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What 45 minutes & GarageBand Can Do

apple, garageband, recordings

Recently, I was having a conversation with someone about the value of Apple’s program Garageband.  I took the side that with the right amount of imagination and an overabundance of library sampling, even the untrained musician could put together a masterpiece.

In order to prove my point, I wanted to share a silly recording I made weeks after I bought my MacBook.  It’s nothing special but it certainly illustrates the potential that one could have with such a program.

“Gaze” from Shadow

Audio, shadow, soundtrack

I was looking through my audio files from my old laptop & came across some of the recordings I made in college: most notably ones from Micah Weisberg’s senior film “Shadow”.  (He asked me to compose & record a soundtrack for the film).

Gaze (Shadow)

This Boat Is Real

hilarious, hulu, snl

Quite possibly the greatest video ever made…

Removing an Active Application’s Icon from the Dock

apple, custom, dock, Leopard, tips

I like having a clean dock.  To me, that means limiting its applications to the few that I deem necessary.  Since using quicksilver,  I use my dock, solely for applications that facilitate GTD.   Applications like Adium, iTunes, & other “secondary” applications tend to distract me. especially since I hate hiding my dock.

Anyway, to get to the point,  I stumbled across some code you can use to hide active applications from being in the dock… and here’s how you do it:
1) Navigate to the application you want to hide from the dock but have open.
2) Right click (ctrl click) on the icon and select “Show Package Contents”.
3) Open the resources folder
4) Locate the document titled info.plist
5) After the first <dict> insert the following two lines:

1
2

<key>LSUIElement</key>
<string>1</string>

6) Save & Restart

Note: Just in case, make sure you save a backup of info.plist somewhere accessible.
Note: I don’t endorse or take any responsibility for anything that happens as a result of this hack.

How David Allen Gets Things Done

david allen, GTD, productivity

iTunes “Perfect” Settings (Yes, it really makes a difference)

I came across this article originally from 43folders.com.  It’s unbelievable how better it makes most of your music sound. If you have great speakers/headphones, the enjoyment is that much better.

Anyway, here’s a what the settings look like.

Here’s the article I found on 43folders and here’s the original article on OXHints.

Productivity Lists II: Professional Incompletion Trigger

checklist, GTD, lists, trigger

For part two of this series, I’m posting GTD’s professional incompletion triggers. If you are interested in the personal incompletion triggers, you can view the post here.

• Microsoft Word: GTD_protriggers.doc
• Omni Outliner: GTD_protriggers.oo3
• Text Edit: GTD_protriggers.txt
  

Thor’s Puppy Pictures

puppy pics, thor

When we adopted Thor, we did so through petfinder.com, where he had a little adoption profile and puppy pictures. When Ashley first saw Thor, he was already larger than his puppy pics and it was another month until I got a chance to see him.

Moral of the story: We’ve been trying to contact the original owner so we could get copies of the puppy photos but to no avail. Well, this afternoon, Ashley (while rummaging through petfinder.com) found the original page with all his photos.

Without further ado: Baby Tho

Productivity Lists I: Personal Incompletion Triggers

GTD, lists, trigger

This is part I to an ongoing series of lists made to help increase productivity and expand your potential

One of the most helpful and under realized parts of GTD is the use of trigger lists. I’ve decided to keep an ongoing inventory of different checklists/trigger lists. At first I’ll be posting ones directly from GTD (with a few additions). Eventually, I’ll be posting them for your to download.

If you want to download this list, I’ve included downloadable copies for:

• Microsoft Word: GTD_personaltriggers.doc
• Omni Outliner: GTD_personaltriggers.oo3
• Text Edit: GTD_personaltriggers.txt

OmniFocus Continues to Thoughtfully Enhance Life: Release by Release

omnifocus

On May 14th, I upgraded to Omnifocus 1.0.2 and this particular release caused an inner-nostalgia for the days of yore, when OmniFocus was a tiny Alpha (try a few months ago). This was mostly because of the time sync updates with iCal and the code signing for Leopard. The updates that lit my fire are: Interface:

• Improved OmniFocus’ memory of which windows were open the last time you used it. (OmniFocus used to sometimes open windows that you’d previously closed, or forget their current position or size.)
• Right- or control-clicking on an item now changes the keyboard focus to that item before bringing up the contextual menu. This ensures that all the items in that contextual menu will be validated against the appropriate target item.
• The reset button on the view bar should show up when making changes while a perspective is active.
• Remove contextual menu items that were not applicable to sidebar items.
• When a chosen keyboard shortcut is already in use by a menu item, we now present the full path that leads to that menu item.

Misc

• The code used in OmniFocus is now signed for Leopard’s benefit. (For more information, see Leopard’s code signing release notes.)
• Focusing on a project now saves any edits that are in progress.
• When synchronizing with iCal, we now set an appropriate local time to incoming dates without times. This should help solve synchronization issues for people in New Zealand who are using daylight savings time (where the local date differs from London’s date when it’s noon in London). It also means that we’ll apply the default due time setting from Data Preferences to items created in iCal. (VERY HAPPY ABOUT THIS ONE)
• The online help now correctly indicates that you hold down Option to copy a file rather than linking to it when dragging.
• Added logging to the Mail Rule processing script so that it’s easier to for users to determine whether or not it’s getting called by Mail.

Lastly, the release mentions in it’s overview that:

“Over the last few months, most of our attention has been focused on OmniFocus 1.1, where we’ve been adding support for synchronization, and on writing OmniFocus for the iPhone. We plan to release both OmniFocus 1.1 and OmniFocus for the iPhone in late June (if they’re ready!).”

Note: I think I may be making the jump to the iPhone (once they’re ready).