I was walking across the green the other day on my way to a meeting, when it struck me how much art is tucked away around UVM. So, the next time I found myself armed with my camera on a trek across campus, I snapped a few pictures. The work shown here is one of those I captured that day. I was also able to find a description of the piece, with some historical background. Read on for more on the grand plan. (more…)
I built an automator script a while ago to move all the files from my desktop to a dated folder. Here’s a little background.
My day to day work flow generally consists of saving a lot of stuff to the desktop. Generally, most of this “stuff” consists of things I’ve downloaded, quick notes and documents I’ve been working on, and anything I haven’t felt like taking the time to file away.
So, I end up with a lot of detritus floating around on my desktop. When I realized that I’d end up neck deep in random files, I began making a folder named after the current date, and moving everything on the desktop into there. I did this every few days, and now have a folder full of archived desktops.
This may seem like overkill, but when you don’t have a lot of screen real estate, it really makes a difference having a clean desktop. With the advent of apps like Quicksilver and Spotlight, it’s also becoming less necessary to file & organize things. All I have to do is try to name items relatively accurately (sometimes I don’t even have to do that), and the search will find it for me!
That said, the process of opening the finder, creating a folder, renaming it to the days date, and moving everything from the desktop was still kind of tedious. So a few weeks ago, I was procrastinating away a Sunday afternoon, and decided to see if Automator could help me out.
So I put together a workflow called “CleanUpDesktop” which I saved as a Plugin for the finder. Now I can just right click on the desktop, and select my workflow. I could probably set it up to run at specific times if I wanted to as well.
I should note that it does seem to run kind of slow, or at least it takes a while. Even the process of building it seemed to take up a lot of memory. I’m not sure why this is, but I have a few ideas which I won’t go into here.
If you’re interested, you can download it here: CleanUpDesktop.workflow.
With an eye to improving the useability of MT on campus, I’ve come across a few plugins that I’ll be investigating. The last one may have some odd license issues, so it might not pan out, but we’ll see.
Some of these have impacts on upcoming projects, while others are addressing existing concerns, such as spam. The spamlookup plugin sounds quite promising, especially since MT hasn’t yet implemented a real spam management solution, instead taking a spam prevention approach. While the effectiveness of these approaches is a discussion in and of itself, I am inclined to agree with the former, and thus am looking forward to playing around with this plugin.
UPDATE: Spamlookup, though we installed it, is included in the default MT 3.2 upgrade. Enclosures is running fine, and people-are-a-podcastin’. I’m not convinced of the usefulness of the photogallery plugin, and it looked a little awkward to install and use anyway, so I’m giving up on that one. Feeds.App sounds pretty useful, but I’m still not sold on the license, and the justification for spending the $$.