hacks

Welcome Lifehackers! Looks like another one of my posts has been lucky enough to be featured on Lifehacker! Very cool. I hope you enjoy my how-to.

About a year ago I picked up a pair of Shure E2C headphones. Well worth their somewhat expensive price, I use them all the time. They provide a ton of isolation, so they’re great on the bus and when flying.

But, in my experience, the actual headphone plug leaves a lot to be desired. Within about 8 months of regular use, I started getting the traditional crappy connection problems you get with cheaper headphones. After a few months of constantly trying to tweak the connector in order to get a good connection, I finally decided to replace the connector myself.

The final product was quite impressive. For more details, read on.

Read the rest of this entry »

So I finally figured out how to write AppleScripts that hook directly into Quicksilver’s “text clipping” interface. For the longest time I’ve wanted to be able to set away messages from Quicksilver… and now I can:

using terms from application "Quicksilver"
    on process text ThisClipping

    tell application "Adium"
        set my status message to ThisClipping
        set my status type to away
    end tell

end process text

end using terms from It may not look like much, but I’m a happy boy. Put that into an AppleScript using Script Editor and save it to ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions. Restart Quicksilver, and you’ll be able to set any text you type in Quicksilver after the “.” command as your Adium away message.

The on process text terms has lots of other uses too. I’m sure I’ll come up with more.

So after posting a few tiltshift fakes to my Flickr account, the most frequent response has been “Yeah, they look cool, but what the hell is ’tilt-shift’ photography??”. Well let me quote myself from an email I sent to my mother as a response to just that question:

Tilt/shift lenses let you change the focal plane of your camera by shifting your lens up/down/left/right or by tilting it in any direction. [1] In this manner you can do lots of interesting stuff to change the field of view and where the “focal point” is on an image. They’re used a lot in things like fashion and landscape photography to do things like selectively bring into focus a particular part of a photo. Check out the example fashion photo at the bottom of [2]. For landscape and in particular photos taken at a high angle of city scenes, they have the cool side-effect of allowing you to create pictures that look like macro photos of highly detailed models, since you can shrink the field of view to a narrow plane of the photo a lot like a macro lens does. But I just fake it using a gradient mask and a lens blur in photoshop. [1] http://www.dennisonbertram.com/hackmaster/2005/02/tilt-shift-pc-lens.htm [2] http://www.photo.net/equipment/canon/tilt-shift

The whole tilt-shift miniature meme probably started with a post to Boing Boing with some awesome shots from a photographer who used a real tilt-shift lens to constrain his depth-of-field to make photos look like ultra-detailed models. And then, as memes go, it took on a life of its own and spawned more Boing Boing posts, Flickr groups, Photoshop “hacks”, and so-on.

Ah, the joys of the intarweb…

An awesome time-saving database forwarded to me by a friend:

The IVR Cheat Sheet: This “QuickBase” from Intuit has instructions for how to cut through to a real person when you call a company and get an IVR system — Interactive (or Integrated) Voice Response. You know, the computer system that tries to solve your problem using stacked menu systems so they don’t have to pay a real person to talk to you? Even though you know what you want can’t be solved by the machine and you have to talk to a human? This site will tell you what you need to do to get the human on the phone.

The Intuit IVR Cheat Sheet.

Some Debian developer will probably see this and yell at me for doing something very evil, but I find this trick quite useful and thought I’d share it with the world. You might notice I also made use of it in my Debian Java mini-howto.

The Debian “alternatives” system is basically a set of utilities designed for manipulating what is no more than a complex collection of symlinks. However, the flexibility it affords users is wonderful. It allows the administrator to set up intelligent “default versions” for system utilities such as editors, pagers, and terminals.

And it also, if you abuse it slightly, gives you an easy way to manage applications installed into /opt.

Debian, as you might know, isn’t that great at always packaging applications that don’t agree with its “social contract”. So you’ll usually find yourself jumping through hoops to get anything that involves Java installed. I install apps like Eclipse, Azureus, and VMWare into directories in /opt (/opt/eclipse, /opt/azureus, etc). And then I use update-alternatives to add intelligent symlinks back into the main system:

update-alternatives --verbose --install [desired symlink] [name] [executable location in /opt/whatever] 500

For a specific example: update-alternatives --verbose --install /usr/bin/vmware vmware /opt/vmware/bin/vmware 500

If you also want to install a link for the manpage, you can also do that:

update-alternatives --verbose --install /usr/bin/vmware vmware /opt/vmware/bin/vmware 500 --slave /usr/share/man/man1/vmware.1 vmware.1 /opt/vmware/man/man1/vmware.1

(I know that actually points to the manpage of the vmware XF86 driver, but you get the idea…)

And since all the links are tracked by update-alternatives, I can easily remove them when I uninstall the application: update-alternatives --remove-all vmware