Mac on Andres Marrugo

Always Late to The Party

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 00:11:00 -0500

To Tweet or Not to Tweet

It always seems I’m late to the party. For several years I pondered on the idea of joining Twitter, but it never really made much sense to me – at least at the time – to join a social network where there were hardly any friends of mine¹. Big mistake, that actually is one of the cool things about twitter. Unlike Facebook, it does provides an open space suitable for engaging in discussions, albeit short, of all sorts with interesting people who don’t really have to be your “friend.”

It turns out that shortly after joining twitter most people² were already considering abandoning it in favor of App.net. For the time being App.net seems like a niche thing, and most people seem to continue on twitter. Whether that stays that way for the next year or so depends on twitter and their recent policy changes that could well endanger the platform as we know it today.

Convert Image to PDF with Automator and Imagemagick

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 22:30:00 -0500

I often use Imagemagick for image manipulation¹. However, for simple conversion of an image to another format or similar things I have to go to the terminal and type something like the following

convert somefile.png somefile.pdf

Which is quite simple, and much better than opening preview -> export²->select pdf-> and hit save. But typing that for more than one image is also tedious. So, I decided I’d better create a service that would essentially do the following.

It would take the selected finder items, mainly images in png, jpeg, or whatever, and convert all of them to pdf. Simple.

My blog post writing workflow with Dropbox and Hazel

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 23:44:00 -0500

It may seem that, for the most part, I’ve been blogging about blogging. No matter how pointless it seems, I do think that this could prove useful to someone, in the same way I have benefited from others while setting up this site¹.

One of the things I like about having an Octopress driven txt-only blog is that I have the liberty to set things my way. The topic I am addressing here is that of writing blog posts on different devices² with the help of Dropbox³ and Hazel. I’m still working out the whole remote blogging thing, this is but the first stage of a soon-to-be remote blogging workflow with Octopress.

Spanish keyboard and Aperture

Sun, 07 Oct 2012 00:36:00 -0500

My new keyboard.

It's been quite a while since I've grown accustomed to switching back and forth between an english keyboard at home and a spanish keyboard at work. Like anything, at first it takes a while to get fully accustomed, but all in all it isn't too bad. This week my English keyboard at home died, so I bought a new one this time in Spanish, because that was what they had at the store.

One of the things I don’t like of the spanish keyboard ¹ is that most (if not all) applications design the shortcuts assuming an English keyboard. Therefore, what could be single key shortcut in the English keyboard becomes a double key shortcut in the Spanish keyboard. And that’s not all.

a service for writing day one footnotes inline

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 22:31:00 -0500

I recently wrote about inserting footnotes in Day One and how it could be achieved with the new markdown support. I realize that ideally Day One should support multimarkdown footnotes, but this has not arrived yet. It could well be planned for a future release, but I’ll stick to my solution for the mean time.

One of the tedious things about my solution to footnotes in Day One is that you have to do everything manually. The insertion of the footnotes plus the formatting, not to mention keeping count of the number of footnotes. For one or two footnotes this doesn’t seem like a big issue. But for several more it gets complicated.¹ You have to put the superscript (^), the number of the footnote, the horizontal line (which I think necessary) and the footnote itself. Therefore, I thought I could automate this–somewhat.

Footnotes in Day One

Sat, 29 Sep 2012 22:51:00 -0500

My favorite journaling app, Day One, just got updated to version 1.7.2, and it includes some really great new features.

It now includes more multimarkdown syntax like strike through, fenced code, and other nifty things. However one of the things I still find missing in Day One is multimarkdown footnotes. I’ve grown so accustomed to footnotes, that I don’t think I could live without them anymore.¹