Photo Singularity #5

AppleScript Applications – Hiding the dock icon

AppleScript is useful for all kinds of little tasks. If you’ve created one that you run fairly often, but do not want it to appear in the dock, there is an easy fix for that.

First, save the AppleScript as an Application Bundle. As a side note, saving as an Application creates a Power-PC application that will launch slower on Intel machines. An Application Bundle creates a Universal Binary which will launch faster and is required anyway to hide the icon. See this Mac OS X Hints article.

Second, you must modify the applications Info.plist file. This can be found by right-clicking the app and selecting Show Package Contents. The file can be found in the Contents folder. Add the lines
<key>LSUIElement</key>
<string>1</string>
just above the line that reads as <key>WindowState</key>. Save and you’re done.

Another option is to download Icon Hider and drag’n'drop your application to it. I included the code, so if you wish to see it simply drag’n'drop the app to the Script Editor. Beware, though, after editing a plist file with Icon Hider the plist file will not appear correctly in TextEdit. It works fine though in Mac OS X 10.5.

Photo Singularity #4

Photo Singularity #3

Photo Singularity #2

My new hobby! – courtesy of The Great U.S. 36 Treasure Hunt

Photo Singularity #1

This is something new I’m going to try and maybe it will make me post a bit more often. Just a single photo every once in a while. Maybe at most once a week and at least once a month. It will usually be something that I’ve taken, but it might not always be recent. Sometimes I may write a bit, but it will probably be just the photo most of the time. This time, though, I’ll write a bit. This photo is from our garden and is a picture of our broom corn. The height of it is somewhere around 10 to 12 feet. Once enlarged you can see it better.

Kite Shelving

Finished some shelving that I made to store my kites. Made the shelves out of some yellow pine that was from one of our barns that blew down a while back and some cedar. The French Cleat was made all from cedar. If you want the plans, you can download the SketchUp file here.

And for those who have asked, I currently have 33 kites.

Screen savers for Mac OS X

I was going through some of my bookmarks and came across this article by Macworld with many good screen savers for Mac OS X. If you want something different, check them out.

Screen savers live! [via Lifehacker]

There’s also a couple that I really like at http://wakaba.c3.cx/s/lotsablankers/.

How to extract MPEG-2 video files from a DVD

This example uses the command-line version of mplayer. It will extract the titles without doing any transcoding or editing to them. Run the command…

mplayer -dumpstream -dumpfile /save/path/video.mpg dvd://1

If a DVD has multiple titles/videos, change the 1 to the number of the title you want.
If you get errors like…

Couldn't open DVD device: /dev/dvd
No stream found to handle url dvd://1

try adding in the option

-dvd-device /path/to/dvd

to the above command.

On Ubuntu the path is /dev/cdrom0
On Mac OS X the path is /Volumes/Name_of_DVD
You can also specify a path to a folder containing a DVD’s Video_TS folder somewhere on your drive.

SanDisk Sansa e250

For Christmas this year, one of my sisters gave me a SanDisk Sansa e250. In my opinion, if you’re willing to do a little bit of tinkering (or maybe more than a little), many MP3 Players can be better than an iPod. Especially if you factor in price.

As it turns out, for this specific player, SanDisk did an awuful job with the firmware (software). Most things I’ve figured out though. In the process I discovered a forum great for any MP3 players other than the iPod, Anything but iPod. I also discovered Rockbox to replace the SanDisk firmware. Both firmware’s have their up sides, but after using both, Rockbox is starting to come out on top.

After much googling, I managed to figure out the formats needed for the files and get them scripted. Now it’s pretty much Drag’N'Drop to get photos, video, and music onto the player. I’ve posted what I’ve discovered and the scripts I wrote over on the ABI forums. If you’re interested, you can find that topic here.