Installation

1. I’ve setup Dropbox to share my Things database betweeen my laptop and a computer at home which is always online.

2. Buy and install Prowl on your iOS device.

3. On the home computer/server, install things-rb:

   $ (sudo) gem update --system # if you're on an older RubyGems version
$ (sudo) gem install things-rb

4. ..and the prowl gem to talk to the Prowl API

   $ (sudo) gem install prowl

5. Save this file somewhere (like ~/bin/prowl_things.rb)

6. Setup a cronjob to run the script as often as you’d like. Mine runs every weekday at 8:45 am.

   45 8 * * 1-5 /usr/bin/ruby /Users/me/bin/prowl_things.rb

It could be used on your home server to download torrent files you send to it from something like your iPad.

I’ve set it up to run every fifth minute (using cron) to check for new files, but can of course be adjusted to something that works for you.

Also, make sure to point Safari’s download folder (in Safari’s preferences) to the same folder as you have Transmission automatically watch for .torrent files so the download actually starts.

Everything you need to know is in the README on GitHub so if you’re interested in this, check it out.

I wanted to display my ToDos from Things on the Desktop using GeekTool so I created a command line tool in Ruby (backed by a library) to access the database.

This way you can see what needs to be done but without switching (or even launching Things)

It’s in a pretty early state right now and probably has bugs but I’ve been using it for some days now without problems. I’m planning to add write-support as well (so you can create tasks from the command line if Things isn’t running) but right now it’s read-only.

For more information, check out the README file and source on GitHub or this thread on the Things’ forum

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

DEFAULT_PORT = 3000

puts (`ps aux | grep [r]uby | grep script/server`.split("\n").map { |l|
  server = l.split(/\s+/)[11..-1]
  (port = server.index('-p')) ? server[port.next].to_i : DEFAULT_PORT
}.max || DEFAULT_PORT - 1).next

I aliased it to ss in .bash_profile like this:

alias ss='./script/server -p `~/bin/available_rails_port`'

(Btw, Happy 2008! I haven’t updated this site for a while)

Tired of see the the soooo 1999-ish font “Verdana” every time you get a local error page in Rails?
Now you don’t have to. With this plugin the error pages will use Arial or Helvetica instead—finally!

./script/plugin install http://burnfield.com/svn/martin/rails/plugins/verdano

./script/plugin install -x http://burnfield.com/svn/martin/rails/plugins/verdano

git clone git://github.com/haraldmartin/verdano.git

Happy new year!

Read more in the OmniGroup forums and/or download the latest version here.

Update: On request, here are some screenshots of how the todo list looks like:

My friends over at Konst & Teknik asked me to code their web site. It’s only one page, that should show the results from Google Image searches for the word in their name, “konst” and “teknik” (“art” and “technology” in swedish). I liked the idea and also got the opportunity to do some ruby scripting and try the Prototype JavaScript library.

Server side

Since Google currently doesn’t offer any API to do other searches than pure web searches and we wanted to use Google Image Search, I had to do my own image fetching script. The script is a ruby script that will pull the images and info from Google Images and store them in a local index file. First, I used Net::HTTP but I found out that it had problem dealing with the swedish characters (used in swedish, ie åäö) so I changed the URL-fetching to use curl instead, witch also was slightly faster. The index is written from ruby using Marshal. It is scheduled to run twice a week using cron.

Client side

My first approach was to make one class that downloads and shows the image for the given keyword. Then create one instance for each word (konst and teknik), controlling the preloading and image-switching every 4th second (meaning; updating one of the images every second second). But I found out it was hard to make the updates smooth and exacly on time.

Instead I split the client side script into of two main classes, the Preloader class and the Switcher class. The Preloader triggers a request using AJAX to a server side ruby script that will return a new random image from the image index and then stores the info received from the server in a local array. After some delay the script will start over again with a new request for another image. When the Preloader is done indexing some images then the Switcher will kick in and start showing them and switch every other second between the images for each word as long as there are images preloaded and ready to be shown. If the Preloader is out of preloaded images then the Switcher will pause and show a loader while the Preloader’s buffering. We wanted the images to be vertical aligned by bottom but I couldn’t make it work with CSS only (nor with vertical-align, float or position). Instead, the script is switching between two <div>s (for each word, totally four divs) and when the “not active” div got a new image loaded into it, it will find its dimensions and set its margins automatically. The next time it’s time to switch image (for this word) this div will be shown instead, the other one becomes invisible and get the next image loaded.

The script should work fine in Safari, Firefox, Camino etc (even WinIE6). It needs some code cleaning (mostly OO-issues; currently I’m referencing the instances from the class, which I think is a bit ugly) but I’m releasing it anyway.

Check it out http://www.konst-teknik.se

This is the second version of the Colhour as iChat picture I posted the other day. The biggest improvment is that it will show both the hours and the minutes.

There’re two versions of the script. The first one uses a Ruby script together with RMagick to create every image on the fly with the current time. But since it requires some installation of Ruby gems and other libraries, I decided to make a version with all 1440 images pregenerated (created with a small Ruby script of course) so you wont need to install the other libraries. The AppleScript still uses some Ruby, but it’s included in OS X, and should (at least) work on a basic OS X 10.4 Tiger installation. Let me know otherwise.

Instructions on how to set up a cron job to run the script every minute is in the previous post. Both the on-the-fly generated version (update-gen.scpt) and the pregenerated version (update-pregen.scpt) are included in the zip file.