I’ve only just got round to reading the book, but I’m glad I did. As a learning book it’s deliberately quite lightweight and easy to get through in a short time, in the same way that Steve Krug’s “Don’t Make Me Think” is designed to be absorbed in a couple of hours on a flight. All told, I spent about three hours with this book, on my tube journeys to and from work this week.

Robin starts her journey by briefly explaining the concepts of Contrast, Repetition, Alignment and Proximity (anyone spot an acronym there?), before moving on to explore each concept in greater detail. As Robin repeatedly tells us in her book, by being able to name the concepts you’re able to identify them and use them deliberately rather than accidentally.

The second half of the book deals with type; the different styles of typefaces, how to combine them and horrible errors of judgement to avoid.

Spread throughout the book are a bunch of mini quizzes and exercises designed to get you thinking about what you’ve just read. The quizzes are a nice touch, and I’m sure I’ve retained more knowledge because of them than I would have done if I’d just read through from cover to cover.

The book covers design in general, rather than being focussed on the web, print or presentations. Whilst Williams has written a book called “The Non-Designer’s Web Book” I specifically chose to buy this one because both I wanted a general overview book and because the web book is from 2005 (a lifetime ago on the web) and has some mixed reviews. “The Non-Designer’s Design Book” did not disappoint – it’s given me that overview that I was looking for, and I now feel a bit more comfortable that my designs will actually work.

“The Non-Designer’s Design Book” costs £23.99 in all good bookshops, or currently £12.30 on Amazon.

Another post, another chance to point to Lay the Table and show off a different recipe than the one Becs used. This time it’s for big fat nommery Chocolate Orange Cupcakes.

The cake mix is a fairly standard mix, with a bit of good quality cocoa powder thrown in. On top of that you have a nice fruity orange sugar syrup, all topped off with some zesty orange frosting.

Takes a couple of hours all told, ideally with a day in the middle. 20 minutes cooking time for the cakes.

These ingredients make 12 normal sized cupcakes or 24 little ones.

Ingredients

Zesty Orange Frosting

• 150g icing sugar
• 100g cream cheese (full fat!)
• 50g unsalted butter
• The grated zest of two oranges.

Orange Sugar Syrup

• The juice of one orange (about 5 tbsp)
• 75g caster sugar
• 1 tbsp Cointreau

Chocolate Cupcake base

• 100g unsalted butter
• 100g caster sugar
• 2 medium eggs
• 85g self raising flour
• 15g cocoa powder

Instructions

Zesty Orange Frosting

1. Cream the butter and sugar.

2. Add the cream cheese, and mix this in too.

3. Grate the zest of two oranges and, you guessed it, add this into the mix as well!

   Don’t chuck the oranges though – you’ll need one of them for the syrup.

Orange Sugar Syrup

1. Juice one of the oranges you had left over from the frosting.

2. Bring the orange juice and sugar to the boil, stirring to dissolve the sugar.

3. Let the syrup cool, and then stir in the Cointreau (or other orange liqueur if you prefer).

   Yes, this means there will be a tiny bit of alcohol in your cakes. If you’d prefer there not to be, just add another tablespoon of orange juice instead at this point.

4. Leave to infuse overnight if at all possible to let all the lovely flavours intermingle. If you can’t wait, then start making the cupcakes now instead.

Chocolate Cupcake

1. Preheat the oven to 160ºC.

2. Cream the butter and sugar.

3. Lightly beat the eggs, and slowly add them to the mix – combine on a medium speed.

4. Once the sugar, butter and eggs are combined, mix in the flour and cocoa powder at a low speed.

   That’s your cake mix – nice and simple.

5. Put your mix into your cupcake cases, and from there into the oven for 18-20 minutes.

   I use a children’s plastic icing plunger to place my cake mix into cases. I find this is much easier than using spoons, and quicker than using a proper icing bag (which is use for the proper icing).

6. Once the cakes have cooked, leave them to cool for ten minutes if you’re making normal cupcakes, or five minutes if you’re making mini ones.

7. Prick the top of the cupcakes a few times with something pointy like a cocktail stick, and using a pastry brush coat the tops with the sugar syrup.

   Be careful not to splash syrup everywhere, but also remember that the syrup is fantastic and will keep the cakes lovely and moist and add flavour so don’t be stingy. Don’t be worried if you have a load of syrup left though – that’s normal.

8. Once completely cooled, you can ice the cakes using your preferred method.

9. Finally, eat the damn cakes!

Last weekend was Becca’s birthday, and since I’d been promising her I’d make her a birthday cake I ended up scouring the internet for a nommy sounding recipe. Somehow I managed to miss the fabulous sounding recipe that Becs recently posted on Lay the Table, and instead settled on one from the BBC Good Food website, even though if I’m honest it didn’t visually appeal to me too much. As Becca said about the Good Food cake: “It looks like a f*cking breezeblock!”.

I’m ridiculously happy that I looked past that initial photo. What I ended up with after I tweaked things a bit was frankly fantastic. It’s ridiculously rich though, and definitely not something I could see myself making every week – it’s most certainly a treat cake.

Takes one hour and fifty minutes – twenty minutes preparation of the cake, one hour cooking, half an hour icing.

Ingredients

For the cake:

• 250g self raising flour
• 250g soft brown sugar
• 50g cocoa
• 250g plain chocolate
• 250g butter
• 4 eggs
• 200ml water

For the sauce and icing:

• 150g plain chocolate
• 250g milk chocolate
• 300ml single cream
• 25g butter
• 700g icing sugar

Instructions

1. Preheat the oven to 160ºC.

2. Mix the flour, sugar and cocoa in a bowl.

3. Melt the chocolate, butter and water together in a pan.

4. Allow to cool slightly, and beat the wet into the dry mixture along with the eggs.

5. Dollop your mixture into a cake tin and bake for one hour.

6. Whilst the cake cools, it’s time to make the icing.

   Melt the chocolate, butter and single cream in a pan, and mix until it becomes smooth and comes together.

7. All the sauce to cool for about 20 minutes.

8. Beat in about 250g of icing sugar.

   At this point the sauce should be rich, thick and dark.

9. Slice the cake in half, and spread as much of the sauce as you want between the slices. Put the top of the cake back onto the bottom.

10. Beat in the remaining icing sugar.

    The sauce will now have become icing, will be a lot lighter in colour and will form peaks in your bowl.

11. Apply the icing to the cake. Make it as messy as you want – there’s something magical about a fully iced cake covered in dozens of little peaks and troughs.

12. Allow the cake to set.

    Over the next couple of hours the icing will harden, allowing it to crunch when you bite into it. The inside of the cake and the rest of the icing will remain wonderfully moist and rich.

13. Host a party, or take the cake into work. This is one cake you certainly don’t want to keep to yourself.

I’m a big fan of flapjacks – they’re sweet and oaty and fruity and yummy. Even better, they’re gluten-free, so my coeliac friends can eat them too.

Most of the time I make mine with cherries and sultanas, but it’s just as easy to substitute in other ingredients.

Takes 10 minutes to prepare, 20 minutes to cook.

Ingredients

• 150g unsalted butter
• 200g light brown sugar
• 4 tbsp golden syrup
• 350g porridge oats
• 150g sultanas
• 100g glacé cherries

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 180ºc

2. Melt butter, sugar and golden syrup in a pan.

3. Whilst the meltening is happening, chop up your cherries. I tend to take them down to quarters.

4. Once everything’s melted remove from the heat, and mix in the oats, cherries and sultanas.

5. Press into a tin, and cook for 20 minutes in the oven.

6. Once it’s out of the oven, let the flapjack cool for a few minutes before scoring it deeply into portion sized pieces.

7. Once cold, turn out the flapjack and break into pieces.

Anyway, enough of the pre-amble, lets see why I decided to do an unboxing of this t-shirt (all images link to larger versions on flickr)!

The t-shirt arrived in a nice simple, black posting bag, but it was immediately obvious to me that it didn’t just contain your average, limply inserted t-shirt. Oh no, it was obvious there was something more in here. Some sort of box.

A box covered by nothing less than the highest grade of bubblewrap known to man. (Okay, I might be overegging the pudding a little here, but it was wrapped in bubblewrap. You wouldn’t want the box getting damaged in transit now, would you?)

Of course, being an inquisitive chap I ripped the bubblewrap off the box and discovered a wonderful piece of custom artwork on an old-school VHS tape case. Frankly, this is a level of commitment I have never before seen in any t-shirt that I’ve bought. Of course, I’ve never bought anything that was in a limited edition of 50 worldwide before either, but that’s beside the point. Going to the trouble of creating a second piece of artwork to contain the t-shirt that I was actually purchasing is above and beyond the call of duty.

The box has a whole load of wonderful little touches, such as the rating certificate of “DB: Suitable only for persons of a really cool nature and an unatural (sic) love of film”, and the statement on the front that reads “…Life is a war, be a hero. Be a hero in an awesome t-shirt…”. This packaging makes me happy.

The t-shirt itself is also pretty damn fab. The weight is great, and the feel of the cloth is smooth to the touch. It’s a pity that the tiny text on the design is almost impossible to read, but that’s a very minor criticism. Other than that the design has transferred fantastically from Photoshop to t-shirt.

So, congratulations Alex. You’ve successfully made me happier opening this t-shirt than anyone has ever done before. Good job.

“Robocop: Directive 3 Baby Food” is part of a limited run of 50 t-shirts from Dark Bunny Tees, and is apparently still available for £25 from the website. You’d better get your skates on if you’re a fan though – I wouldn’t bet on it being around for long.

It takes about 15 minutes to cook and tastes fantastic. Serves 2.

Ingredients

• 4 – 5 rashers of bacon (we use Sainsbury’s Be Good to Yourself Bacon Medallions for this)
• 1 courgette
• Garlic puree
• 150g “light” creme fraiche (we used TESCO’s Healthy Living Creme Fraiche today)
• 4-5 balls of Tagliatelle
• Olive oil

Instructions

1. Slice the courgette in half lengthways, and then slice each half finely. Add it to a large frying pan with a little bit of olive oil and a good squeeze of garlic puree. Mix, and fry on a medium heat for a few minutes until soft.

2. Whilst the courgette is softening, remove the fat from your bacon and slice’n'dice into small pieces. Once the courgette is soft add the bacon to the pan. I tend to turn the heat up a bit now to brown the courgette a bit.

   If you want, you can add even more garlic puree at this point. Don’t forget to give everything a good mix.

3. Now that your bacon and courgette is frying, put your tagliatelle into a saucepan and start cooking it. We tend to put four to five balls in. This will be cooked in about 7 minutes.

4. Once the bacon is cooked, it’s time to add your creme fraiche. Just dollop it into the frying pan and mix. It’ll start to turn a creamy yellow colour as it pulls in the lovely juices from your bacon and courgette.

5. Give it a couple of minutes, then drain your tagliatelle and add it too to the frying pan. Mix everything together and serve immediately. Grate some parmesan on top if you’re feeling that way inclined.

Nommy.

I had thought that this was something most other interested people would have known about already, and that I was slow on the uptake as usual, but it turns out that when I mentioned this to Adriano Castro today he wasn’t aware. So, I present to you a method for deep linking into YouTube videos.

1. Take one YouTube URL.

   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ust9YBlEfY
   

2. Watch it, and find a place within it that you’d like to link to.

   In this instance, I want to link 28 seconds in.

3. Add a fragment to the URL with the format #t=minutesmseconds

   In this instance, the URL would become:

   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ust9YBlEfY#t=0m28
   

4. That’s all there is to it. Simples.

It’s because of my love of ED-209, that loveable rogue from the Robocop films, that Becca bought me this wonderful t-shirt for Christmas. It’s one I’ve had my eye on for some time, since seeing it on Last Exit to Nowhere last year. Last Exit are one of those places that I end up going and looking at quite a lot, because they have rather nice movie based imagery that isn’t just a straight lift and shift from the movies in question.

This, however, is the first t-shirt that I’ve ended up getting from them. Normally I wouldn’t go for t-shirts that are printed on a white or creamy fabric, but since Becca bought this for me I didn’t have much choice. Frankly though, in the flesh I rather like this one. As a larger chap, I tend to think they help to make me look even bigger than I am, but happily this doesn’t seem to be the case with this one. This despite the fact that when I unwrapped it on Christmas morning I was convince that I’d been sent a t-shirt one size larger than I needed!

As it turns out, although the t-shirt was the same size as everything else I own, the neck was considerably larger and the shoulders a bit wider. A bit weird, but nothing that was off-putting to me once I put the t-shirt on.

“ED-209” is available from Last Exit to Nowhere for £18 and is printed on an “ice grey” shirt of no specified brand. And yes, I would buy that for a dollar.

Takes five minutes to prepare, then take as long as you want to drink it.

Ingredients

• 2 shots of rum
• Half a lime
• 2 teaspoons of granulated sugar
• 10 mint leaves
• A whole bunch of crushed ice
• Soda water if you really want it

Instructions

1. Spoon two tablespoons of granulated sugar into your cocktail shaker. Squeeze half a lime onto this, making sure to get as much juice out as you can. Drop the leftover husk of the lime in too. Now throw 10 or so mint leaves in as well (take them off the stalks).

2. Here’s where the magic happens – muddling the sugar, lime and mint together. If you’ve already got a muddler then great, use that. Otherwise, do as I do and use a simple wooden rolling pin.

   Push down into your mixture with your muddler, rotating as you do. This crushes the mint into your sugary limey mixture, releasing its essential oils and wonderful flavours as you do so. Remember how mint leaves don’t really smell of anything until you rub them together in your fingers? That’s what is happening here.

   Give it a good bit of pressure, and you’ll only need to muddle for a few seconds. We’ll now leave this to sit for a minute or two whilst we prepare the ice.

3. Fill the glass you’ll be making the mojito in twice with ice (I use a chunky half-pint glass), and empty this out into a tea towel. Gather the tea towel up to make sure none of the ice can escape, and then give it a few thwacks with a mallet. We use a cheap wooden one – it works a lot better than using the rolling pin again.

   Once the ice is sufficiently pulverised, add it to your glass. You’ll find that what once filled the glass twice should now pretty happily fit in just the once.

   The reason we crush the ice like this is to increase the available surface area to cool the liquid in the drink. If we do a good job of crushing it, we’ll end up with things getting so cold that the outside of the glass frosts over. Lovely.

   As you can see, these mojitos use a lot of ice. For this reason we tend to keep bags of the stuff in the freezer, just for cocktails.

4. We’re back to the cocktail shaker now, and we’re finally getting to the alcohol.

   Add a couple of ice cubes to the shaker, pour in two shots of your favourite white rum, put the top back on and shake roughly. Once you’ve finished shaking and everything’s mixed together nicely, strain into your ice-filled glass.

   Your ice will turn green as you pour over it, and you’ll get some tiny pieces of mint seeping through your drink.

5. At this point, I’d be done. I don’t think that these mojitos need anything adding to them to water them down, but depending on how you like yours you might want to. So, if you want to, add some soda water now.

6. Finally, add a straw and some mint to garnish, and sip happily.

Now, I’m slightly ashamed to admit it, but up until last week I hadn’t been upgrading regularly. It had seemed like in order to be able to use WordPress’s “Upgrade Automatically” functionality I had to either enable FTP (ewwww), or FTPS (seemed like a lot of effort, and needed the SSH extension for PHP installing). So, I’d ended up doing an upgrade every now and then manually. Not the best plan in the world.

So, last week I decided to take another look and see if there wasn’t a more sensible way to enable WordPress to run its “Upgrade Automatically” code. Turns out there is – just make sure the directory you’re running WordPress under is owned by the same user that your web server is running as. Do this, and suddenly “Upgrade Automatically” works, and you’re a happy camper.

And how to do that? Simple. First, find out which user your web server is running as:

ps aux | grep apache

Generally, the answer will be www-data. Then, once you’ve worked out who the server’s owner is, change the owner of your WordPress directory tree:

chown -R www-data:www-data /path/to/wordpress/

Then, when you go back into WordPress you’ll be able to click on the “Upgrade Automatically”, and WordPress will actually upgrade itself. Hooray! (Of course, don’t forget to back up before you do this. I am not responsible for your data, follow instructions at your own risk, Santa Claus is real, etc.)

Hopefully this is of use to someone out there. It’s certainly made me happier about the whole upgrade dance.

Update

As Chris so rightly points out below, leaving things open to the web server to change willy nilly can be a little silly, so after running the update do another chown, this time changing the ownership back to your username and group.

Takes 30 minutes – 10 minutes preparation, 20 minutes cooking.

Ingredients

• 170g unsalted butter
• 50g granulated sugar
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• 210g plain flour
• a pinch of salt

Instructions

1. Preheat your oven to 180ºc.

2. Cream the butter and sugar, then beat in the vanilla extract.

3. Add flour and salt, and mix until everything’s come together.

4. Press hard into a tin and bake for 20 minutes, or until slightly golden.

   If I’m making this Shortbread to turn into Millionaire’s Shortbread I like to line the tin with foil to make turning it out later easier.

5. Once the Shortbread comes out of the oven, if you’re just going to keep it as Shortbread then you might like to score it with a knife to make it easier to break into nommy pieces once it’s cool.

A couple of weeks ago, I realised that my public vCard was less useful than it might be. One of the specific reasons that I created it was to make it easy for people to add a bunch of my contact information to their address books when I met them, rather than them having to manually type in a whole load of stuff that was on a business card. It turns out that this is great when that person’s sat at their own computer, but if they’re (for example) using an iPhone then things become a little more difficult.

You see, the iPhone doesn’t like to use MobileSafari to download files. That’s fine in general – you don’t get a filesystem to peruse on the iPhone, so the only way that downloads would be useful is if the iPhone already knows what to do with them. That’s why applications are allowed to register their own custom URL schemes.

Unfortunately, by default the iPhone only registers a few URL schemes for use within web pages – mailto:, tel: and sms: as pseudo protocols, as well as specific URL structures for Google Maps, YouTube and iTunes links. This makes it impossible to do things like adding an address to the Address Book or an event to the Calendar with a single click on a link in a webpage – you just get a message that reads “Download failed. Safari cannot download this file”.

This is clearly a pain. As a phone, it seems reasonable that you should be able to easily add contacts to your Address Book. Unfortunately, either Apple thinks you shouldn’t be able to do this from a webpage or they just didn’t consider it as a usecase.

It turns out that they did consider that you might like to open email attachments though. If someone sends you an email that contains a VCF file then you are able to open it and see its contents. If you then scroll down to the bottom of the file you’re greeted with two options, allowing you to “Create New Contact” or “Add to Existing Contact”. Suddenly a world full of contact adding goodness is opened up to you.

So, what I’ve decided to do with my vCard is a little bit of user agent sniffing in my PHP. Currently I assume that every other device in the world other than the iPhone will do something sensible with the normal VCF file (or the microformatted data that’s on the page itself), so I listen out for the iPhone’s user agent. If I see it then I swap out the link to download the VCF file with one that takes the user to a page containing a form allowing them to enter their email address. Once they do, the VCF file is immediately emailed to them and they can add my card to their address book.

Right now the look and feel of the the email form that iPhone users are directed to could be described as rudimentary at best, but it works. At some point in the future I’ll get round to making it look a bit more pretty.

As a solution, I’m fairly happy with this. Whilst it’s nowhere near as nice as being able to simply click on a link and add a contact to your address book, it does at least mean that it becomes possible to add a contact from a web page. Certainly it’s a better solution than not allowing users access to the content at all. It’s also entirely possible that this solution would work for other filetypes, such as calendar events.

My only concern is that this problem may be in existence in other devices other than the iPhone as well. It would almost certainly make sense to make the email option available to users of other devices as well.

So there you have it – to allow a user to add a contact to their Address Book from a webpage on the iPhone don’t try and get them to download it, let them receive it via email instead.

Having the summer off after leaving Yahoo! has been fun, and doing bits and pieces of freelance work has been enjoyable too, but I’ve missed the camaraderie that comes from a good team that works well together. So, I’m very much looking forward to joining the team at the BBC and seeing what awesome things we can do together.

Here’s to the future!

PS – I’m really quite pleased I got through this entry without punning terribly.

The first thing to be aware of is that if Safari can display something on a webpage, then Dashboard can display it as well. If you visit a page in Safari and right-click somewhere on the background of the page then you should see a menu item titled Open in Dashboard.... If you select this then you’ll be able to drag to select an area of the page to turn into a dashboard widget. Click the Add button at the top of the window once you’re done, and you’ll magically have created a widget. Now, any time you open up your Dashboard that widget will be reloaded and you’ll see fresh data.

So, that’s how we’ll display the playlist as a Dashboard Widget – we’ll create a webpage that contains the data and then use that as the widget.

If you read the last entry, you’ll know that I like to use AppleScript as a quick glue language on my Mac. It’s pretty easy to use (once you know what you’re doing), and you can hook into many of the apps you use on a day to day basis and do interesting things with them. So, it should be no surprise to hear that I’ll be using AppleScript to get the playlist data out of iTunes. Given that I’ll be displaying this data on a webpage though I’ll be using PHP (because it’s what I know) to write a quick and dirty page that displays the data that the AppleScript provides.

The AppleScript is a little more involved than the one liners we used last time. We need to grab the current playlist and then grab information about its UID, Title, Artist and Album, and before finally finding out what the currently playing track is. Here’s how we do that.

set tracks_list to {} tell application "iTunes" tell current playlist tell tracks set tracks_list to get {persistent ID, name, artist, album} end tell end tell set tracks_list to tracks_list {persistent ID of current track}
end tell get tracks_list

In this script we first we create an empty list to put all our data in, then we add lists of track IDs, names, artists and albums to it, then we add a single item of the currently playing track’s ID. It’s not the most elegant of data structures to use once we get to play with it in PHP, but it’ll do. Running this from the commandline using osascript -s s playlist.scpt (the -s s means “print the output in a recompilable form”) gives us something like the following (respaced for clarity):

{ { "0D7D716D221B623B", "688E193B9F7F7EE3", "05BFA94137C9691F" }, { "Fashion Is Danger", "Fabulous", "Never Gonna Give You Up" }, { "Flight of the Conchords", "High School Musical Cast", "Rick Astley" }, { "I Told You I Was Freaky", "High School Musical 2", "Fantastic 80s" }, "688E193B9F7F7EE3"
}

Now that we have a data structure, we can actually do something with it in PHP. Unfortunately, as far as I’m aware there’s nothing built into PHP that’ll read this structure. Fortunately though, this structure is pretty damn close to JSON. If we were to replace the twiddly brackets with square ones then PHP’s json_decode would return a data structure and we could do something with the data. Hooray. It’s a hack, but it works, and it’s what I did. A simple str_replace later and I had data. You can see the code, such as it is, in my github repository.

The eagle eyed amongst you will notice that I’m not directly calling osascript from my PHP script though, and am instead going through an intermediary shell script that nukes DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH before running the AppleScript. The reason for this is that on the machine I’m running the script on I’m using MAMP for my web stack, and that does funny things with DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH under Snow Leopard apparently. So, I have to nuke it.

And that’s all there is to it. Visit the webpage you’ve created to display the data, let it show you what’s playing and then turn it into a dashboard component using Safari. I get to control iTunes on a remote machine and I don’t have to keep a VNC connection on it. This makes me happy.

My situation is that my iTunes music library is stored on my MacMini that lives in my living room (connected to and powering my TV experience). However, most of the time I spend using my MacBook Pro, which spends most of its time in the office upstairs a fair way away from the MacMini. Because I spend most of my time at the laptop, it’s nice to have music available for me to listen to on it. Of course, if I just wanted to listen to music then this would be a very short blog post – I could use iTunes to share the library from the MacMini and listen to the music upstairs, or I could use Spotify or Last.fm. The problem with these as solutions are that I make heavy use of Smart and Genius Playlists in iTunes to generate playlists of music to listen to. Using iTunes’ sharing feature doesn’t allow me to rate tracks in the originating library (even with iTunes 9’s “Home Sharing” feature), and it also doesn’t generate extra playcount in the originating library for the things I listen to. This means my Smart Playlists don’t update in the expected way, and I become a sad panda. Likewise, Genius Playlists don’t work in a usable way when using a shared library, so this doesn’t really work for me.

What I wanted was a way to play my music using the MacMini downstairs, but have the music erupt from the speakers connected to my MacBook Pro. As it turns out, there’s an app for that – Airfoil. This lovely application hijacks audio from one device and sends it out across the network to multiple other devices of your choice, all in sync. So, immediately I was able to use OSX’s Screen Sharing app to connect to my MacMini, start some music playing in iTunes and then have Airfoil pipe it out to my MacBook Pro. It was a solution that was sheer elegance in its simplicity. Yes, you have to wait a second or so after pressing play before you hear anything come out of your speakers, but that’s down to Airfoil making sure all your devices are in sync before it starts to do anything. All in all, it’s brilliant. It costs $25, but that’s a small price to pay for this functionality for me.

The only problem is that in playing music on a different computer than the one you’re on, you’re playing music on a different computer than the one you’re on. So various things, like media keys on your keyboard don’t work in the way you expect. So, whenever I was wanting to do simple things like pause my music I was having to go into Apple’s Screen Sharing app, log into the MacMini and then press the pause button in iTunes. Not ideal. So, I wrote a quick AppleScript in Apple’s Script Editor:

tell application "iTunes" of machine "eppc://macmini-2.local" to playpause

Yup, that’s a really simple AppleScript. Something I wasn’t aware of until a couple of days ago is that it’s possible to run AppleScript that runs AppleScript on a different machine. All you have to do is go into System Preferences, open the Sharing panel, and enable Remote Apple Events. The first time you try to run an event on the remote machine you’ll be asked to enter your credentials on the local machine, which you can save to your keychain for auto-use in the future. Now, if I run that AppleScript then iTunes on the remote machine will toggle its play state, and consequently on my local machine. Awesome.

It’s just as easy to write other scripts as well. For example, to advance to the next track, just change playpause to play (next track).

But we’re still not controlling iTunes on the remote machine with just a keypress. If you’ve got something like Quicksilver installed on your machine then you should be able to simply hook the script up to a key combination of your choice. I don’t currently have Quicksilver installed on this machine (and wasn’t about to install it just for this), so I had to find another alternative. What I’m currently using is FastScripts Lite, a free app that adds an icon to your menubar that contains menu items for any AppleScripts you put in a certain directory. The nice thing about FastScripts is that it also allows you to enter a keypress combo for any of these scripts by going into its Preferences pane and double clicking on the Shortcut field next to the relevant script. I’ve got playpause bound to ctrl-up, next track to ctrl-right and previous track to (you guessed it) ctrl-left. Now I can easily change what I’m listening to with a quick keypress, and I’m happy.

Well, I’m almost happy. I still need to have Screen Sharing open so that I can see what’s actually in the playlist that I’m listening to. There’s a solution to that as well though. All I needed do was create a script that calls some AppleScript on the MacMini, grabs the current playlist info and then outputs it into a web page. I could then use this page as the basis of a Dashboard widget and I’d only ever have to press F12 to see my current playlist. And that’s what I did. To find out how I did it though, you’ll have to read the next post!

Now, it turns out that a week or two ago NetNewsWire was updated to include syncing with Google Reader (since it no longer syncs with NewsGator’s services), and one of the steps you’re asked to go through whilst installing is to link to a Google account to turn this syncing on. Fair enough, that makes sense. So, I linked to my Google account. It may or may not be important at this juncture to note that I’d never used this Google account with Google Reader before, so the account was fairly pristine for these purposes.

Before installing NetNewsWire on my new machine I’d made sure that I’d exported all the feeds that I was following to a grouped OPML file so that I’d be able to easily reimport them later. Pretty sensible, especially when you’re following a couple of hundred feeds – I wouldn’t want to have to resubscribe to all of them again manually! So, once I’d linked the Google account to my new NetNewsWire install I reimported the OPML file. Here comes woe number one – everything I imported was placed inside an “Imported on 29/09/09″ folder. Not the worst thing in the world to happen, and it was easy enough to drag everything out of that folder and back up to the root level, but it would have been nice to have had the option for that not to have happened. Likewise, since I was doing this import from a clean state (I’d previously deleted all the feeds that get activated by default) it would have been nice for NetNewsWire to have realised I was probably restoring to a known good state and not put everything into this sub folder.

Unfortunately this wasn’t my biggest woe. After importing the OPML and refreshing everything using the “Refresh all” button in the app, I apparently had no unread items. “Fair enough”, I thought. “That’s probably a design decision to stop you from feeling overwhelmed when you first start subscribing to things”. The problem was that several hours after this I still had no unread items in NetNewsWire. At this point I was becoming a little concerned that something wasn’t right, and went to log into the Good Reader web interface. Lo and behold, I saw a list of folders that mirrored those in NetNewsWire, but none of these folders contained any feeds! Going back to NetNewsWire I decided to have a dig through the preferences panel, and had a look at the “Syncing” pane. Right in the middle of this pane was the ominous text “If you’re just turning on syncing now, you should Merge Subscriptions”. Now, I wasn’t just turning on syncing then – I’d linked the account when I installed NetNewsWire, and the “Sync with Google Reader” checkbox was already ticked – but it couldn’t hurt to push the button, could it? And it didn’t. As soon as I’d manually pushed the button to merge subscriptions NetNewsWire started pulling in new news items, and I was happy.

My theory is that if you import from OPML then for whatever reason the code to sync with Google Reader doesn’t get triggered. So, if you have issues with NetNewsWire not seeming to update your feeds, then try doing a quick manual merge.

PS This post was written on the train – yay!

Just after I left Yahoo!, I was asked by YDN if I’d mind still presenting the talk I was planning to do about Yahoo! Pipes. Being the wonderful sort of chap I am, I happily agreed. So, after a couple of months away from the company, on Tuesday I rolled up to give my presentation. I’ve got to say, it felt a bit weird giving a talk for a company I no longer worked for. But, it seemed to go okay. People asked interesting questions, and they seemed to enjoy me talking about how to make Pipes, and sharing a few of the ones that I’d previously made with them.

The idea behind the talk was that whilst Pipes is a wonderful tool, it does have a fairly steep learning curve, and many people are dissuaded from using it before they’ve managed to do anything because of that. When I started using Pipes two years ago, I wished I had someone who already used it to give me a few pointers, so by giving this talk I hope I helped a few people out in the way that I wish I had been two years previously.

All the pipes used within the talk are linked within the slide deck, and if you want to look at any of my other pipes, you can find them at pipes.yahoo.com/neilcrosby.