Categories
Mac

Send files to Evernote from Hazel

I finally decided that I want to move most of my paperless workflow to Evernote. Its search feature make it more convenient than going through a bunch of folders in Dropbox, and I guess that the fact that the bonus space I had gained through Dropbox’s Space Race has expired gave me the final push I needed to move my stuff.

So, I made a thing.

Evernote_secret_mailI called it sendToEvernote. It’s a Python script that mails the files you want to send to Evernote to the personal address every Evernote user gets after signing up. You can find yours in the “Account Info” section of the app, and you should make sure you keep it secret, otherwise you’re likely to get random junk in your notebooks.

You’ll find sendToEvernote on GitHub. Download it.

I’ll spare you some details about the script (you can find everything in the README file), and just go through what you need to do to get up and running with Hazel.

  1. Download the mailer Python module:
    sudo easy_install mailer
  2. Edit your email settings at the top of the script
  3. Make it executable:
    chmod +x /path/to/sendToEvernote.py

    PROTIP: drag the file into your terminal window instead of typing the path manually.

  4. Add a “Run shell script” action (embedded script) to your Hazel rule, and enter the following:
    /path/to/sendToEvernote.py "Notebook name" "$1"

Hazel Evernote rule That’s it.

Categories
Mac

Introducing SoundBlossomer

SoundBlossomer LogoA while back I wrote about my hack that allowed me to have multiple instances of Soundflower that I used to record a multi-track Skype group call for podcasting purposes. That guide became pretty popular, and it was even linked in Cycling 74’s blog.

Today I’m introducing a new project, SoundBlossomer, a little utility that lets you easily add, edit and delete your Soundflower audio interfaces.

Basically, this app figures out which Soundflower instances you already have defined in your /System/Library/Extensions/Soundflower.kext/Contents/Info.plist file and shows them in a list, allowing you to add additional ones, as well as renaming, changing the number of channels and deleting the other ones.

SoundBlossomer Screenshot

I spent about a day putting together this app, which by the way is my first Mac app ever, and I think it works reasonably well, at least in all the testing I’ve made. If you find any issues, please, let me know.

SoundBlossomer is 100% open source, it is released under the BSD license and you can find all of its source code on the GItHub page. I strongly encourage you to check it out, and even to improve it if you can, I’d gladly pull your changes into the main repository.

Categories
Miscellanea

Get pretty date differences in PHP

Today I needed a quick way to get the time difference from an UNIX timestamp to the current date. To get an idea, it’s like the little date you see on Twitter.com, for example “5m” if the tweet was posted 5 minutes ago.

Here’s my quick-and-dirty PHP code, it just takes the timestamp as an input and returns the formatted output. Feel free to fork it and improve it!