I’m writing this down so I won’t forget.

First, there’s the utility “Grab” in Applications/Utilities. It doesn’t have a window, you use the program menu or the keyboard shortcuts. After you take a shot it pops up a window with the image that you can save anywhere you want. By default it outputs TIFF images.

My preferred method is to use the keyboard shortcuts built into OS X. It generates crisp PNG image files of the screen.

apple command key + shift + 3 will take a capture of the entire screen (or two captures if you’re running a dual-head setup) and automatically save it as a PNG file on your desktop. It will be named Picture 1.png, where the number is auto-incremented with each screenshot.

apple command key + shift + 4 changes your cursor into a bulls eye. Whatever you select ends up the same as before—a file with the same naming convention on the desktop.

apple command key + shift + 4 when you’ve got the bulls-eye cursor hit the space bar. It changes the icon to a camera. It takes a picture of the selected application window—the selected window will be highlighted in baby blue.

HassleMe is a cool looking free service that I ran into recently.

Not eating enough fruit? Forgot to feed the fish again? Need a little help keeping your New Year’s resolutions? Tell us what to hassle you about, and we’ll nag you via email at semi-unpredictable intervals.

I like the simplicity of it. I also like that you can configure a rough timing scheme. I could see myself configuring a ‘hassle’ everyday for only a short time. Either it would get ingrained into my head to do the thing everyday and I wouldn’t need the nagging anymore or it would be too much and the virtual nagging would become a little too real.

It would be fantastic for things that don’t happen quite as frequently. I know I’m no the only one that on occasion realizes that a month has passed by without me knowing.

Methinks the integration can go just a titch deeper – instead of just reminding, allow the notification to be actionable. For instance, if I mail you a reminder to blog, if you respond to the email, your response could be posted directly to your blog. Same goes for a journal.

An identity system with a delegation mechanism is really needed here. If I really want this service to post to my blog, well, I shouldn’t have to give it my blog password. I should be able to grant access to an application (the reminder service) to post a blog entry or whatever else without me disclosing my password. AtomPub can get us a lingua-franca to converse with all these web services, but it doesn’t provide the identity part.

There are a lot of things going on over in Java-land that are bringing up the question, what exactly do you mean by Java? and what does the future of Java look like?

JRuby, Jython, Groovy and Rhino, these are all projects that show that Java as a language is not the future, but Java as a platform has a long and prosperous future.

On the other hand, Android is showing that the virtual machine isn’t the essential piece—it’s the syntax, the language. Android is using “java” but targeting their own virtual machine , dalvik instead of the JVM.

Which is it? I’m not sure. Both developments are heading in opposite directions, but both directions look promising. Conclusion: Java the platform|language|OS|whatever isn’t going away any time soon and what we think of as Java is definitely going to change.

Out of the fuss over the parody video ‘Here Comes Another Bubble’ (succinct summary) an intriguing idea is set forth over at scripting news

Most conferences are so boring. I want to do a conf on a hot subject when it’s still hot in the blogosphere. This may be a good subject for such a quickly organized conference. What do you think of the flash conference idea for this??

I’ve never though about a flash conference before. Not just for this topic, but so many others as well.

Fantastic idea. Love it.

I use Google Scholar among other academic searches to find work related to my research. Other citation references supply a Bibtex entry for generating bibliographies. It wasn’t readily apparent to me, but Google Scholar does have this feature, you just have to turn it on.

Go into the Google Scholar Preferences and change the ‘Bibliography Manager’ to “show links to import citations into Bibtex”. Other options for bibliography management are: EndNote, RefMan, RefWorks, WenXianWang.

Oh and while you’re in there, set the results per page to something more reasonable like 50.

Happy hunting on your related work searches.

At home we have a MacBook. My wife can’t stand using the trackpad—she’s got to have a mouse. For our anniversary I got her a Kensington bluetooth mouse. I wanted a bluetooth device because I didn’t want any USB receiver sticking out the side to get bumped or broken. Took all of 45 seconds to hook it up.

Seamless.

Is that because we’ve got a Mac or is it because Bluetooth is cool?

I’m a big fan of Google Reader. Let’s just say I’m subscribed to more than a few feeds. I use the keyboard shortcuts to quickly read and scan through my reading list. To keep my pace I’ve come to open articles that I want to think about more, or ones that I want to read more in depth in background tabs. Usually this involves the laborious task of moving my hand from the keyboard and middle-clicking with the mouse. Painful. Time-wasting. Distracting.

Enough is enough, so I decided to create a Greasemonkey script to bind a keyboard shortcut to opening an article in a background tab. But, what magical javascript incantation is required to open a tab?

Turns out that Greasemonkey doesn’t only allow you to add functionality via javascript to any webpage, it also provides privileged functionality that is not available to normal javascript running in a webpage. One of those methods is, opening a url in a background tab .

All the hard work goes to Sunny Wu who provided the solution. I tweaked his version to use the “h” character instead of “v”.

I wasn’t sure what kind of event this handler receives and so I wasn’t sure how to determine that a “h” was pressed. Firebug to the rescue, I just added the following line to just print out the value to the Firebug console.

Sidenote: Ever wonder what event is sent for crazy modifiers like shift+3 or shift+s? I thought it might be something complicated—where you’d check if modifier keys were pressed on the keyboard event. I was thinking too much. Shift+3 ends up sending a #, shift+s sends a capital S. Who would have thought?!

Just change the first “if” to compare against 104 instead of 118 and h is the man.

I changed to h since, well, first, v currently opens the article in another tab that immediately takes focus—handy at times. Second, well, if I use h instead, I can navigate mostly with just my right hand :)

By default, on a Mac in Firefox, tab moves from one form element to another—except it will skip radio buttons, checkboxes and drop-down select boxes. I have suffered in silence since I started using the Mac. I finally found out that this too can be remedied. Hooray!

There is an actual setting in the Mac OS that produces this behavior. To change this so that tab treats all form elements with equality go to: System Preferences -> Keyboard and Mouse and select the tab Keyboard Shortcuts. On the bottom you will see a setting for “Full Keyboard Access”. Just set it to All Controls. This setting will take effect right away, no need to restart Firefox.

Found this in the comments on John Resig’s blog