A Party to the World » tools

The Incredible Screen Capture

Dan — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 08:42:25 +0000

It has occurred to me recently (or rather the possibility was suggested by a friend) that as a computer scientist, I’ve become so far removed from the “normal” use of computers by “Joe Sixpack.” I have a set of tools, programs, utilities that I use and love and imperialistically think everyone should use and love. I caught myself suggesting that someone use a command-line tool called “ffmpeg” to convert his videos.

That said, there is something incredibly useful that I think more people should know about and use: screen captures. They’ve been around forever, but they’re usually a deeply-buried feature (at least in OS’s I’ve used). I clearly focus on how to do this in Mac (sorry fanboys of other OS’s).

How To:

Command-Shift-3 – Captures the whole screen. If you have multiple monitors, it will capture everything visible.
Command-Shift-4 – Captures a selectable area.
Command-Shift-4, then Space – This is the one I use most often as it allows you to select a window. It’s quicker than drawing a box around the window, and the results look much nicer.
Home-Power Button – On the iPhone / iPod Touch, hold the home button and press the power button. Release.

iPhone / iPod Touch:

Quick-and-Dirty Save – I saw a friend scribbling down notes off of his iPod touch onto some paper. I asked if his battery was low, and he told me that it wasn’t, but he didn’t have wifi where he was going and might need to reference something. A screen capture is a great way to get a quick-and-dirty save of information you might need to reference. It’s not perfect, but it’s dead-simple.
Slow Connection – Whether you’re out in the boonies or just on an incredibly slow connection or have had to navigate some terrible website, once you get some information, instead of playing Safari-Roulette (whether or not it will decide to refresh from the server), a picture might be sufficient.
GPS – The built-in Google Maps doesn’t have waypoints, and so when I’m out and about with friends or on a hike, at the beginning, get your location on Google Maps and screen capture it. That way you don’t have to remember the intersection or where the trailhead was.
Directions – I love the Google Maps app, and though it has destroyed my sense of direction, it’s pretty useful. However, when you see the list of directions, if you close out the app (and sometimes even if you don’t), it will re-ping the GPS and that consumes time and precious battery life. Screen capture all the directions for a quick reference.
Anything Laggy – The general principle is if it might be slow to get back to, take a screen cap. I had a lab I needed to repeatedly reference in the field, but viewing the whole PDF was very laggy, but I didn’t need to see it in full resolution.

Computer:

Diagnosing Problems – If you are friend, family or colleague get in touch with me on AIM or email to help you solve your tech problem, do me this incredible favor and include screen captures of what you’re trying to do and what’s happening.
Describing How To – When conveying how something’s done, instead of describing where this button or that button is, or what text field to enter something, show the person. Screen captures make people feel confident that they’ve entered everything in correctly.
Spotting Bigfoot – Being quick on the keystrokes can be essential for documenting anomalies. My favorite such screen capture is I once got a debugger (not just any debugger – gdb) to crash. The tool one uses to figure out why programs crash, crashed.

Look and Feel – Here are some examples of what the different methods look like:

Bonus : Marking It Up – Whenever you want to mark things up a little bit to draw attention, there are a bunch of tools out there.

Skitch – http://skitch.com/ – You can quickly and easily mark up pictures and upload them to Flickr, Skitch and other places.
Drawing focus to certain areas.
OmniDazzle – http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnidazzle/ – Highlight as if with a spotlight (or other visualizations) certain areas of the screen. I use this all the time when lecturing or demonstrating something.
A demonstration of OmniDazzle

Automated Web Resource Citing With Bibtex

Dan — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 02:13:27 +0000

I find myself constantly citing web resources that I need to cite, and I think it’s a huge hassle. They’ve all got the same format, and though Bibtex does a lot of the formatting heavy lifting for you, it’s still a pain.

Enter laziness.

From Safari, I drag a web location onto my desktop, or keep them in a references folder:

Drag a link onto the desktop from Safari.

And then drag the web location onto the droplet to get results. You can drag several files or folders on at once:

Rejoice in the output.

Running on a directory.

Or from the command line tool (see the install tool):

Using it from the command line.

Installation:

Disk image contents

Files:
webdoc-0.1

IP Geolocation

Dan — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 16:59:36 +0000

There are a million services out there where you type in an IP address and get an estimate as to its location. A few months ago I stumbled across a free IP geolocation database because I find myself using online services from time to time – I was sort of surprised how often it’s helpful to know where traffic is coming from (outside of Google Analytics, etc.).

Using the database I found, I threw together a script that takes a list of domain names and / or IP addresses and gives you an idea of where it lives:

dan-lecocqs-macbook:~ dlecocq$ ipquery google.com 209.85.171.100 Mountain View, US 94043 37.4192 -122.0570 dan-lecocqs-macbook:~ dlecocq$ ipquery yahoo.com 68.180.206.184 Sunnyvale, US 94089 37.4249 -122.0070 dan-lecocqs-macbook:~ dlecocq$ ipquery apple.com 17.251.200.70 Cupertino, US 95014 37.3042 -122.0950 dan-lecocqs-macbook:~ dlecocq$ ipquery mines.edu 138.67.1.8 Golden, US 80401 39.7146 -105.2430

iP0wn3d!

Dan — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 01:02:24 +0000

I broke down, and I bought one. I’m now one of those a**holes walking down the street checking his email. I want to stay connected, via email and the internet, and also a phone.

See, for what has now become a multi-year bother, my friends have been pestering me about getting a cell phone. I put it off citing the associated charges and the shortcomings of other phones. But now, I can do a lot of tedious tasks I used to use my laptop for – checking mail, calling people, reading news, find local movie show times, get directions from point me to point b. Even listen to my music and watch stupid internet videos.

Simultaneously a great and sad day.

Fully charged and ready to go

What I see when it says hello

A demo graph from the grapher program I bought

My daily news intake

Looking for movies - blue dot is where I was

Watching a Reel Big Fish music video on YouTube

Which album to play?!

Nintendo DS Browser

Dan — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 22:13:45 +0000

I am actually writing this post from my Nintendo DS. Though I originally got the DS to use with a Kanji dictionary cartridge, since I had it laying around, I thought I’d drop the $30 to let me surf the net with it. That said, I had heard mixed reviews about the Opera web browser for DS, but most complaints were from people looking to play Flash games on the ‘net or people expecting Firefox on something like this.

Although it doesn’t boast the fastest browsing around, I’m liking it very much so far. Late nights in bed trying to recall the details of the Ford-Fulkerson algorithm can be settled earlier with a bedside visit to Wikipedia from my new toy. I envision myself taking this places where I don’t want to lug around a laptop (read: coffee shops), but I may have to look something up on Google or Wikipedia to verify a friendly bet.

It is, however, a little cumbersome to write a post or e-mail like this.

Addendum:
I thought it might be useful to show some sites with which I’ve had success, and which ones flounder.

Facebook – yes; little finnicky
Gmail – yes; no hitches
Google Reader – not yet; trying to tweak
Meebo – no; definite no
Lifehacker – yes; looks good, too
Wired – yes; slow to open, though
Google Search – yes
Google Maps – no :-(
Instructables – no
Yahoo Maps – yes; I miss Google

Leopard

Dan — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 01:15:46 +0000

Wüt for Leopard.

I’ve been enjoying the hell out of Apple’s new OS – you can read about its awesomeness elsewhere. I will express my surprise, however, that they are using a picture of Windows’ BSOD as the icon for network PCs. So… smug. I hope people are laughing about this as much as I am.

I was wary of the semi-transparent top bar, but the only thing I didn’t like about it was Google Notifier’s icon indicating that I have no unread mail. It… used… white…, not… transparent. I think you’ll agree it looked awful:

Much better after deleting the white bits and making them transparent:

Every iPod You Know Will One Day Die

Dan — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 02:57:54 +0000

The folks over at iPod Mechanic have conjured up the iPod Deathclock which, given your iPod’s serial number and a little information on how you use it, it tried to predict when your little friend will expire.

According to them, my 1st-gen iPod video has got another 483 days, 5 hours, 7 minutes and change left. Not bad in my opinion – I’ve already had it for a year+ and I use it for a couple of hours every day.

My 2nd-gen iPod shuffle has got 513 days, 15 hours, 33 minutes of tunes for the trails before it kicks it. I’ve had it for about 11 months, and have enjoyed it intensely – relatively cheap (especially for Apple), aesthetically pleasing, and I love the clip. Yeah, it’s not for everyone or everything, but autofill it from a ‘haven’t-heard-this-in-a-while’ playlist (using smart playlists and the last-played date), and it’s a little nostalgia machine. It also helps me resurface the ‘why-do-I-even-have-this-album’ music and get rid of it.

As per their suggestion on the site, I’m going to add a reminder on the day it’s set to die, and we’ll see if they’re still ticking away.

Via Lifehacker

XBMC

Dan — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 00:18:05 +0000

My XBox is now my gateway to my media. $4.73 for Splinter Cell (how this particular hack gets the Linux installer running), and $21.81 for an Action Replay kit to transfer the files. Now, all the media on the LAN are at the fingertips of my XBox. Music, Pictures, Movies and TV Shows – the whole gambit.

I used this Lifehacker article as a guideline. All in all, it took about an hour.

Mint

Dan — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 17:30:50 +0000

I have been dying to try out Mint, but unfortunately it doesn’t support my local bank at this point. They recently reworked their setup so that it’s much faster than it was a couple of days ago, and it looks so incredibly amazing. What it does is it keeps track of your various credit cards and bank accounts by logging you in and retrieving your recent activity. I’m not sure to what extent it automatically sort things, but my understanding is that it will do its best to pick out things like gas and groceries and sort them accordingly. See the changes in your monthly entertainment spending.

All in all, it looks very sharp. I emailed them about adding support for my bank, and hopefully they will do so soon.

Via LifeHacker.

ColdHeat

Dan — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 02:40:26 +0000

I recently put in a 3.5 mm jack in my car stereo that I might listen to my iPod without an FM transmitter (with which I’ve had no luck) or one of those cassette tapes (my tape deck does not work). In using my bulky soldering iron which I am certain came from the 50′s, I soldered two pins together, and I’m sure I came close to breaking something on several occasions. Frankly, I’m surprised the whole thing worked in the end.

I had seen the ColdHeat soldering iron on ThinkGeek (my nerd toys site of choice), but found out that RadioShack sells them, too. (And at RadioShack, it was even the same price!) Being one who hates to wait for / pay for shipping, and seeing as Kevin and I are going to do the same little experiment on his car stereo this weekend, I hopped on down to RadioShack to get it. I had some other things on my RS shopping list for other projects that this store didn’t have, but so be it.

I got it home, turned it on, and overly-trustingly touched the tip. Nothing. I touched the tip to the solder, and it melted and a blob fell to the counter. As soon as I could, I touch the tip again. Room temperature. It’s pretty neat. Check out some of the videos of it out and about on YouTube and Google Video.

For those interested, I got the car-stereo jack idea from Lifehacker, who apparently found it on Make.