Categories
Media Organization Personal Web

Tech Gets Crazy

I’ve started a new blog… http://techgetscrazy.blogspot.com

I’ve decided to make Rex.FM more of a personal blog, while I’ll post my crazy, tech-related posts over at TechGetsCrazy. I feel like it will be a better outlet for my ideas without pushing my personal brand too much. I mean, I really want Rex.FM to be about me, not my crazy ideas. So anyway, expect some coolness over there, if you’re interested, and subscribe via Google Reader or whatever if you like… feel free to expect some awesomeness. http://techgetscrazy.blogspot.com

Categories
Entertainment Featured Hacks Mac Music Productivity

Applescript: Fade iTunes to Selected Track

Ever playing music for other people from iTunes? And want to change the song without everyone noticing? Trying to do a manual fade is tough. This script lets you select the next song you want to play, and then fade the volume out and in to that track. Download: itunes-fade-to-selected-track.zip


property initialVolume : null
tell application "iTunes"
set speed to 5 -- lower means slower fade
if sound volume = 0 then -- if volume is all the way down, fade in
play
set initialVolume to 60
repeat until (sound volume) is greater than or equal to (initialVolume - speed)
set sound volume to (sound volume + speed)
end repeat
set sound volume to initialVolume
else -- fade out, skip to selected track, fade in
set initialVolume to (get sound volume)
repeat until (sound volume - speed) is less than or equal to 0
set sound volume to (sound volume - speed)
end repeat
set sound volume to 0
play selection
repeat until (sound volume + speed) is greater than or equal to initialVolume
set sound volume to (sound volume + speed)
end repeat
end if
end tell

Categories
Found Hacks Media Mobile Personal Web

Blogging from the iPhone

I’ve been looking for a way to blog from my iPhone, especially because I wasn’t having much luck with the WP-mail plugin that allows you to post by email.

Anyway, I’m writing right now on my iPhone using a plugin called WPhone, which you can find here: http://wphoneplugin.org

You can now expect a lot more posts from me here!

Categories
Mac Productivity

Mac 101: Keyboard text selection

I use these all the time… especially holding Option or Command while using the arrows to move the cursor around.

To select text you hold down the SHIFT key and then use the arrow keys or HOME, END, PAGEUP, and PAGEDOWN. The left/right arrow keys (plus SHIFT) will increase the selection one character in that direction, if you hold down the OPTION (⌥) key the left/right arrows will select an entire word in that direction, and if you hold down the ⌘ key the left/right arrows will select to the beginning or end of the line. The up/down arrow keys (plus SHIFT) will select a full line up or down; with the OPTION key held down the up/down arrows will select a paragraph. The HOME key (plus SHIFT) will select all the text to the beginning of the document and the END key (plus SHIFT) will select all the text to the end of the document. Finally, the PAGEUP and PAGEDOWN keys (plus SHIFT) will select a full “page” up or down.
Mac 101: Keyboard text selection – The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
.

You only need to hold Shift if you want to select text. Without holding shift, the aforementioned key commands will just move the cursor around. You probably don’t realize how much time you waste trying to point with that Trackpad on your MacBook.

Categories
Mobile Web

Facebook for iPhone… Still Incomplete

I just saw a post by Robert Scoble, where he mentions the iPhone interface for Facebook that Joe Hewitt created. Facebook for iPhone looks pretty slick, I’ll admit that. But it is also missing a ton of essential features.My top wishlist / feature requests:

  • Commenting on photos
  • Edit Profile info
  • Message people from their profile
  • Groups

These are all things that don’t work on the current iPhone interface, but seem like a serious missing feature. Now, I’m not sure who to point my finger at, but I’m disappointed that there’s been no apparent improvement to the iPhone interface since it was released about 6 months ago.

Categories
Media Web

No More Daily Twitter Summaries

I’ve just had too much trouble getting Twitter-Tools to do exactly what I want. I’ve been thinking about New Year’s resolutions, and maybe blogging every day consistently is something I’d like to achieve. Happy 2008! 

Categories
Media Web

My experience with Facebook Beacon

I just read Mark Zuckerberg’s post where he’s basically apologizing for mistakes made in the launch of Beacon. I just want to share my personal experience with Beacon.

Yesterday, I was looking for a coffee shop to go study for my Business Strategy course. I did a quick search for “coffee” in “Santa Cruz, CA” at Yelp.com and was presented with a list of nearby cafés ranked by users. I went to the (relatively) new Bad Ass Coffee downtown, and had an amazing Double Cappuccino (with Half & Half). Looking back at Yelp, I saw mediocre ratings of the Bad Ass coffee, so I registered at Yelp and wrote my own review.

Later, I went to Facebook for something completely unrelated. Here’s what I saw:

beacon.png

Amazing! Impressive! I really like it! What happened? When did Facebook and Yelp talk? I don’t get it! But I like it!

Now, I’m sure Beacon has created all sorts of problems for people, but so far, for me, it’s been nothing short of awesome.

We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it.

from: Zuckerberg: Thoughts on Beacon | The Facebook Blog

Categories
Found Media Mobile

Sprint XOHM Will Soft Launch “In A Few Days”

I spent a lot of time searching for a mobile broadband card that I could get without a contract (I found Millenicom, a Sprint reseller charging $50/mo). Anyway, the reason I wanted a card without the normal 2 year contract is because of the upcoming XOHM service from Sprint. This will be a nationwide WiMax network… and it’s set to launch in early 2008. Just read the below article at Techmeme, and it looks like XOHM is coming sooner than we thought. Seems like a perfect network for the Google Phones.

Sprint Nextel will soft launch its XOHM WiMax network in the next few days according to Bin Shen, VP of Product Management and Partnership Development. Chicago, Washington DC and Baltimore will all go live at soft launch, and though Shen did not discuss what devices would be available, a number of data cards have been tested on the network. XOHM will officially launch in the second quarter of 2008 as will several laptops with WiMax embedded in them. Later in the year a number of special purpose devices will launch, as will dual-mode CDMA / WiMax handsets.

from: Sprint XOHM Will Soft Launch “In A Few Days” (Phone Scoop)

Categories
Personal Productivity Web

Google Reader unread count zero for once

I know this isn’t really something worth blogging about, but I’m pretty excited to have finally gotten my Google Reader unread items count down to zero. I don’t think this has ever happened since I first started using it… I originally signed up for just too many feeds. Anyway, here’s a picture of my achievement…

Categories
Hacks Mac

Applescript: Number Selected Tracks Sequentially

I think you can tell from the title what this simple applescript does. I’m sure this code could be made much shorter, but I’m really a novice, and this works pretty well, albeit there are no foolproofs.  

Here’s what it does: You select some songs that are already in order (how? see below), say 12 songs that you already arranged. You then run the script… it numbers them 1 of 12, 2 of 12, 3 of 12… and so on up to 12 of 12. You now have a nicely organized album.Album not in order?

Instructions: Select all the album tracks. Make a new playlist from selection (cmd+shift+N). Click the title bar above the first column, in other words: sort by number in playlist. Then, you can rearrange the songs as you like. Now select all the songs, and finally run the script.Ahh, finally some home-brewed automation for sorting out this messy iTunes library. 

--Number Selected Tracks Sequentially
--A simple applescript from Rex Pechler
--http://rex.fm
--
--2007

tell application "iTunes"
if selection is not {} then
set sel to selection
set these_files to {}
set numtracks to the count of sel
set trackcount to 0
with timeout of 30000 seconds
repeat with this_track in sel
if class of this_track is file track then
set trackcount to trackcount + 1
set the track number of this_track to trackcount
set the track count of this_track to numtracks
end if
end repeat
end timeout
else
set count to 0
end if
end tell

Download: the applescript as text or as a binary app.