so, it's come to this...

There's been an Update

I like my keyboard shortcuts to be consistent across applications. Two shortcuts I use frequently ⌥-⌫ (option-delete) to erase the last word and ⌘-⌫ (command-delete) to erase the last line¹.

Since upgrading to Mountain Lion, every time I hit ⌘-⌫ in the Messages app, I get a prompt asking if I want to delete the conversation. And every single time it's mentally jarring as normal, expected behavior elicits an unexpected and incorrect response. That shortcut is being used as a built-in for the app:

A few minutes of searching the web led me to the universally accepted answer that "no, there is nothing you can do about it." Even a well written (I assume--tl;dr) piece by Gruber weren't promising.

So I took a chance and tried to change the shortcut by adding another shortcut on top of it in Keyboard Shortcuts in system preferences.

I used ⌃⌥↩ because I can't see myself every using that shortcut. I can't explain why it seems to get duplicated and also show a new shortcut of ⌥⌘⌫. I did notice that when I went back and re-did this a few times (to take screenshots), I kept getting different duplications. One thing that seemed to be necessary is trying to first make the shortcut ⌃⌥⌫, which would make an error sound and not accept, then doing another one would lead to the desired results.

Clear as mud, I know.

• #technology
• #article
• #programming

Matt Gemmell:

[Y]ou’re getting too many work emails, and you need to actively start cultivating a reputation as a simmering psychopath who may or may not bring a weapon¹ into the office if he gets just one more stupid email.

I consistently rock Inbox Zero but I'm going to make Ikuko read this tonight. Last I checked she had over 1000 Inbox messages. Mail.app does not like 1000 Inbox messages.

Throckmorton:

We have just been overrun by scab eaters.

People eat the scabs off of other people in order to get high off of the meth concentrated in the scabs.

• #medicine
• #link

A short video demonstrating using Keyboard Maestro to write prednisone tapers in a patient friendly format, calculating out the total number of pills needed at the end.

Update: The first taper doesn't actually calculate the corrects number of pills in the video. I had made a mistake in the order of a loop. It's been fixed since this video.

• #keyboard-maestro
• #km
• #video

Update: @psufka reports that he has seen this with Windows machines, so apparently is not an isolated Mac compatibility issue.

A colleague and friend was having trouble with the Epic electronic medical record. He writes his notes in Pages on the Mac and when he would try to paste the text into Epic, it would mess up. What he was seeing was his note was losing words and the paragraph formatting was screwed up. It was making his life painful, slow, and frustrating…basically like all EMRs make life.

Thankfully, there's a really simple solution

What was happening (I think) was that he was pasting text from a Mac environment into a Unix environment, which have different (invisible) characters to end a line.¹

Keyboard Maestro has a function to change the line endings of whatever text is in the clipboard. So now, he copies the text to the clipboard using ⌘-C, switches to the EMR, and ⌃⌘-V pastes the correctly formatted text into the EMR without any screw ups.

The same thing was also happening with another EMR he uses, Allscripts. The same solution worked there too.

Keyboard Maestro is a very powerful application for the Mac. I can't begin to say how great it is. It is also not for beginners. If you're looking to get started with taking more control over your machine, this is not the place I'd recommend starting unless you have a strong familiarity with computers and have someone to help you along the way. Otherwise, it's very much worth it's price of $36.

• #technology
• #medicine
• #keyboard-maestro
• #articles
• #programming

Apple Insider:

Asked if he told anyone at Apple to copy Samsung's designs, Forstall replied, "I never directed anyone to go and copy something from Samsung. We wanted to build something great. There was no reason to look at anything they had done."

Paste the url from the top tab in Safari into current location of the cursor with one line of Applescript in TextExpander.

Dr. Drang:

Boom. Give that a nice abbreviation, like ;furl for “front URL,” and it’ll insert the URL directly where you’re typing. There’s no need to run the script and then paste the URL—that’s an inefficiency that comes from thinking the script has to act like you would.

Update: I've found this works better in Keyboard Maestro because I'm typically tying in urls right after another character, like a "(". TextExpander won't expand a macro in such a situation whereas Keyboard Maestro will. Just have the macro run an Applescript and paste the results.

For Safari: tell application "Safari" to get the URL of the front document

For Chrome: tell application "Google Chrome" to get the URL of active tab of first window

• #textexpander
• #link

David Pogue's phone was stolen. Using Find my iPhone, an army of Twitter followers, Gizmodo.com and the Prince George's County police, he was able to get it back.

In 2007, my Samsung Blade A800 was stolen. I'd installed GPS tracking software on it for a pet project. I was able to locate the house it was at. I called the cops. They were only willing to fill out a report so I could file the loss with insurance. They were completely unwilling to investigate or even knock on the door of the house that GPS said the phone was at.

I got billed $400 from Sprint for downloaded games, songs, and ringtones.

• #article

Finally.

Ordered.

Why am I so happy to have this?

1. Thunderbolt is a super fast connection. In my experience, I can't tell the different between the internal speeds and the external speeds¹ so transfers are blazing fast.
2. Fast, clone back ups of my work machine before going home and before going to work.
3. If my work machine hard drive dies, I just reboot with this installed and can run my machine as if nothing happened.
4. If my whole computer dies, I just drive down the street to Best Buy (I work in a city without an Apple store), grab another Macbook Air, and can be instantly running my old machine via the clone back up and in only 30 minutes can have re-installed everything from the back up.

Most people don't need such ridiculously fast restores and redundancies, but with my computer is for my work and my work is taking care of sick patients, and since all my patient data as well as my protocols are on my machine, I have to have that kind of security.

Sure, I work is a large healthcare organization, but ultimately it's my responsibility, and as a tiny cog in a giant machine, my individual needs are meaningless.

• #technology

Thomas Sowell:

The CBO report shows that, while the average household income fell 12 percent between 2007 and 2009, the average for the lower four-fifths fell by 5 percent or less, while the average income for households in the top fifth fell 18 percent. For households in the "top one percent" that seems to fascinate so many people, income fell by 36 percent in those same years.

So, the rich aren't getting richer and the poor poorer?

Politicians and media talking heads love to refer to people who are in the bottom 20 percent in income in a given year as "the poor." But, following the same individuals for 10 or 15 years usually shows the great majority of those individuals moving into higher income brackets.

The number who reach all the way to the top 20 percent greatly exceeds the number still stuck in the bottom 20 percent over the years.

But that won't sell any newspapers.

• #politics
• #sowell