Jim’s Junk Drawer

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OS X has an alternate, and I think better, menu format for dock folders. With the alternate menus you have bigger icons, a cleaner look, better scrolling for long lists, and you can click into nested folders right in the menu.

To enable the alternate view, open Terminal and type:
defaults write com.apple.dock use-new-list-stack -boolean YES; killall Dock

If you find you don’t like these changes, type the command again, replacing YES with NO.

Source: maclife.com

This essay captures something I struggle with all the time: how to get momentum on a project when your day is dominated by calls & meetings. Short answer, you can’t. You need to do project work in relatively long uninterrupted chunks of time.

“For someone on the maker’s schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn’t merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work.”

Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule, and also by the same guy (Paul Graham), Good and Bad Procrastination.

Jack Mezirow, a professor emeritus at Columbia Teachers College, has proposed that adults learn best if presented with what he calls a “disorienting dilemma,” or something that “helps you critically reflect on the assumptions you’ve acquired.”

Good article in the NYT on the importance of dissonance in priming the brain for learning.

Just got Windows 7 running in Parallels on my iMac. This post is being written using the Windows Live Essentials download of goodies from Microsoft.

Windows 7 seems pretty good if Aero is running, but for some reason it is getting disabled at every boot. Annoying.

Seems to work fine. Kudos Microsoft!

For a recent DVD project I needed to create multiple language subtitles. Basically this involves getting a transcript of the audio track in English, laying it in as subtitles, then exporting the English subtitle track out to a timecode formatted text file to the translation company can translate phrase by phrase. You would think exporting a subtitle track would be built into a professional DVD authoring program, but it’s missing from Apples DVD Studio Pro. Not only is it missing, but finding a utility to help with this was frustratingly difficult.

If you’re faced with a similar challenge, the program you want is Subtitle Xtractor. It’s a great program that does the job perfectly, and is donationware to boot.

Wasn’t sure it was going to happen this year.

First paste the following into the Script Editor and save it to the Word Scripts folder in your Office 2008 identity:

tell application "/Applications/Microsoft Office 2008/Microsoft Word.app"
	tell selection
		try
			set theClip to Unicode text of (the clipboard as record)
			type text text theClip
		end try
	end tell
end tell

Then use System Preferences to set a keyboard command for the resulting script menu item. A kludge, but seems to work. I found this here.

Here’s the ultimate simple, free labeling software for lightscribe. Lightscribe takes forever to burn labels, but that is more than made up for by not fiddling with adhesive labels or finicky inkjet disc printers. Get a Lightscribe drive, chuck the $35 graphics-focused program it comes packaged with, and get this from the Lightscribe manufacturer’s site:

Lightscribe Simple Labeler

It prints one line of text on the top, one on the bottom, that’s it.

Free, and does what you want with way less crap than Roxio Toast. To save DVDs to ISO images (which you can then use as virtual masters for duplicating) choose the Save As CD/DVD Image option. It will produce a .cdr file. The file extensions can be confusing: .cdr (Burn plus some other Mac programs), .toast (Roxio Toast), and .iso (the rest of the world) are all identical — the files produced are bit-identical to each other.  So you can change the resulting file extension from .cdr to .iso if you want. The resulting file can be used as a disc master on virtually any burning program, Mac, Windows, or Unix.

Burn