I wanted to use a random, rotating image as my site’s masthead and there was no simple way to do this in Textpattern. Initially I wrote a form with custom PHP code, including the Textpattern config, connecting to the database, doing a query… it seemed messy. So I started over and decided to do it as a plugin.
To install:
To use:
<txp:dml_rand_masthead category="site-masthead" />By default, the link will be built so that the tool tip is “Go to main page”. You can change this to any value you want by adding the linktext attribute, e.g.: <txp:dml_rand_masthead category="site-masthead" linktext="Return to home page"/>
You can also give the class="classname" attribute to attach a CSS class to the masthead.
Download dml_rand_masthead-0.5.txt