A Party to the World » tools

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

ZipSkinny

Dan — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 04:32:28 +0000

I read about ZipSkinny.com on Lifehacker a couple of days ago, and it’s actually pretty neat. I never knew how white, educated, upper-middle-class middle-aged parent-like my community was. How did it escape my attention?

Still, I do get a certain amount of pride from the education level of Colorado, and especially the Boulder area. Culture is just dripping from every hemp messenger bag and Birkenstock sandal in Boulder proper.

Like MacGyver, Survivin’ For The Very First Time

Dan — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 03:17:03 +0000

Like MacGy-ay-ay-ay-ver.

Scenario: you need to boil some water to incapacitate a guard (a hot cup of tea puts him right to sleep. Also, he’s very trusting when it comes to strangers offering him tea), and you’ve got sandpaper, two soda cans, a razor, a tuft of fiberglass insulation, a tack and a bottle of Heet at your disposal. Also, the internet to watch this metacafe video.

I had seen this before and in various design complexities, but I really like the compactness and ease of this one. I decided to scrounge up some Heet ($2.10 at a local gas station), a couple of cans, sandpaper and a razor blade (both on hand), and pull a little piece of insulation off of some that happened to be sitting in our basement.

It got surprisingly hot – I tried setting an oven rack over it with a kettle (to knock out that tea-loving guard), and it started to melt one of the bars of the rack. I expected it to be hot, but not hot enough to melt parts of an oven rack. Who knew?

Success: certainly.

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.