We keep our home pretty cool during the winter. Since I work out of the house all day[1], I’m frequently bundled up with a hat and stuff. The one thing I can’t really cover well has been my hands. I needs to type. It’s what I do. To combat my whining about my cold hands, my wife threw together[2] these somewhat fingerless mittens. It’s not clear in the picture, but there’s a hole for the pinky as well as the thumb. The first beta was more of a flap with a thumb hole. That didn’t really help much. The v1.0 model (pictured) is great. Having it loosely wrap around my fingers worked really well. I can type just as well with these on as with off.

My wife seems to really enjoy making stuff. If you want a pair of these custom made fingerless mitten thingys, send me an email @ bcooke@roobasoft.com.

[1] - I have a day job, but I work remotely
[2] - She taught herself how to crochet a couple months ago and now cranks out all kinds of stuff

The traineo folks hooked me up with a simple API quite quickly (simple == good). The widget has two big improvements:

• You can now enter your traineo username / password (no longer relies on Safari cookies)
• The gauge is much more reliable and the NaN issue should be resolved.

It was fun working with the traineo folks at such a rapid pace (I posted the original widget on Saturday and they provided an API on Monday). Many thanks to them for supporting this.

Download version 1.1 now.

Let me know if you have any problems / suggestions.

Update: The traineo guys provided an API and I updated the widget. See: TraineoWeight.wdgt Updated

Like most Americans I’d prefer to be less fat. To help me with that goal I’ve been logging my weight on traineo.com. They offer plenty more than just weight tracking, but I haven’t gotten into all that quite yet. Anyway, it seemed silly to log into a web page just to enter my weight each day (who has the time for that! </lazy>). So I pinged the traineo folks and got this in reply:

I’m afraid that at the moment we don’t have an open API, although we are planning to release one in the not-too-distant future.

<snip>

If you want to input your weight remotely, this is possible, but not something we actively advertise, as it’s currently not really ready for public consumption.

If you were to visit http://they.made.it.sound/like/i/shouldnt/share while logged in (i.e. you have a cookie saved in your browser (they don’t go stale for a long time)), your weight would be submitted.

To which I said (to myself): “C Is for cookie, that’s good enough for me!”.

When I found myself awake at 3am[1]. I knew just what to do:

1) Fire up Dashcode
2) Author a widget based on a template Apple provided[2] using 1997 methods of screen scraping[3].
3) Publish widget with minimal testing
4) Hope traineo doesn’t change their response HTML

This took ~3 hours of my time[4] and surely has bugs and will surely break when traineo changes their response. I provide this “as is”. With that:

Enjoy! TraineoWeight.wdgt.zip Make sure you log into your traineo account with Safari first.

[1] our 3 year old likes to wake me up and make me tuck her back in (it’s not that bad really - I’m sure I’ll miss it when it stops).
[2] I can’t make pretty things. But I can copy pretty things!
[3] .substring() - I fought the DOM parser for too long and finally reverted to .substring(). Yes, this is a hack and this widget *will* break someday…possibly soon.
[4] I would have never tried this without Dashcode. It’s pretty slick. Two thumbs up.
[5] Wait…there wasn’t a [5]. Well, if you want access to the Dashcode project let me know and I’ll put up an svn repo. Feel free to take the widget and do with it what you will.

In order to keep myself busy, I’ve moved hosting providers again. If you notice any bumps, please let me know @ contact@roobasoft.com

The move is from pair (who I still highly recommend) to a slice over on slicehost (who I hope to be able to recommend). I got the slice to play with some rails stuff I’ve been doing and decided to move roobasoft.com over to reduce costs. The biggest pain/fear with running a dedicated server (even a virtual one) is taking care of mail. To take care of that I’m giving google apps for your domain a try. The biggest downside to that is the lack of IMAP support. I decided the gmail web interface plus POP access was good enough for now.

This is for all you F12 invoking Dashboarders out there: Did you know you can take the Dashboard icon in the dock and drag it off? It goes poof, just like any other dock icon. Dashboard doesn’t stop running, this just frees up its slot in the dock.

I’m late to this party, but here goes:

MacSanta is:

Thanks to MacSanta, you can save 20% off applications from all 77 companies below! Just use coupon code MACSANTA to save through December 25th.

The number 77 is probably higher by the time you read this. Apps are being added daily.

Since I didn’t have a way to accept coupons, I wasn’t going to participate (read: I’m lazy). Fortunately I got an appropriate nudge from a friend and I took care of that: Save 20% on rooSwitch

Don’t forget to give the full list a look. Enjoy!

Credit and thanks go to the Rogue Amoeba guys for setting this up.

The hard part is over. I can effectively type without forcing my fingers to go where they should. I think I’m at about 70% the speed I was with Qwerty. I’m really surprised that I stuck this out.

For a few uninteresting reasons I had the opportunity to install three different OS’s. The interesting part was observing which gave me the opportunity to select Dvorak as my desired layout.

NetBSD 3.0 - Dvorak was not an option. This was painful since I had to manually mount a machine’s share via ’sh’ shell (I’m guessing bash is too heavy for NetBSD’s defaults? It may have had csh, I didn’t think to try.)

Windows Vista RC1 - It asked me right away. Dvorak was on the list. However, the screen after the layout choice is the “enter your license key” screen. Guess what? Yep, the dang layout was still in Qwerty! So close The next time it needed input (after a reboot) it was correctly in Dvorak.

Mac OS X - It asked, offered and honored my choice of the Dvorak layout.

This should be the last post dedicated to my now preferred keyboard layout. My conclusion is: I’m glad I did this, It was fun. Maybe next year I’ll get a chorded keyboard.

It has been quieter than usual around here lately. The reason for that is due to my typing skills being drastically crippled for the past week. Last Thursday I was preparing for a flight from New Hampshire to Boise (that involves about six hours in the air) and decided it’d be a good idea to learn the Dvorak keyboard layout. I don’t have any good reasoning for this, but it’s too late for reasoning.

I spent the flight teaching myself where things were. I then continued through the weekend. That weekend was painful. I think I was at about fifteen words per minute at the end of the day Saturday (I try not to take Sundays off - not being able to type made that pretty easy).

On Monday I got an email I wanted to reply to quickly. I tried to cheat and went back to qwerty for a second. Turns out the plane ride, plus the casual “training” I did over the weekend had made my qwerty skills useless. I was beyond the point of no return (yes, it would still be faster to go back to qwerty than forward with dvorak, but that’s no fun). This was scary. I trudged forward.

Some notes:
* My qwerty skills degraded a lot faster than I thought.
* Keyboard shortcuts are hard to relearn and sometimes painful when you use the wrong one (”what the heck was that!? I just wanted to copy that text”)
* OS X’s “show keyboard viewer” is essential those first few days
* The conversion is painful. I wanted to give up about three different times. No idea why I didn’t, guess I’m stubborn.
* gtypist is pretty good (especially for the price)

One concern I have with this switch is how I’ll be able to type on other people’s keyboards. That situation hasn’t come up yet, and since I work in solitude in my home, it’ll probably be a while before this situation presents itself. Only time will tell. I plan to have to look at the keys and hunt and peck.

I might check back in a week with more comments on the switch if I have anything I deem somewhat interesting.

Over in the forums, rooSwitch Lite user, brokosz asked if there was a way to switch iTunes without rooSwitch trying to switch the contents of ~/Music/iTunes. At first I didn’t quite get the request, but after some clarification and now that I’ve played with this a little I see it’s quite powerful. What’s going on is brokosz has created multiple iTunes Libraries (to do this, hold down option while launching iTunes (works in iPhoto as well)). So instead of rooSwitch managing the libraries, brokosz lets iTunes do that and rooSwitch just shuffles the iTunes settings. The end result is the ability to have multiple, easily switchable, iTunes libraries stored wherever you like (in brokosz’s case, an external HD).

note: In order to get this to work, you should rename your main library from ~/Music/iTunes to anything else. I suggest ~/Music/iTunes5000. Doing this will cause the main library to be hidden from rooSwitch. Now reopen iTunes holding down option and choose the iTunes5000 Library. There’s another way to do this mentioned in the forum posting, but it’s a lot more involved.

Once you’ve hidden the music files from rooSwitch create a new profile, or duplicate the current one and switch to it. Quit iTunes and re-open it holding down the option key. Create a new library wherever you want. Now when you switch between the two profiles you’ll be switching between the two libraries and rooSwitch won’t be moving any data.

Why doesn’t brokosz just hold down option on every iTunes launch and not bother with rooSwitch? Cause remembering to hold down option and then fumbling around to find the library you want is a pain. Using rooSwitch brokosz can have friendly named profiles and have rooSwitch quit and relaunch iTunes.

Right now I’m using this such that I have all the podcasts I listen to in their own iTunes Library. I’m doing this because I’ve found 4GB+ of podcasts before and I’m hoping they’re easier to keep an eye on / contain this way.

This same method should work for iPhoto, but I’ve yet to test it (I will soon).
update 2006.09.30: Just confirmed that the same procedure works great for managing multiple iPhoto libraries as well.

I’ve got a number of secret pages that display things like sales data and download stats. My pages were ugly. As a fan of mint, I decided to see what would be involved in turning these ugly pages into private, roobasoft peppers (one “sales” pepper, one “downloads” pepper). Turns out, it’s quite easy (Kudo’s to Mr. Inman for making it easy). If interested, there’s a tutorial. A lot of folks (especially PHP heads) can probably just look at existing peppers and figure it out.

After I finished my sales and downloads peppers (these were very roobasoft specific) I wanted to write something I could share. Enter, roobasoft’s, iusethis pepper. It’s very simple. It displays the “use this” count from osx.iusethis.com using iusethis’s javascript include-isms.

Grab it here.

The preference for the ‘iusethis’ pepper lets you specify which apps you want to watch, comma separated.

I threw this together pretty quickly. Let me know in the comments if it has issues.