Channeling Douglas Adams

In Last Chance To See Douglas Adams talks about writing a program that is very sexy and has pull down menus and everything, and it’s entire purpose is to figure out the volume of the nests made by a certain kind of bird. In an article called “Frank The Vandal” he writes about a desire to be able to take just the parts of programs you want and paste them into a workflow so that you can do whatever it is you want to do without using six different programs. It was in this vein that I tackled the following

Extremely Small Problem:

I do a lot of what Natalie Goldberg calls “practice writing”. which is where you just block out some time and keep writing for that entire time. This writing can be directed, or not, but the goal is to keep moving forward, to keep putting words on the page, or, in my case, into the text document. This isn’t “real” writing that you plan to put in front of other people some day, this is just exercise, to keep those writing muscles in shape.

When you exercise your muscles, you aren’t left with an artifact of your exercise. But when you do writing exercise, you have this document that you created, and have to do something with it. It’s possible that some part of it might be worth something to you in some context, so it seems wasteful to just delete it. Once again referring to Natalie Goldberg, these are like compost; they’re not really valuable by themselves, but if you keep piling them up there’s a chance that someday something good will grow out of them. Being the nerd that I am, I decided that I would keep all these useless little documents, and I would keep them all in one folder, so they would stay out the way.

So, on my home Mac I set up Hazel to just take those documents, rename them to today’s date (which gives me a good record of which days I did my writing practice and which days I didn’t) and shove them in a folder. All of this happens without me thinking about it, because Hazel is awesome. So, here comes the extremely small problem:

Sometimes I do my writing practice on my laptop, which is a PC.

Because I’m insane and picky and whatnot I use FocusWriter on the PC (it most closely matches the functionality of WriteRoom, which is what I use on my mac) and FocusWriter, by default, produces Rich Text files (rtf files). BUT I have WriteRoom set to produce plain text files (txt files). It’s possible that I could just set FocusWriter to save things as txt files by default, but that’s crazy talk. Simple solutions need not apply, thank you very much. And I still have the problem of getting my little documents (which, you’ll remember, are pretty much worthless) from my PC to my mac, and in the right folder.

Now, I grant you, I could move these files myself, but part of being who I am is having a rock-solid conviction that I shouldn’t be thinking about things if I can make a computer think about them for me. My ultimate goal is to be able to write something mindlessly and forget about it, secure in the knowledge that when I look for it (which may nor may not ever happen, but that’s beside the point) it’ll be where I expect it to be.

After a little bit of thinking and a little more tinkering, I came up with the following

Gloriously Baroque Solution:

The moving parts involved here are (in order):

1. Dropbox
2. Hazel
3. Automator
4. Word 2011 for Mac
5. Hazel again

Here’s how it goes:

I write my useless document, and save it to a particular folder in my Dropbox. It’s instantly beamed to all the other computers that are connected to my Dropbox account.

On my mac, Hazel is monitoring that folder, and sees a new rtf file show up. It starts a rule (Hazel’s name for a set of actions that happen when a certain condition is met) that renames the file and moves it into my “compost” folder. But the file is still an rtf instead of a txt file! Not to worry, this is where it calls Automator.

I’ve created an Automator workflow that takes the file, loads it into Word, converts it into a txt file and saves it. (and then closes Word. I don’t know why this is a separate step, but it is.) It then hands control back to Hazel. The Hazel rule completes, and colors the label of the original rtf file gray. This triggers a second Hazel rule that is watching the compost folder. This rule does one thing: if it finds an rtf file with a gray label it puts it in the trash. Since these files are only turned gray after the txt version is created I’m no longer worried about keeping the rtf file around.

This all works perfectly, much to my surprise, and (even more surprisingly) usually takes less than five seconds to run, even with all the Word opening and closing stuff. And since it’s happening while I’m not at my mac it’s effectively happening instantly.

Conclusion

Well, there isn’t one, really. All in all this took me about 20 minutes to set up, and will save me a few seconds of work a few times a week. But it’s work that I’m unlikely to do by myself, which would compromise the integrity of my compost folder. So, here’s to creative solutions to minuscule problems!

More To the World Than Computers

My little sister runs a fine blog about design and games and books, and she’s giving away REAL MONEY (well, gift cards) on her site. You should check it out post haste.

http://3pointperspective.blogspot.com/2011/07/mondays-day-to-giveaway.html

Have fun!

I Could Do This All Day

Another great anti-hacker* PSA ad:

[Bearded, ponytailed DAD enters a SON’s room. He’s holding a laptop, showing a bittorrent client window full of active seeds and downloads]

DAD: Are these your warez?

SON: No, I…

DAD: Your mother found this on your laptop.

SON: Some guys…

DAD: Some guys what? Where did you learn this stuff? ANSWER ME!

SON: FROM YOU ALRIGHT? I LEARNED IT BY WATCHING YOU!

[Dad looks slightly shamed, although it’s hard to tell through his beard]

VOICEOVER: Parents who download warez have children who download warez.

The original masterpiece.

 

*Yes, I am well aware of the “real” meaning of the word hacker, and often identify myself as such. (Purely White Hat, if hats are required.) But it’s such easy shorthand for “bad guy on the internet” that I couldn’t avoid it.

A Stupid Proposal

someone needs to start an 80's style "Just say no to 'hacktivists'" campaign, where seedy looking teens try to pressure their friends into joining stupid groups like Anonymous or LulzSec and the friends are all cool and say no and go have good lives.

I estimate that it would be at least 70% as effective as the original “Just say no to drugs” campaign, (so, not effective at all) but it would also be at least five times as hilarious. And being five times as funny as this:

Is quite a feat.

Remember, you have a right to say no to misguided online vigilantes.

 

I wonder how long it’ll be before this blog is hacked.

Someone Who Rocks

Every once in a while you get a peek at something awesome, and unexpected. It’s a good feeling, a shock of adrenaline and a reminder that the world isn’t as old and worn out as you thought it was.

Terraria is one of those awesome, unexpected things. It’s more than just Minecraft in 2D, like I thought it was when I first checked it out. It’s a simple, happy, complex, exciting little world all it’s own, with definite parallels in Notch’s masterpiece, but a different vibe altogether.

But I’m not here to talk about Terraria, as much as I’d like to do just that all day. One of the most delightful things about an overall delightful game is the music. There are themes for daytime outside, nighttime outside, underground, etc. etc., each one catchy and interesting (and very likely to get stuck in your head for days on end) and at the same time not overpowering, allowing you to get on with whatever you’re doing. They’re brilliant.

The makers of Terraria share splash screen space with the creator of these brilliant tracks, a company called Resonance Array. I went to check out their page, seeing what else those amazing musicians had done. And was surprised to learn that it’s exactly one amazing musician. There it all was, the pleasant little jolt, the realization that there are people who are just cool out there, doing cool things.

Check out the Resonance Array home page, it’s got a demo video for Terraria, which also gives you a good taste of the music in the game. For more fun times you can go to his “Listen and License” page and check out some tracks that you can buy for whatever project you’re working on, or just to listen to.

So, yeah. Go play Terraria, enjoy the awesome music, as well as the awesome game play. And if you’ve got an upcoming project that needs a strong audio component give Resonance Array a shot.

 

(Note: I’m not being paid by Re-Logic or Resonance Array for this article. I just really like what they’ve done.)