Author Archives: Dr. Drang

Blogging from BBEdit, redux

I’ve been having blog problems the past couple of weeks. My script for publishing from BBEdit has been working fine when publishing new posts, but it’s been throwing errors when updating posts after editing. I’m not sure what has changed. I did update my WordPress installation recently, but I’m also suspicious of new configurations my…Read More…

Cleaning up my Markdown table cleanup script

Way back in 2008, I wrote a script that made it easier to have nicely formatted tables in a Markdown1 document. The idea was to take a hastily written table like this, | Column 1 | Column 2 | Column 3 | |–|:–:|–:| | first | second | third | | column | column |…Read More…

Quick invoicing emails with MailMate

I’m not ready to write a post on the positives and negatives (mostly positives) of MailMate, but I am ready to share a script that automates one of my common emailing tasks. The invoices I send to clients are PDFs that I attach to a short email. The body of the email is boilerplate: here’s…Read More…

Battery post

Of the 2,000-plus posts I’ve written here, one stands out. Not because it’s particularly well written, and not because it covers a favorite topic of mine, but because it’s the one post where I somehow managed to hit the SEO jackpot. It’s a small jackpot, to be sure, but it’s mine. The post is “Camry…Read More…

A simple Numbers workflow

Here’s a simple AppleScript I should’ve written a while ago. It saves me a few steps when creating and filling out a new expense report. As I’ve mentioned before, I have a simple two-table Numbers template for my expense reports. The table in the top right has just two cells for the date of the…Read More…

Mapping photos with Pythonista 1.5

This tweet from Ole Zorn on Saturday took a load off my mind: Pythonista 1.5 has passed Apple’s review – release on Monday, more details soon. \o/— Ole Zorn (@olemoritz) Jun 14 2014 6:27 AM First, I was relieved to see that Ole had dodged the App Store’s threat to remove Pythonista. Second, I could…Read More…

Trajectory

A couple of weeks ago, I followed a link to this article by Alejandro Tauber that purported to calculate how far you’d be flung from an amusement park ride called the Booster Maxxx. The article had achieved some popularity through a link on Boing Boing from the usually reliable Maggie Koerth-Baker. Given that this is…Read More…

Better Markdown folding in BBEdit

One of the few things I don’t like about BBEdit’s Markdown language module is the way it handles section folding. Here’s a simple example document, similar to the format I use when writing a report: Title: A simple report in Markdown Author: Dr. Drang Date: June 11, 2014 Client: Markdown Industries, LLC 1029 Race St…Read More…

withTitle

The day after the WWDC keynote, after I’d skimmed the Swift documentation, I learned from this post by Clark Goble and this tweet by Allen MacKenzie that Yosemite was going to have a new scripting language. Or maybe an old scripting language resurrected. Either way, JavaScript is going to take a spot alongside AppleScript as…Read More…

Rite of passage

My older son had to go to a meeting at work this morning. He works at a grocery store in town and I assume the all-hands meeting was called to prepare the staff for an especially busy day because of a big sale. Thing is, my son’s a bag boy. His responsibilities consist of: putting…Read More…

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