Tricks

Tip of the Tongue Strategies

wood.tang — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 10:14:06 -0400

Even the most diligent among us can't always remember to pocket a pen and paper everywhere we go (or, shhh!, won't admit that sometimes we just don't want to), but of course that's always when our best ideas hit us. Last night when I was walking my dog, I'm convinced I came up with the answer to global warming, but before I got home to write it down, I had a conversation with a neighbor, checked my mail, and watered the plants, so I might as well have been thinking about the lyrics to "Sussudio" for all I could remember. And try as I might, I couldn't bring it back.

We've all had that tip-of-the-tongue experience where we can't quite recall a word or a name. Usually, we can yank those back with brute force, just by repeating a letter or phrase until is falls out. But what about a more complete thought that slips your mind? Last night I kept trying to revive my flatulent brain by picturing where I was on the street and recreating the moment, which obviously didn't work, and my dog was just no help at all. What else could I have done?

What are some of your best tip-of-the-tongue strategies? What tricks do you use to recover those auto-saved documents from your mind? Or better yet, how do I get my dog to take dictation?

”Tip of the Tongue Strategies” was written by Matt Wood for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 11, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Some handy Mail.app Smart Mailboxes

Merlin — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 10:42:47 -0400

It took me a while, but ever since I've gotten my head around Smart Folders (and Smart Playlists and Smart Groups, etc.), I've started to think about the way I use my Mac a bit differently.

Clearly iTunes is the winner in this regard (watch for an upcoming multi-part series about Smart Playlists on The Merlin Show), but the Finder, and Address Book, and Mail.app also have an amazing amount of power rumbling under the hood. So, in the interest of spreading the love, here's four Mail.app Smart Mailboxes that have been rocking my world over the last months.

Inbox, Flagged

This super-basic mailbox is great for whenever you're processing your Inbox(es). You can blow through all the incoming messages, quickly flag anything that needs a response (CMD-SHIFT-L), then view this Smart Mailbox to visually separate the wheat from the chaff. Select all, move them to your "To Respond" folder, and off you go.

Recently Sent

Like the previous Smart Mailbox, this simpleton makes it easy to bubble-up messages that you often need to refer to, but that can be a pain to locate the old-fashioned way. Just shows you any messages you've sent to other people in the last couple days. Yeah, it's obvious, but, man, will you ever love this once you remember it's there.

[ also via Red Sweater Blog - Mail Smart Folders ]

From a given Address Book group

In Address Book:

In Mail.app:

A lot of folks don't realize that Smart Groups even exist in Address Book. Consequently, even fewer know that the contents of both ad hoc and Smart Groups can be searched on from inside Mail.app.

So in this example, I've created a Smart Group with everyone in my Address Book who lives in San Francisco, then I tell Mail.app to group all those peoples' emails in one place.

This is also swell for seeing messages from a company you work with a lot, and it's fantastic for grouping all the email from people in your family.

These particular kind of mailboxes can often be enhanced by ticking off the "Include messages from Sent" box -- that way you also see your own emails to people in this group, allowing you to view your conversations in threads. (Note that this is a lot less useful if your own Address Book entry matches the saved criteria :-) )

If you find yourself searching or -- God forbid -- manually hunting for certain kinds of messages again and again, try to think of a way that Mail.app Smart Mailboxes can do the heavy lifting for you. And, if you add to the mix something like Mail Tags (which adds several very useful search abilities), you can have a lot of automated sexy happening in your email.

Edit: 2007-04-23 11:56:23: Nomenclature corrected -- As Jean points out in comments, these are properly called "Smart Mailboxes" not "Smart Folders." Thanks, Jean!

”Some handy Mail.app Smart Mailboxes” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on April 23, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

The Merlin Show: Quicksilver proxies for application menus

Merlin — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 05:54:46 -0400

008: HOWTO: Quicksilver: Application Menus | The Merlin Show

Click To Play

Many of the most diehard Quicksilver fans don't know "proxy objects" even exist. Proxies are a sexy way to build actions and triggers around abstract QS items such as "Current Application," "Finder Selection," "Album Now Playing," and even meta-stuff like "Last Command" and "Quicksilver Selection."

By making a trigger to "Show Menu Items" in the "Current Application," you can get Quicksilver-based access to almost any pull-down menu in a given OS X app. In today's demo, I show you how to bring this fast access to any of the bajillion drop-down menu items in Macromates' Textmate.

If you enjoy The Merlin Show, please consider subscribing for free via iTunes or Democracy, or just point the "podcatacher" of your choice at http://feeds.themerlinshow.com/TheMerlinShow.

”The Merlin Show: Quicksilver proxies for application menus” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on March 12, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Fix for securityd hogging RAM when reauthorizing apps' Keychain access

Merlin — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 11:50:54 -0500

Unsanity.org: Love Tropicana: The Fix for securityd Eatings Gobs of Ram When Updating Keychain Entries

For the past few months, I've suffered the most vexing and stubborn OS X problem I've ever had to confront. Detailed in this Apple.com forum thread, the short version is that something with my Keychain went haywire somewhere, and any time I had to reauthorize an application's access to the Keychain, the securityd process would spin off into the stratosphere, grabbing an enormous amount of RAM, virtually freezing my Mac, and never letting go until I did a full-on, old-school restart (CONTROL-COMMAND-POWER). This was frustrating.

In addition to leaving me without NetNewsWire, OmniWeb, and several other of my Top 20 apps, I lost reliable access to Transmit, which for me is like losing a fingertip or something.

I'll save you the ridiculous amount of rubber chicken waving (and Keychain item decimation) that ensued, and will just cut to the solution, which was provided by Unsanity's Rosyna.

In order to fix this problem if you are having it, just open the Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal) and type:

sudo mv /var/db/CodeEquivalenceDatabase /var/db/CodeEquivalenceDatabase.old

or

open /var/db (and then manually move CodeEquivalenceDatabase to the trash, if you can).

I don't know precisely how or why this works (short answer: "file corruption bad"), and I cannot assure you that it will not, in your own usage, cause Big Problems™. But it worked for me, I have my apps back, and now I'm the happiest boy in the world. May Google bring others to the solution as well.

Many thanks to Rosyna, who is so going to get a present for this.

”Fix for securityd hogging RAM when reauthorizing apps' Keychain access” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on January 22, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

MacBreak: Minimize distractions on your Mac

Merlin — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 10:58:59 -0500

MacBreak 33: The Distracted Mac (Direct MOV Download)

Although it covers a lot of the same ground as a previous MacBreak we did on the subject, I think Leo and my segment on un-distract-ifying your Mac turned out pretty good (my atrocious hairstyle at shoot time notwithstanding). Download 10:28 MOV file now...

Here's the apps and tricks that we covered, with links:

Hide Others - In the front app, select "[Application name menu] > Hide Others"
Turn [Dock] Hiding On - In the Dock, CTRL-Click the Dock's vertical separator bar, and select "Turn Hiding On"
Backdrop - Create a black background that still lets you easily interact with Desktop contents
MenuShade - Alter the brightness of your Menu -- or totally black it out, like I do
Spirited Away -- Hides non-active applications after the interval of your choice (thanks for the legacy download link, Don)
Path Finder - Totally tricked out Finder on steroids that I love love love; where I made the Desktop black and hid all mounted drives, folders, etc. (doable in the regular Finder, too)
Hazel - Automagically clean up the contents of folders and the Desktop (e.g., "move old MP3s here" or "archive files older than a week" etc.)
Textmate - My favorite text editor. Which I apparently love to plug for no particular reason.

Edit 2006-12-21 16:51:22: Check after the cut for reader suggestions from comments for this post...

"Make iCal": Granular event creation via Quicksilver

Merlin — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 09:46:59 -0500

Hawk Wings » Blog Archive » A powerful new iCal action for Quicksilver

Hawk Wings has a great feature on a new Quicksilver plugin for detailed task and event creation. The already-swell stock iCal plugin lets you select a new event's date and calendar, but this tricked-out new edition by Benjamin Harley lets you add more granular details on length of event, location, notes, alarm, and more.

It’s complicated (power comes at a cost) but offers a speedy way to quickly enter a complete iCal item on the fly whichever app you are in. I use the current public beta of MailTags to do this when I am in Mail.app, which has the added bonus of automatically creating a URL link back to the email in question. But I’m not always in Mail (sadly).

Tim is hosting this file himself, as well as providing a very useful key to the syntax that you can print out while you're learning the ropes.

If you're not already a big Quicksilver fan, this probably won't mint you as a new one, but if you're a text-y geek who's more comfortable with fast typing than changing modes, this is quite a gem.

”"Make iCal": Granular event creation via Quicksilver” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on December 21, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

HOWTO generate a kGTD Project list for your weekly review

Merlin — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 09:01:22 -0500

While OmniFocus is under development (and yes, friends, I have seen it: it is actual software that does things), we Kinkless users will have to make do as we can for now. And while I still find my own kGTD setup oddly stable given its byzantine under-the-hood workings (think: innards of Cylon Raider meets Brazil's pneumatic tubes), there are definitely times when I crave just a bit more canonical GTD functionality.

One of the most vexing shortcomings in kGTD (God bless it) is the lack of a formal Project list -- one easy location to glance just all of the obligations and desirable outcomes that are on your horizon, without reference to the tasks that comprise them. David Allen has repeatedly said that the project list is critical (as I recall, his quote in our interviews was "...the Project list is king."), and, honestly, lacking an all-in-one Project list for your weekly review is kind of like sitting down to the SATs without your two sharpened #2 pencils.

My solution for this has two components -- one mostly behavioral and one mildly technical. Both are squirrely and lofi and your mileage may vary. As ever.

1. Brutal pruning

First, as part of my weekly review, I relentlessly weed from kGTD any Project that I know doesn't belong there. This could include:

projects that died or have gotten cancelled or rescheduled
projects that have gone hopelessly and irretrievably fallow (functionally dead)
projects I have no real intention of working on (for at least the next month or two)
projects I've kept around because of sentimentality, affection, laziness, or just too much ambition

Bottom line: if the Project doesn't have a legitimate next action that I intend to complete in the next couple weeks? Gone. Deleted or moved to "Someday/Maybe." Next, please.

This, as David is fond of saying, clears the decks by removing any distractions or baseless claims on your attention. And while it's not so novel a concept (everyone's weekly review should include this step in some way), it's critical for part 2 of my kGTD Project list hackination. (Plus, yeah, it just feels really good to do)

For our purposes, it also ensures that you've completed all the obvious pruning before creating your new Project list and delving further.

2. Copy and Paste

<background> As you add projects, actions, and contexts in kGTD, the AppleScripts that keep its lights on are populating the different parts of your document with multiple synced versions of your information. The ability to view, for example, just actions associated with a Project versus just actions associated with a context are arguably the coolest and most useful features of kGTD since it mirrors GTD's ninja shifting between horizontal and vertical focus. </background>

But what it took me a fricking year to figure out is that I already have a project list -- it's just that it's hiding in a dropdown menu.

Getting your Project List liberated

Backup your kGTD document, then do a Sync and Save
- Backup is good. Repeat, repeat.
From any Project or Context view, select the "Projects" column head
- Should be the third column after "Action" and "Context"
- After you do this you should see the column get highlighted (mine's blue) with one of those pretty OmniGroup-y, rounded corner highlights
Reveal the "Column Type" Inspector window
- Either by hitting "COMMAND-3" or by selecting "Column Type" from the "Inspectors" window
- You should see two drop-down menus ("Type" and "Summary") and then a big-ass bulleted list of all your Projects
Select the first bulleted item in the Projects list
Scroll all the way to the last item in the list, then hold down "Shift" and select that last item
- This should highlight all of the projects
- Again, you should see lots of those pretty rounded selection highlight thingees
Hit "Copy" or "Command-C" to snatch the Projects to your clipboard
Open a new, blank text document in the text editor of your choice, and hit "Paste" (or Command-V)
- (I like TextMate but TextEdit will do fine)

And that's it.

"WOW, thank you: you've taught me to 'copy and paste.' So, now what, Admiral Obvious?"

The first thing you might want to do -- depending on your personal brand of anal-retentiveness -- is to tidy up your new Project list document a bit. Personally I Search & Replace all "..."s into TABs, which provides a prettier outline. At a minimum, get the document to where it's visually sensible for you. Then print 'er out.

Cosmetics aside, you do what you need to do with a project list. You let it jog your memory. You use it to find time sinks and attention holes. You scout for dead wood. You comb through it for missed actions, meetings you forgot to schedule, and reminders of things you said you'd do a week ago. This is your outcome-centric viewport into all the projects and actions that need to be added to or removed from your kGTD list. Be courageous.

"No, seriously. Why bother?"

I'll just speak for myself here, but I think that once you're out of the ad hoc procrastination mind set of the task list, you permit a more strategic part of your brain to take over for a while. Your mental CEO gets to take a crack at all the projects, deciding who gets the deep-six versus who's not getting the attention or resources they deserve, and then you can return to your task list with a rejuvenated sense of do-ability, focus, and mission. I call it "Manager Mode," and it's something I really need.

Also, from a tactical perspective, I like to use the Project list as a way to identify my "focus projects" for the week. If you have more than a few dozen projects (and share my own dearth of non-computer contexts), you probably crave some way to narrow your focus. A weekly review of the list can give you the confidence to call out the stuff that must see motion this week. You can even use to pull up what Gina calls your "MIT" (or, most important task of the day).

Regardless of your approach and preferences, if you're attempting some flavor of GTD, it's well worth your time to generate a task-less Project list and review the crap out of it as often as you need to. Because, if you aren't occasionally alternating between the tasks "on the runway" and the larger outcomes of higher altitudes, you're not only not doing GTD; you're probably wasting a lot of time and missing out on some cool opportunities.

Addition, 2006-12-20 10:08:27

Based on comments, I should clarify why a plaintext list of your current projects (without tasks?!?) has value in a GTD review (although David covers the concept nicely in the book, if memory serves). Thus, I will embrace vanity and quote myself at length:

The Project list -- in David's canonical description -- represents the "10,000 foot" view. It should exist as a list unattached to child tasks someplace and then be reviewed and updated as a thing-in-itself on a regular basis. It's not about the tasks per se; it's very much about evaluating how your Projects map to what you want to be doing at 20k [feet] and higher.

My gut sense is that a lot of the folks using kGTD use it as a fancy to-do list. Which is in a sense, what it is. But you mustn't just stop there. It's critical to not spend your whole life shoveling tasks and vaguely hoping that they map to some kind of outcome. That's the Bad Old Days simply relived with updated software.

IMHO, GTD works best (and only) when you periodically take a formal step up and off of the runway to ensure the projects themselves are worth doing (and have a place in your bigger plan).

I love that the weekly Project review also generates new tasks at the runway level; but that's mostly happening specifically because you set aside the time to not focus just on the stuff that's already in front of your nose.

”HOWTO generate a kGTD Project list for your weekly review” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on December 20, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Fun and functional ways to trick out your htaccess file

Merlin — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 10:39:05 -0500

Stupid htaccess Tricks « Perishable Press

This is a terrific collection of tricks for hacking on your Apache htaccess file, including some very useful ways to save bandwidth, control site access, and generate havoc.

I have been known to do some "creative" forwarding based on referrers from time to time, and if you're in the mood to play a bit of psychedelic traffic cop with your own hosted site, there's enough here to keep you busy through the holiday weekend.

This one's an old favorite, from which bandwidth can be conserved, leeches can be smote, and hilarity can ensue:

Stop Hotlinking, Serve Alternate Content

To serve ‘em some unexpected alternate content when hotlinking is detected, employ the following code, which will protect all files of the types included in the last line (add more types as needed). Remember to replace the dummy path names with real ones. Also, the name of the nasty image being served in this case is “eatme.jpe”, as indicated in the line containing the RewriteRule. Please advise that this method will also block services such as FeedBurner from accessing your images.

# stop hotlinking and serve alternate content
><IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
> RewriteEngine on
> RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
> RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?domain\.com/.*$ [NC]
> RewriteRule .*\.(gif|jpg)$ http://www.domain.com/eatme.jpe [R,NC,L]
></ifModule>

”Fun and functional ways to trick out your htaccess file” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on November 22, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Revenge of the Smart Playlist: 5 tricks for packrats & power users

Merlin — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 10:56:21 -0500

The success of yesterday's post on the basics of Smart Playlists makes me think you might enjoy seeing a few more. So, today I want to show you how to get control of a very large iTunes library -- to save space by getting rid of stuff you're not enjoying or listening to, as well as bubble up stuff you may not even realize you like.

If you are an iTunes packrat but feel overwhelmed by your collection (or are simply running out of drive space), try these recipes for Smart Playlists to help you get it together.

Step 0: Backup

Before doing anything too fancy with your iTunes (or with anything else for that matter), always do a backup.

This could be as simple as dragging your library to an external drive, although personally I'd recommend a smarter tool -- I recommend rsync for geeks, and ChronoSync for civilians.

In any case, don't yell at me if you get confused and permanently delete your heirloom recordings. 'Nuff said.

Big and Useless

This is the dullest instrument in our drawer, but if you're on deadline for a video editing project and suddenly realize you have 200mb of disk space left -- well, you need to delete some shit fast.

This Smart Playlist, as you can see, looks for the biggest bang for the buck in terms of deletion. It's the fastest way to find very large files that you aren't listening to much. You could also use something like What Size for this, but, you know, that would be cheating.

Basic Culling

This one's not much more sophisticated, but, if you're doing regular backups, it's my favorite way to quickly and responsibly reduce the disk space used by your library. As with many of these lists, you'll start to see the value of rating your music; in addition to improving the quality of your lists and listening experience, it eventually becomes a quick way to determine which music you can afford to dump in a pinch.

Old Podcasts

Man, if you aren't careful, podcasts will eat your lunch. Although iTunes provides useful tools for managing the number of eps you keep, per podcast series, you'll be amazed how quickly old episodes will fill up your drive.

This little fella does something insanely simple but critical; it pulls up any podcasts that you've already listened to, making it easy to select them all and delete quickly (without lots of COMMAND- clicking in the "Podcasts" window)

Sure you really like that?

This simple auditor calls you on your ratings. It looks at your higher-rated songs and sees if you're skipping them often -- a good sign you don't like them as much as you claim. Very helpful way to refactor if you realize you've gotten too enthusiastic with the 5-star ratings.

Rate these

This does something like the opposite of the previous list -- it pulls up songs that you've listened to a lot but have never rated. Again, if you're going to get the most out of your Smart Playlists, it pays to rate stuff you have a strong opinion about. This is one of the fastest ways to do that.

You get the basic idea at this point. By tagging the crap out of your songs, adding correct genres, and rating rating rating, you can produce a library that is both more enjoyable and way more manageable. Even if you save every track you've ever added, you can always benefit from the history of your behavior that iTunes has collected and exposed.

”Revenge of the Smart Playlist: 5 tricks for packrats & power users” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on November 10, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

"Music Only" for your iTunes playlists

Merlin — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 12:18:28 -0500

New for Friday 11/10:
Revenge of the Smart Playlist: 5 tricks for packrats & power users »

In my MacBreak Weekly capacity as Vice-President in Charge of Digging Pointless Ratholes™, I recently mentioned some tricks that I use to create better playlists in iTunes. One of these tricks -- which is an oldie, and which I'm certain I yoinked from some uncredited smarter person out in the blogtropolis -- is to create a "Music Only" list.

So you know how you have increasing buttloads of non-music (podcasts, audio books, etc.) in your iTunes library? It's really annoying to throw on one of your sexy Smart Playlists or the Party Shuffle, only to have a 20 minute nap or a Noam Chomsky lecture kick in.

I get around this by basing almost all my Smart Playlists on my one canonical "Music Only" list, which currently looks like this:

Yes, it's very hacky, and yes there's probably a more elegant way to accomplish this effect, but so far it's been a handy jumping off point for my favorite Smart Playlists. This helps me build stuff like...

New and unlistened-to

My neglected lovers

If you're even a casual iTunes user, it pays to spend some time rating your songs (no they can't all be "5 stars"), adding rich metadata, and building Smart Playlists. So powerful. And it you're using a (GUI-free) iPod Shuffle but not Smart Playlists? Man, that's just nuts.

New for Friday 11/10:
Revenge of the Smart Playlist: 5 tricks for packrats & power users

By popular demand, here are five more Smart Playlists, designed to help you manage very large libraries and bubble up interesting tracks (that you may not realize you like). (more »)

”"Music Only" for your iTunes playlists” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on November 09, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"