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.
Since I have Keyboard Maestro I decided to make a recipe for doing this much easier. Now I click the KM icon in my menubar, select Compose MMD and KM will create a new blank file for me to use, open it in TextEdit and open it in Marked. All I have to do is start typing! When I am finished I can just copy and paste my ready-to-go finished product, or the raw HTML, from Marked and paste it where I like. Now maybe I can remember what it was I was going to say since I won’t forget it doing all that clicking and opening now!
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Less than a week after writing my article, Dennis M. Ritchie – a tribute I find myself writing another. This time it is much “closer to home” as it is a man I call my friend. Herschel Hayo was my boss’s boss so our friendship was not best buddies or anything. I’ve never been to his house nor he to mine and yet I think a great number of people in my position still think
of Herschel as their friend. He was that kind of person – no one was beneath him or unworthy of a smile and a chuckle.
Herschel was a good man and there are too few of them around. Even in casual conversation it was clear how much he thought of his family, and they of him. His wife, Barbara, would light up when she was with him after many years of marriage. That says a lot about a man.
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In about 1985 I had the opportunity to learn the C programming language. This was a wholly remarkable language that let you get down with the computer at its own level without talking machine code. It was an exciting and different challenge for me from the standard “TRS-80 Basic” I had been used to. I was a Sophomore in college and this was a perfect diversion for a computer geek like me.
Everyone who has ever more than heard about C knows the only go-to source of all knowledge for it is the book “The C Programming Language”, known to C programmers as “K&R”. The R of K&R is Dennis M. Ritchie often known by his username dmr. Dennis Ritchie is also the creator of the C language.
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I have been fascinated with Markdown(MD) and MultiMarkdown(MMD) for months and yet have had little opportunity to use them. Sure I have created the occasional document with my favorite of the two, MultiMarkdown, and yet it is not enough to learn all the proper syntax. I most often want to use MMD with Email as that is the most common vehicle I have for quick and easy text that is not of epic length.
Until recently I had no decent solution for this. I would end up editing in TextMate and using the MMD bundle to Generate Output and Open in Browser menu option and then I could cut and paste from the browser into my email client. What a hassle!
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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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