Mailmerge with Appscript in Mail

Apple’s Mail program has the most frustrating Applescript support. (Or rather lack thereof) There are just so many ridiculous limitations. For instance you can’t get the message associated with a particular window. You can’t create smart mailboxes. And trying to manipulate the content of a message is near impossible (i.e. in a manner akin to [...]

30 Lessons Learned

Interesting post: 30 Lessons Learned in Computing. (HT: OReilly) A lot I agree with. I’m not so sure about the IDE comment. I get it about complexity of code with things like C# or Java. There’s a reason why IDEs do so much with these languages because to do even simple things requires tons of [...]

Emscripten

This sounds very cool. Emscripten is a LLVM to Javascript compiler. Anything that compiles with LLVM can thus run in a browser. I guess Apple more or less bought the open source project.

Turn a Dremmel into a CNC Machine

Turn a Dremmel into a CnC machine. I love these little plans. Wish I had time to make one.

Get Menulings

Need to get the list of menulings on your menubar? Menulings are those small icons that do things like control your wireless, battery or the like. If you do need a list here’s a bit of python code to do it. (Note it assumes you have Appscript)

Annoyances About Appscript

I really love Appscript. However there really are a lot of little annoyances and things that don’t quite work. Not as bad as with Apple’s Scripting Bridge, but still enough that I get annoyed at times. Consider the following for example:

Google Apps Pro

So I’ve signed up with Google Apps. The main reason for the change was our mail server somehow getting put on a bunch of blacklists which meant not only problems sending mail but even interoffice mail getting flagged as spam and disappearing! I was so swamped that trying to fix this seemed a lost cause. [...]

iCal Share

iCal Share. If you haven’t seen this check it out. Thousands of shared calendars. Some are silly or extremely narrow. (i.e. assignments for some class) But some are very good such as sports schedules. Note that these calendars work with many programs and not just iCal.

Developer Year in Review

Developer year in review at O’Reilly.

Cydia Repositories Not Working?

I had a problem with a Cydia repository I’d added for a beta lockscreen. However Cydia wouldn’t display the repository and kept giving errors. If you have this happen there’s an easy fix. Go to /var/lib/apt/lists and remove the offending repository. Next go to /etc/apt/sources.list.d and edit Cydia.list. Remove the sources there as well. Beware: [...]

Fonts on iOS

There’s a nice chart of all the fonts in iOS that has been making the link rounds today. It made me realize that one of the more frustrating facets of iOS is font handling. Simply put you are stuck with the fonts Apple choses for you. Now honestly on the iPhone this isn’t that big [...]

Quicklook from the Command Line

Discovered a way to use QuickLook from the command line rather than just the Finder. Try qlmanage -p. I’ve already started to integrate this into some of my Python scripts.

Why Get Rid of Splashdowns

Why NASA got rid of spashdown landings. Kind of interesting.

Sub $400 CNC Machine

Sub $400 CNC Machine. Such machines have already dropped so significantly in price. I think 3D printing and the like will really take off with the masses soon… (Great for building spare parts for things like dish washers which are ridiculously overpriced – I’m surprised more repair shops don’t have these)

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