pinterest

Alex Jones

I lead teams at the intersection of strategy and design. Autodidact. Polymath. Barbecue acolyte. I start fires (the good kind).

tip

Set a File's Modified Date to the Future in OS X

Just a quick note for myself, that I hope others will find useful.

To set the modified date of a file in OS X to a value in the future (useful if you want something to always be sorted at the top or bottom of a date listing), use this command in the Terminal:
touch -mt 201212120000 [path to file]

The date format is YYYYMMDDHHMM (Year-Month-Day-Hour-Minute), so in my example above, I’ve set the modified date to midnight, 12/12/12 (December 12, 2012).

Bonus tip: if you don’t want to type the full path to the file, type touch -mt 201212120000 and then drag the file onto the terminal, which should write out the path for you.

Bonus tip #2: the command will work on any *NIX system, though I don’t expect the same holds true for the drag-and-drop file path.

A Reminder – QuickSilver Style

So, I ran across a little QuickSilver tip which may be old news for the QS power users, but was new to me: QuickSilver is a a great timer for reminders. So, say you need to call someone in 30 minutes, but you don’t want to have to keep monitoring the clock as you are working on a project, writing e-mails etc. You could use a dashboard widget, or a kitchen timer, but why not use QuickSilver? It’s pretty damned easy:

  1. Open QuickSilver (cmd-space) and type a period (.) to open the QS text box
  2. Type your message (Call the restaurant to confirm tonight’s reservation) and hit the tab key to move to the commands pane
  3. The first option is to display as large text, make sure its highlighted and hit ctrl-enterto save that command to be used in conjunction with the next command:
  4. Choose ‘Run after Delay’ or ‘Run at Time’
  5. To have your message appear on screen in half an hour, type ’30m’ (30 minutes) in the box and hit enter.

It take about five seconds to do, and in half an hour, you’ll see a large box reminding you to “Call the restaurant to confirm tonight’s reservation”. Give it a shot, it’s a very useful feature! You can of course use other time options, seconds, hours etc.

Thanks to David Hayes for publishing the tip on his site, where I stumbled across it.

Efficient WebDev Tip

The post Write Stylesheets Simultaneously has a great tip for easing the initial development of a new site. Instead of manually reloading your browser each time you want to view your changes to your markup or CSS, throw a simple meta refresh into the HEAD so the page will reload automatically every N seconds. A second tip is provided a bit farther down the page – so check it out.

Wireless network-aware homepage

From Mac Geekery comes the wireless network aware homepage

Given a list of trusted SSID’s it will test internet connection and:

1. if connected to a trusted network it will load homepage if connected or display an error if not connected

2. if connected to another network it will display SSID and connection status

3. if not connected to a wireless network, show homepage if internet detected (like ethernet or whatever) else display an offline page

I can’t wait to get me a MacBook Pro so I can try out all of these OS X tricks and tips!