Caius Theory

I use a wonderful service for saving text to be read later, instapaper.com. It's gotten more wonderful as time has gone on and other applications/service's have gained the ability to save links/articles/webpages there for me to pick up later.

For instance, I'm out and about checking twitter on my iPhone using tweetie and someone tweets a link. Rather than wait for it to load and having to read it then and there I can just hit "Read Later" and it's saved in my instapaper account for me to read as and when I choose to. Recently the legendary mac feed reader NetNewsWire gained this ability too.

There's a few ways to send a feed item to instapaper from within NNW. Firstly you can right-click and click "Send to Instapaper".

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Secondly there's a menu item for it in the News menu, which also provides my chosen way of instapapering an item—the keyboard shortcut! ⌃P (control-P).

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So, in NNW I'm happily sending stuff to instapaper with the handy ⌃P shortcut, but that doesn't exist in the third place I mark things to read later--Safari! Up until now I've been using the standard "Read Later" bookmarklet that instapaper.com provides, and it's got a spot on my Bookmarks Bar so I can easily click it.

That doesn't really help with the fact I'm hitting ⌃P in NNW, and it doesn't work in Safari. Quite often I noticed myself hitting the key combination in Safari and wondering for a split second why it wasn't sending the item to instapaper. Then the solution hit me!

In OS X you can setup (and/or override) menu items with custom key combinations! Why hadn't I remembered this before. Because the "Read Later" bookmark(let) is nested under the Bookmarks menu, it is a menu item! A quick trip into the Keyboards Prefpane in System Preferences and a new binding later and voilâ, "Read Later" in Safari is bound to ⌃P and I can use it in both Safari and NNW.

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This is a something that occasionally makes the rounds again, I've not seen it for a while and I've added some new items since I last remember documenting it. Thus, @macarne asking what the app was that gives me stats prompted me to document my current menubar items.

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1. SMCFanControl - Lets me adjust the minimum speed of my fans.
2. Tweetie/mac
3. iScrobbler - Scrobbles tunes iTunes plays
4. LittleSnapper (Or more accurately the menubar icon is NanoSnapper, LittleSnapper is the full app.) Mainly used for screen grabs.
5. SlimBatteryMonitor - Takes up less horizontal space than Apple's menu item.
6. Expresscard menu item - Lets me power off my Expresscard/34 SSD
7. MenuMeters - An old friend I've been using for as long as I can remember running OS X. Set to show (left to right)
   1. Ram - Used and Free totals.
   2. Network - Graph + values.
   3. CPU - Graph per core. Probably the most useful out of the three.
8. Bluetooth
9. Time Machine
10. Modem - To dial on my Huawei E220 3G stick.
11. Airport
12. Sound
13. Day/Time
14. Fast User Switching - Not sure why I keep this in the menubar, only have one user and I lock my screen with a password protected screensaver.
15. Viscosity - VPN software. Pretty useful.
16. Spotlight! - Occasionally this vanishes when spotlight decides to be a dick and eat ram/cpu reindexing my disk every few hours. Touch wood it hasn't done it since 10.6.1.

On a couple of occasions now I've wanted to read from STDIN into an Objective-C command line tool, and both times I've had to hunt quite a bit to find the answer because nothing shows up in google for the search terms I used. "Objective-c read from stdin" and "objc read stdin" both turn up results ranging from using NSInputStream to dropping some C++ in there.

The answer is quite simple really, just use NSFileHandle. More specifically +[NSFileHandle fileHandleWithStandardInput]. You can then read all data currently in STDIN, monitor it for new data and anything else you can do with a normal NSFileHandle.

And here's some example code, reads all data from STDIN and stores it into an NSString:

NSFileHandle *input = [NSFileHandle fileHandleWithStandardInput];
NSData *inputData = [NSData dataWithData:[input readDataToEndOfFile]];
NSString *inputString = [[NSString alloc] initWithData:inputData encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];

I'm using this in GarbageCollected apps, memory management without GC is left as an exercise to the user.

Here's how to access the self diagnostic / configuration menu on a Nissan Almera 2003 SVE (N16):

1. Start the engine
2. Turn the radio on
3. Turn the radio off
4. Hold the info button in then:
5. Turn the volume knob up (clockwise) until:
6. Diagnostic menu appears

From here you can do various things: run self-diagnostics; reset/change the main service counter; various other tests for the climate control, sat nav system, etc.

Recently I ran into an issue where I was working on a project which had files I wanted git to ignore, but I didn't want to commit a .gitignore file into the project. In case you don't know, any files matching a pattern in .gitignore in a git repository are ignored by git. (Unless the file(s) have already been committed, then they need removing from git before they are ignored.)

Initially I figured I could just throw the patterns I needed excluded into my global ~/.gitignore, but quickly realised that I needed files matching these patterns to show up in other git repos, so going the global route really wasn't an option. After some thought I wondered if you could make git ignore .gitignore, whilst still getting it to ignore files matching the other patterns in the .gitignore.

Lets create a new empty repo to test this crazy idea in:

$ mkdir foo
$ cd foo
$ git init
Initialized empty Git repository in /Volumes/Brutus/Users/caius/foo/.git/

And create a couple of files for us to play with:

$ touch bar
$ touch baz

Ignore one of the files so we can check other matches are still ignored later on:

$ echo "baz" >> .gitignore
$ git ststatus
# On branch master
#
# Initial commit
#
# Untracked files:
#   (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
#
#       .gitignore
#       bar
nothing added to commit but untracked files present (use "git add" to track)

Ok so far, but we can still see .gitignore in git, so now for the crazy shindig, ignore the ignore file:

$ echo ".gitignore" >> .gitignore 

Lets see if it worked, or if we can still see our .gitignore:

$ git status
# On branch master
#
# Initial commit
#
# Untracked files:
#   (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
#
#       bar
nothing added to commit but untracked files present (use "git add" to track)

And lets just double-check that .gitignore and baz still exist on the filesystem:

$ ls -a
.               ..              .git            .gitignore      bar             baz

Fantastic! Turns out adding ".gitignore" to .gitignore works perfectly. The file is still parsed by git to ignore everything else too, so it does exactly what I needed in this instance.