Sage Hacks

Re:pocketmod – Flash-based PocketMod generator

Wesley Rice — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 19:19:37 +0000

A couple of folks, apparently impatient with the slow pace of development on the ‘official’ PocketMod, have taken matters into their own hands and put together a brilliant offline PocketMod generator called Re:pocketmod. The package contains around a hundred PocketMod templates, including some GTD-related and Stephen Covey-inspired mods, any of which can be dragged and dropped onto a layout pane and printed directly from the app. It even includes video instructions on how to fold your PocketMod.

See our previous post on converting PDFs to PocketMods.

HOWTO: Easily install Firefox extensions while offline

Wesley Rice — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 19:14:27 +0000

You can add an ‘Install’ button to Firefox’s add-ons pane by tracking down the following line in ‘about:config’:

extensions.hideInstallButton

and double-clicking on it to toggle the Boolean value to ‘False’. Firefox should now have an install button, just as Thunderbird does, for offline installation of extensions.

HOWTO – Create back-pocket cheat sheets with PDFtoPocketMod

Wesley Rice — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 20:57:28 +0000

I love PocketMods. I don’t think I would spend so much time collecting and processing my thoughts with ThinkingRock if it weren’t for TR’s ‘Report as PocketMod’ feature. Then I began creating my own PocketMod content, ranging from a lengthy jQuery reference booklet to a simple listing of keyboard shortcuts to keep in the front pocket of a laptop bag. With PDFtoPocketMod, built on the open-source PDFSharp library, you can put one together in less than ninety seconds.

In this example, we’ll put together a PocketMod stack listing all the keyboard shortcuts available in Word 2007.

To get a list of all shortcuts in Word, click the ‘Macros’ button under the Developer toolbar, and search for the ‘listcommands’ macro in ‘Word commands’. Run the macro, selecting ‘Current keyboard settings’ at the prompt that follows, and you’ll get an 11-page table. Shrink the table down to 8 pages (the proper length of a PocketMod) by adjusting the row height under the ‘Layout’ tab in ‘Table Tools’. 0.26″ worked for me

Now you can export the document to PDF, with Microsoft’s free Save As PDF or XPS add-in for Office 2007. Next, you want to download PDF2PM, which converts most any paginated PDF to a PocketMod-formatted PDF, ready for folding, and run your Office-exported PDF through PDF2PM. The finished product should look something like this.

HOWTO: Hack a makeshift CSSTidy plugin for Notepad++

Wesley Rice — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 19:28:16 +0000

You say you’d like to right-click on the stylesheet you’re editing in Notepad++ and run it through CSSTidy, and that you also need a corresponding keyboard shortcut? Do you have three minutes?

Download CSSTidy to your Notepad++ program directory. If you’re not running the portable version, you’ll need to be Administrator to place csstidy.exe under %PROGRAMFILES%\Notepad++.

Next, edit your shortcut settings file, found at %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Notepad++\shortcuts.xml, by adding this line under ‘User Defined Commands’:

$(NPP_DIRECTORY)\csstidy.exe "$(FULL_CURRENT_PATH)" "$(FULL_CURRENT_PATH)"

This adds a ‘Run CSSTidy on File’ entry to your menubar, under ‘Run’, and also assigns it the keyboard shortcut Ctl+Alt+Shift+C. You can also add it to your right-click menu by adding this line to your contextMenu.xml file (which you’ll find in the same directory as shortcuts.xml), within the ‘Scintilla Context Menu’ node:

In your Notepad++ settings, under the ‘MISC’ tab, make certain you have Notepad++ set to update files automatically, as well as silently, and that ‘Scroll to the last line after update’ is checked. This provides some confirmation that your file was modified outside of the editor. As we’re providing CSSTidy with the same filename for both input and output, the file will be quietly overwritten and reloaded in Notepad++.

Also, make sure you’re editing your Notepad++ settings files with something other than Notepad++. For editing XML, I like Microsoft’s free XMLNotepad.

For an online CSS optimizer/compressor that makes use of the PHP version of CSSTidy, try CleanCSS or CSS Portal.

HOWTO: Mount NFS shares under Windows 7

Wesley Rice — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 19:21:00 +0000

UNIX and Linux users have long been accustomed to networking over NFS, or Network File System. It’s been around for a quarter of a century, was made popular by SunOS, and if you can stomach it’s myriad security flaws, it’s always been the quickest, dirtiest way to share files between disparate systems. With the upcoming Windows 7, Microsoft has (finally!) deemed it neccesary to provide proper NFS client support (and requisite MMC snap-in) to consumer Windows.

First, set up NFS exports on the server- in my case a Ubuntu desktop. An /etc/exports file may look like this:

/home 192.168.1.0/24 (rw, async, insecure)
/opt 192.168.1.2 (rw, async, insecure)
/usr/share *.op.us (ro, insecure)

That’s it- three fields. The filesystem branch to export, names of allowed hosts (as IP address, netmask, or hostname, with wildcards if that makes your life easier), and whatever options you need to provide. The “insecure” option allows requests from ports above 1024. In the *nix world, only root can bind to a secure port. The ‘async’ option tells NFS to place a higher priority on client responses than to writing out to local disks, the result being improved performance with an increased risk of data loss. There are many more options- consult the manpages or this guide to NFS on Linux.

On the Windows side, you mount an NFS export much like any other network share, by issuing a command such as

mount [options] //nfs-server-unc-name/share-name [drive letter]

This is assuming, of course, that you’ve installed Client Services for NFS under Windows. NFS support is one of those optional packages that is available via the Add/Remove Software wizard in the Control Panel.

Once mounted, your Linux shares will appear as any other drive in Windows:

Perhaps best of all, by right-clicking on the share’s drive icon and selecting ‘Add to library…’, your NFS shares can be rolled into a library (libraries were discussed in this previous post) for sharing across Windows 7 homegroups.

Repurposing old, low-end hardware (running Linux) as a personal file server just got a lot easier.