NSLog();

I'm developing a small site for someone and I've already hacked together a custom widget to show recent posts on every page of the site (the "blog" is more of a "news" thing while the main site uses pages), but I haven't yet found a good solution for an "Upcoming Events" widget.

If it were me, I'd just read in a PHP file with arrays in it or something and spit out the data. No muss, no fuss. But the guy who will be managing this will want a nice GUI for everything.

I found one plugin and widget that works with .ics files but I don't know that I can rely on the customer being able to create a .ics file.

Plugins like this one seem like massive overkill.

Update: In the end I hacked up a copy of External Events Calendar, which since the site is new and began after WordPress 3.5, required the Links Manager plugin to expose the links capabilities within WordPress again.

That is all.

The bulk of our day was spent watching some guy who shouts "Live action!" every four minutes.

Turn crossfading off. You might even be able to turn it on again after you quit and re-launch iTunes ((It worked here for me doing that.)), but turning it off fixed the problems right away.

Weird bug.

P.S. I have an "Unrated/Unplayed" smart playlist that contains songs I haven't played OR haven't rated, and it was frustrating to play 20 songs in the list, rate them, and have them play again because they weren't disappearing from the playlist.

I only see loser's here.

I award 72 :doh:s to LongHorn Steakhouse.

Found this GIF while cleaning up my Downloads folder.

It's interesting how many little changes took what was the first icon (inspired by actual pulp fiction) to the final icon.

PulpFiction and its replacement Cyndicate remain two of my most favorite applications I've developed (including some I've never released but which I use weekly).

Ho hum.

The traction drive spring for the Husqvarna 10530 SBE is part #532180926.

I heard this trivia question while on hold:

What King became President of the United States of America?

Gerald Ford, who was born Leslie Lynch King, Jr. before being semi-adopted and changing his name on December 3, 1935.

• 2012's Worst Words - I'm so glad I didn't hear of many of them.
• 2012's Top Tech Fails. Spoiler: Apple's Maps wins. Meh, whatever. I've never had a problem with them. I'd have voted for how freaking useless and slow Siri turned out to be.
• Artisanal Water - Yeah, people apparently buy it.
• Gun nuts - Hey, regular gun owners don't like them either.
• The final episode of Homeland (season 2) was 30 minutes of terrible and 20 minutes of greatness. The final episode of Dexter (season 7) was good the whole way through.
• Comfort dogs are being flown to Connecticut? Okay.
• The media needs to get their facts right, I agree.

I mentioned in the comments on this post that I'd write this up, so here goes. What follows is an AppleScript I activate via FastScripts with the keyboard shortcut cmd-opt-f. It scrapes the page, filters the text, builds a list of URLs to click from the "new post" links (often an image is linked), and then opens them in reverse order, oldest to newest.

This lets me quickly read (or mark as read, even if I just quickly close that particular thread because I am not interested in it) all the new posts on any of the forums I visit regularly.

Note: a simplified version of this script is available here: http://cl.ly/1i1G0G3C2X1n.

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 1312); »

Instagram's new ToS (Terms of Use, technically), effective January 16, 2013, says:

Some or all of the Service may be supported by advertising revenue. To help us deliver interesting paid or sponsored content or promotions, you agree that a business or other entity may pay us to display your username, likeness, photos (along with any associated metadata), and/or actions you take, in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you.

Where by "metadata" they mean location data.

But that doesn't necessarily bug me that much - it's the advertising as a whole thing that bugs me.

This article suggests users pay $5/month, but that's too much. If users had to pay $0.99 for every "24-pack" of photos or something, that would be a good way to go.

I'd also willingly pay $10 to never have to see ads on Instagram again. I've already opted out of ads on the Kindle and they're not even super intrusive or annoying, from what I've heard.

I just don't want to mess with 'em. Ever.

A good article that's neither pro-gun nor anti-gun.

This is appropriate too:

Let me tell you a story. The day after Columbine, I was interviewed for the Tom Brokaw news program. The reporter had been assigned a theory and was seeking sound bites to support it. "Wouldn't you say," she asked, "that killings like this are influenced by violent movies?" No, I said, I wouldn't say that. "But what about 'Basketball Diaries'?" she asked. "Doesn't that have a scene of a boy walking into a school with a machine gun?" The obscure 1995 Leonardo Di Caprio movie did indeed have a brief fantasy scene of that nature, I said, but the movie failed at the box office (it grossed only $2.5 million), and it's unlikely the Columbine killers saw it.

The reporter looked disappointed, so I offered her my theory. "Events like this," I said, "if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn't have messed with me. I'll go out in a blaze of glory."

In short, I said, events like Columbine are influenced far less by violent movies than by CNN, the NBC Nightly News and all the other news media, who glorify the killers in the guise of "explaining" them. I commended the policy at the Sun-Times, where our editor said the paper would no longer feature school killings on Page 1. The reporter thanked me and turned off the camera. Of course the interview was never used. They found plenty of talking heads to condemn violent movies, and everybody was happy.

A few random thoughts…

- Guns don't kill people, people do. But guns make it easier to kill people than a knife.

- If you want to kill a bunch of people, bombs, poisons, etc. are effective too.

- The media sure makes mass killers famous, don't they?

- Guns save lives, too - and I don't just mean guns used by the police.

- Murder is illegal. Didn't seem to stop that jackass in Connecticut. Point being if guns are made illegal, I'm fairly certain criminals will still find them. Not as many, and maybe not guys like this one, but then again, he could have made a bomb too.

- No responsible gun owner I know of is opposed to rational, reasonable restrictions on guns.

- This country needs people to hunt. It controls the population and leads to healthier game populations.

- The NRA isn't as wealthy as a lot of people want to believe it to be. And the NRA is not supported 100% by all gun owners. Far from it. I was a member for one year a decade ago until I learned more about them.

- I own two guns. One's a "fun" 0.22 slab sided Ruger which is great for target shooting (and, if I wanted, perhaps some squirrel or rabbit hunting). The other is a 9mm that I hope to never use outside of occasional practice and maintenance at a shooting range.

- Instructing teachers how to use a gun and to have one in the classroom is about the stupidest "solution" I've heard proposed.

- School remains statistically the safest place for children.

- A .223 is not a "high powered assault rifle." It's a hunting rifle. I shot my first deer with one.

- Millions and millions and millions of gun owners did not kill anyone today.

- The media should really try to get its facts right before they release information. The amount of misinformation that's been spread today by news outlets has been astounding.

A great article, and one I'll read again, but let me just say this: thank goodness AppleScript has survived. The number of things for which I rely on AppleScript every day is somewhere between 50 and 1000, and probably between 200 and 500 depending on how you define "things."