Keyboard Maestro and MultiMarkdown

An easier way to compose markdown emails.

I just started my 30 day trial of Keyboard Maestro. I am 3 days into it and am ready to buy it. It is a remarkable tool for anyone who wants to tinker with that kind of thing.

I often find myself making quick little MultiMarkdown texts for use as emails or quick Evernote documentation. Until now I was just grinding out the text the hard way – create a temporary file, edit it in TextEdit, save it, drag it to Marked (another excellent tool by Brett Terpstra), and then type my usually short message.

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RSI – CTS – My experiences and a solution that worked for me.

Intro

I have been typing since 1976. My mother was trained to be a secretary and learned to type on a keyboard without letters drawn on the keycaps. “Old school” trainers knew if you learned to type by looking at the keys you would never become as good as you could be. She made me learn on an old Royal manual typewriter without looking and with proper typing technique as well.

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Photographic tip – glare

wpid-wpid-DSC_0379.jpg@66.7RGB_8-2011-02-23-20-41-2011-02-23-20-41.jpgI love photography even though I’m a rank amateur at it. I enjoy everything about it… composing the shot, learning the equipment, seeing how different things affect the shot, and post production.

It’s easy to get in a hurry and take a photo that’s somewhat less than great but guess what? Sometimes you don’t need an expensive polarizing filter to save an otherwise awful picture. Take this one for example:

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Thanks a lot.

I didn’t write this. It was an email a friend sent me that sends me these kinds of emails… kinda ironic.

Subject: Cheer
As we end the year 2010, I want to thank all of you for your educational e-mails over the past year. I am totally screwed up now and have little chance of recovery.

I no longer open a bathroom door without using a paper towel, or have the waitress put lemon slices in my ice water without worrying about the bacteria on the lemon peel.
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Review: LastPass – The Last Password You’ll Have To Remember

*Originally posted Oct 17, 2010*
Ok, so last time I talked about security and how tough it is to pull off that level of safety. Well one tool that has done more than all the rest of them together for me is LastPass. I could write an entire book on LastPass but I’ll spare you all from that. 🙂

###What Is It?
LastPass, oversimplified, is a multi-faceted program that lets you keep all of your passwords in an extremely safe manner. In the simplest terms it is a password vault type utility but it is much more than that! To use LastPass you install it (more later) and then any time you need a password you just log into LastPass with one password and it either provides the password to you or it securely inserts it into the website you are accessing.

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Review: MacJournal

*Originally posted July 24, 2010*
You can hear the audio file of this review at this link.
This is a review I did of MacJournal for the Nosillacast Podcast hosted over at Podfeet.com – A Technology Geek Podcast with an EVER so slight Macintosh Bias! I am posting here because it is a new way of thinking for me… I am an old-school computer geek but the people in the Mac community are changing my perspectives. I’ve done magazine reviews in the 80’s but this will be recorded as an audio review for a podcast show. How far have we come since I first laid hands on a computer in ’78!

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Security? I Give Up!

*Originally posted Oct 16,2010*
We all know about the people who have energy, creativity, talent, and a spark of brilliance but yet they use all that to try to grab our passwords and get into our bank accounts or sell our information for cash. When I was growing up the term “Hacker” meant:

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Markdown in TextWrangler on the Mac for free!

*Originally written Nov 29, 2010*

Did you know you can do Markdown in the excellent and free TextWrangler?

For anyone interested in the Markdown text markup language and doesn’t own Scrivener or doesn’t want to get into the Terminal to convert your text to HTML then here’s a pretty nice thing I found.

  1. Install Markdown per the instructions at Daring Fireball.
  2. Install the free TextWrangler from Bare Bones Software.
  3. Open TextWrangler and select the menu item #! which they call shebang.
  4. Go down to Unix Filters and click Open Filters Folder.
  5. Open a new finder window and find the Markdown.pl file you installed in step 1.
  6. Drag a copy (Option key while dragging) into the Filters Folder.

Now any time you have markdown text inside TextWrangler you can go to the #! menu -> Unix Filters -> Markdown.pl and it will convert your buffer into the appropriate HTML! Just copy and paste it into your blog or web page and you’re ready to go.

As an added bonus you can download SmartyPants, also from Daring Fireball and turn those typewriter quote marks into proper marks.

New Perspectives Versus Computing Notes

I have a blog called [New Perspectives][np] which is a collection of thoughts, insights, questions for myself and others and various other writings in the attempt to get a new perspective on our lives.

I tell you this because lately I have been letting computing articles slip into that blog and they don’t quite belong. My solution to this is to start moving those articles to this blog and eventually deleting them from that site.

So, prepare for some fun computing things to start showing up here as I write them!

[np]: http://jimscomputing.com/np

Church on Vacation?

Church on Vacation?

If you are vacationing or if you are on a business trip to Key West and the Lower Florida Keys then I’d like to invite you to the church I attend.  At Covenant Word Church we have a contemporary worship service and Children’s Church and Pastor Kevin Kerr always seems to have the right word at the right time from God for us.  Stop by and feel like family at home in what I consider to be the best of the Key West churches.