Bookmarks for 15th May 2013

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These are my saved Pinboard links for 15th May 2013:

  • Brown Rice Jambalaya-ish recipe from Food52 – I've been playing with brown rice in this recipe for a while and this method seems to work pretty well. I have tried it in the oven, but stove top makes it easier to check the liquid level. I leave out one of the trinity of New Orleans style cooking, the green bell pepper, because I just don't like them. To use bell pepper, add about a half a pepper, diced, when you add your onion and celery.
  • Sketch | The designer’s toolbox – Sketch is a professional vector graphics app with a beautiful interface and powerful tools.
    We set out to build a better app for graphic designers. Not to copy, but rather to improve.
  • PaintCode – PaintCode is a vector drawing app that generates Objective-C code in real time.
  • WebCode – Vector drawing app that instantly generates
    JavaScript+Canvas, CSS+HTML or SVG code.
  • Sublime Text Resources for Front-end Developers | Shane Jeffers – It was about 8 months ago that I made the switch and purchased Sublime Text 2, the popular source code editing software.  Let's be honest, we (front-end developers) are always looking for a way to increase the productivity of our workflow.  ST2 (Sublime Text 2) has significantly done just that for my daily routine.  I am writing this article to compile some of the best articles written about ST2 tips & tricks.  
  • Malt Chocolate Doughnuts Recipe at Epicurious.com – I know deep-fried doughnuts don't strictly count as baking, but I've included them here because they start with a dough, and they taste too good to leave out, especially made with a chocolate ganache filling instead of the ususal jam.
  • How I Resize and Rename Images with Automator, Name Mangler, and TextExpander – A few weeks ago, while I was preparing my coverage of Apple’s Q2 2013 earnings call, I grew tired of my system to resize and rename images on OS X, so I rebuilt it from scratch using Automator, Name Mangler 3, and TextExpander.

    When I create images for MacStories, I either keep them at a single size between 600 and 650 pixels, or use two separate versions: the original larger size, and a smaller one that links to the full version. In either case, images are uploaded to our CDN with Cyberduck, which I have been using for years and that has never failed me. Until last month, the process of duplicating the larger image and saving it to a smaller size was entirely manual – something that, I later realized, was surprising considering I try to automate as many aspects of my daily workflow as possible. I decided to fix this before the Apple earnings call because I knew Excel was going to export our charts as large PNGs – but, mostly, because it really didn’t make sense to keep on manually clicking menus and selecting sizes after all these years of writing for MacStories.

  • trishume/pro · GitHub – Quickly jump to git repositories, run commands in batch and get status overviews

Bookmarks for 8th May 2013

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These are my saved Pinboard links for 8th May 2013:

  • Shauna James Ahern’s Chile-Lime Shrimp Stir-Fry | Serious Eats : Recipes – Stir-fries are an obvious choice when it comes to quick and approachable weeknight cooking. And with the availability of gluten-free tamari and other Asian sauces increasing at markets, it is super easy to sauté up an allergy-free meal that tastes better than wheat-filled takeout. After all, there is nothing inherently gluten-y when it comes to quickly pan-fried meat and veggies served over rice.

    Shauna James Ahern's Chile-Lime Shimp recipe in Gluten-Free Girl Every Day is one of eight unique stir-fries in the book. Heavily laced with lime juice and spicy from the ginger and chiles, this shrimp dish is far from chewy and bland. Add a handful of sweet and meaty chanterelle mushrooms and a bunch of bok choy, and you'll have an easy (and pretty healthy) meal in no time.

  • Indian Prawn Patties | Serious Eats : Recipes – This is one of those dishes you will eat without knowing when to stop. Kolmi na Kevaab , or prawn kebabs, are a distinctly Parsi dish. This small community of people follow the ancient Zorastrian religion and have made many contributions to the city of Bombay. Parsi cuisine has evolved into a unique amalgamation of flavors over the years, largely non-vegetarian in its range with plenty of interesting dishes involving eggs.

    Kolmi Na Kevaab is an easy-to-cook Parsi favorite that will inspire many requests for seconds. It's mildly spicy, soft on the inside, and slightly crisp on the outside. It does have the typical Indian flavors of cumin and chilli, but the addition of Worcestershire sauce gives it a unique twist. Have it as a starter or as a side to brown rice pilaf, dhansak masala daal (recipes for that coming soon) and end with a quick snooze if it's your Sunday lunch menu.

  • Soft Polenta For Dinner, Fried Polenta Cakes for Bento | Just Bento – Preconceptions can limit you more than you can imagine. I’d always thought that polenta needed to be piping hot to be really good, but it’s actually pretty good cold. Anything good cold, of course, can go into a bento box.

    Firm polenta cakes, briefly fried until golden on the outside, are really nice as a carb in a bento. If you have some tomato sauce also it makes a very nice accompaniment. Below is my basic polenta recipe (I use some garlic in there to boost the flavor), but please use your own polenta recipe.

  • Almond and pecan biscuits – Gluten-free biscuits with gram flour and ground almonds
  • Managing multiple printers via the command line – Mac OS X Hints – Working on a site with a few hundred OS X machines, manually altering each computer's configuration can become very tedious, very fast. Especially when dealing with printers. I had issues whereby I would sometimes need to set up a number of computers with a new printer, and then remove it later. Add to that, I have printers constantly spitting things out because people hit Print a few too many times and clog up the queues. Fortunately, I managed to come across a few Unix commands which, using ssh or ideally Apple Remote Desktop (via the ever-useful 'Send UNIX command' function), can reduce jobs of many minutes, even hours, into seconds.
  • Getting and setting PPD options via command line for use with lpadmin in OS X | brunerd – There are some good hints for adding printers via the command line with lpadmin: Managing multiple printers via the command line

    However, there is still confusion surrounding the setting of printer options from the command line, as a poster to Debian bugs pointed out back in 2006: lpoptions documentation doesn’t. After doing some testing, here’s the two main takewaways:

    If you use lpadmin and specify options with “-o” the PPD is altered and OS X will recognize the options for the printer.
    However, if you setup the printer using lpadmin without any options and later use lptoptions to set the options, they are not written to the PPD and the GUI is unaware of the printer’s options.

  • Chicken Tikka Masala Recipe at Epicurious.com – The yogurt helps tenderize the chicken; the garlic, ginger, and spices in the marinade infuse it with lots of flavor.
  • SIGALRM Timers and Stdin Analysis | Linux Journal – It's not hard to create functions to ensure that your script doesn't run forever. But what if you want portions to be timed while others can take as long as they need? Not so fast, Dave explains in his latest Work the Shell.

    In an earlier article, I started building out a skeleton script that would have the basic functions needed for any decent shell script you might want to create. I started with command-line argument processing with getopts, then explored syslog and status logging as scripts. Finally, I ended that column by talking about how to capture signals like Ctrl-C and invoke functions that can clean up temp files and so on before actually giving up control of your shell script.

    This time, I want to explore a different facet of signal management in a shell script: having built-in timers that let you specify an allowable quantum of time for a specific function or command to complete with explicit consequences if it hangs.

    When does a command hang? Often when you're tapping into a network resource. For example, you might have a script that looks up definitions by handing a query to Google via curl. If everything's running fine, it'll complete in a second or two, and you're on your way.

    But if the network's off-line or Google's having a problem or any of the million other reasons that a network query can fail, what happens to your script? Does it just hang forever, relying on the curl program to have its own timeout feature? That's not good.

  • Working with Stdin and Stdout | Linux Journal – Previously, I erroneously titled my column as ""SIGALRM Timers and Stdin Analysis". It turned out that by the time I'd finished writing it, I had spent a lot of time talking about SIGALRM and how to set up timers to avoid scripts that hang forever, but I never actually got to the topic of stdin analysis. Oops.

    So this time, let's start with that topic. The behavior to emulate here is something a lot of utilities do without you paying much attention: they behave differently if their input or output is a pipe or file than they do when it's stdin (the keyboard) or stdout (the screen). Try ls versus ls|cat to see what I mean.

Bookmarks for 30th April 2013

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These are my saved Pinboard links for 30th April 2013:

  • HTTP: The Protocol Every Web Developer Must Know – Part 2 | Nettuts+ – In my previous article, we covered some of HTTP’s basics, such as the URL scheme, status codes and request/response headers. With that as our foundation, we will look at the finer aspects of HTTP, like connection handling, authentication and HTTP caching. These topics are fairly extensive, but we’ll cover the most important bits.
  • 5 Great Tools for Finding Color Inspiration | Vandelay Design Blog – There are so many great resources available to designers that help inspire and improve efficiency, but often, color inspiration and color search abilities are overlooked in web design resources. After all, it’s often just important to find an image, gradient, or palette as it is to find one with the right subject.

    What’s more, color can be one of the elements that designers forget to focus on, in favor of the typography, layout, or imagery. And yet a gorgeous color palette can make the difference between a bland and a strikingly original design.

    So if you find yourself in need of a color inspiration boost, not only will this roundup of great sites provide you with all the palettes and images you could ever wish to see, they’re also great resources for manipulating, creating, and sharing color.

  • geuis/helium-css · GitHub – Helium is a tool for discovering unused CSS across many pages on a web site.

    The tool is javascript-based and runs from the browser.

    Helium accepts a list of URLs for different sections of a site then loads and parses each page to build up a list of all stylesheets. It then visits each page in the URL list and checks if the selectors found in the stylesheets are used on the pages. Finally, it generates a report that details each stylesheet and the selectors that were not found to be used on any of the given pages.

  • Brie and Nutella Grilled Cheese | Serious Eats : Recipes – The first time I had a brie and nutella sandwich was at The Smile in New York, where my old friend chef Melia Marden serves the stuff on a warm baguette. It's really darn good.

    Nutella makes most things better. This is something most of us already know.

    Another thing we can agree on: toasting things in butter makes better things even more better. So why not take her great sandwich idea, apply a bit of butter and heat to the equation, and see what we get?

    Rather than my normal choice of white sandwich bread, I like the heartier texture of a french-style loaf here. More pores for stuff to ooze into, you know? The key is to slice the bread extra thick and grill extra slow so that the melted cheese and chocolate drip in and out of every nook and cranny. I'm not going to lie: this is a delicious mess of a sandwich.

  • Paneer Jalfrezi – Paneer Recipes – Indian Vegetarian Dish » All Recipes Indian Curry Recipes Indian Paneer Recipes Indian Vegetarian Recipes North Indian Recipes Indian Food Recipes | Andhra Recipes | Indian Dishes Recipes | Sailu’s Kitchen – Paneer Jalfrezi is a colorful, healthy Indian Vegetarian dish and a classic among paneer recipes. A low calorie paneer dish that has contrasting textures with melt in the mouth soft paneer and the bell peppers provide a flavorful crunch. It makes for a wonderful filling with wraps and a good side dish with rotis. There are a few variations to Paneer Jafrezi recipe but the one I am posting today is the one I like to hang on to and make pretty often.

    You could saute the paneer in oil or ghee till golden brown before adding to the vegetables or use paneer that has been dunked in warm water for 15 minutes. And please do not omit roasted fenugreek powder aka kasuri methi when making this easy vegetarian dish.

  • App.net Client Comparison – this is ADNCC, a number of tools to help you find the most suitable app.net-client for your needs.
  • All you need to know about CSS Transitions | Mostly harmless by Alex MacCaw – CSS3 transitions bring simple and elegant animations to web applications, but there's a lot more to the spec than first meets the eye.

    In this post I'm going to delve into some of the more complicated parts of CSS transitions, from chaining and events to hardware acceleration and animation functions.

    Letting the browser control animations sequences allows it to optimize performance and efficiency by altering the frame rate, minimizing paints and offloading some of the work to the GPU.

  • Thank God We Have A Specification! | Smashing Coding – This article is packed with a number of quirks and issues you should be aware of when working with CSS3 transitions. Please note that I’m not showing any workarounds or giving advice on how to circumvent the issues discussed. Alex MacCaw has already written a very insightful and thorough article on “All You Need to Know About CSS Transitions.”
  • Securing Ubuntu – Josh Rendek – Let’s login to our new machine and take some initial steps to secure our system. For this article I’m going to assume your username is ubuntu.

Bookmarks for 26th April 2013

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These are my saved Pinboard links for 26th April 2013:

  • twocanoes/salute · GitHub – OS X does not have a built in mechanism to easily lock the screen using a key combination. Salute allows you to press Control-command-delete to be prompted like this:
  • twocanoes/debug · GitHub – Debug is a System Preference Pane that allows you to easily figure out complex enterprise issues by capuring logging. It allows an administrator to have a user install the preference pane, turn it on, and then collect the logs. Usually log collection involves telling a user to run complex commands that are prone to errors. With Debug, those days are over. They double click to install it, turn it on, and the hit the "collect logs" button to, well, collect the logs to the desktop.
  • twocanoes/audit · GitHub – OS X has a built in auditing system build into OS X based on OpenBSM. It is configured and setup via the command line, and has some esoteric syntax. To deal with this, I created a system preference pane to configure the options, and a log reader to read and search the binary logs. For more detailed information, see man audit on OS X.

    The preference pane creates the audit config files in their normal places (/etc/security) and aids in creating the files for later distribution or for individual configuration.

  • Cavatelli with Asiago Oat Crumbs – WHO: QueenSashy is a self-professed cooking addict from New York City. WHAT: A unique pasta with customizable spice and a process that's mostly hands-off. HOW: Endure chill and bake times for the cheesy oat crumbs, then boil some pasta, and eat! WHY WE LOVE IT: This is a cookie dough experiment gone wrong, and we couldn't be happier for the kitchen disaster. You'll swear the crumb mixture tastes familiar, and you'll agree — a dough once destined for cookies is a revelation on pasta.
  • Heidi Swanson’s Chickpea Stew with Saffron, Yogurt, and Garlic – A spring vegetarian chickpea soup that's lush in all the right places (but won't lull you to sleep).
  • Get productive: hacking Sublime Text 2 for faster rails/project navigation | fonicmonkey – Programmer productivity stems from the ability to easily and efficiently navigate, create and edit the code you need to work with. To this end, it’s incredibly important to pay attention to the efficiency of your own daily workflow. If you’re regularly repeating tedious tasks that have multiple steps, it’s important to take some time out to automate these issues.

    This isn’t taught on a lot of computer science courses — it isn’t strictly computer science so that’s understandable — but it’s incredibly important for your efficiency, effectiveness and ability to remain a happy, motivated programmer. Too many tedious tasks cloud and distract from the real problems you’re trying to solve.

    In this post I want to focus on the workflow-improving plugins I use with Sublime Text 2 to make my navigation around rails and ruby projects fast and efficient. I’m not going to focus on debugging, validating, snippets or the plethora of other aspects that are also important for good coding. Instead I’m going to focus specifically on how we navigate around our projects and have all the info we need at our fingertips as quickly as possible.

  • BeagleBoard.org – BeagleBone Black – BeagleBone Black is a community-supported development platform for developers and hobbyists. Boot Linux in under 10 seconds and get started on development in less than 5 minutes with just a single USB cable.
  • mneorr/Alcatraz · GitHub – The Xcode Package Manager!

    Alcatraz is an open-source package manager for Xcode. It lets you discover and install plugins, templates and color schemes without the need for manually cloning or copying files. It installs itself as a part of Xcode and it feels like home.

  • alloy/terminal-notifier · GitHub – terminal-notifier is a command-line tool to send Mac OS X User Notifications, which are available in Mac OS X 10.8.

    It is currently packaged as an application bundle, because NSUserNotification does not work from a ‘Foundation tool’. radar://11956694

    The Notification Center always uses the application’s own icon, there’s currently no way to specify a custom icon for a notification. The only way to use this tool with your own icon is to include a build of terminal-notifier with your icon instead.

    This tool will be used by Kicker to show the status of commands which are executed due to filesystem changes. (v3.0.0)

  • Writing a simple Sublime Text plugin. | Metal Toad – For the most part I like to keep my code editors as light and vanilla as possible. Some of the basic features that I like to see in my editor include auto indentation, syntax highlighting and ability to search across the project. Anything that will help debugging my codebase is a plus. Sublime Text offers all of these features out of the box and much more with the addition of community contributed plugins.

    One of the neat Sublime Text features is that it provides you with a list of commands which you can extend (or write your own) and assign them to different key binds.

    In this blog post I will go over configuring key binds and use insert_snippet command to generate some debug statements and then we will write few lines of python to extend insert_snippet to use text from clipboard as well.

  • Raspberry Doughnuts with Vanilla Dipping Sauce | Serious Eats : Recipes – It doesn't get much simpler or more indulgent than a fresh doughnut. Old School Comfort Food shares chef Alex's recipe for fluffy, sugar-encrusted doughnuts filled with tangy jam accompanied by a creamy vanilla sauce. It took her dozens of attempts to develop a method that, according to her, works every time. You just need to make it once.

Bookmarks for 23rd April 2013

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These are my saved Pinboard links for 23rd April 2013:

  • Crunchy and Spicy Shrimp Stir-Fry with Snap Peas | Serious Eats : Recipes – After discovering a hoard of bright green snap peas at the grocery store, I assembled a snap pea and shrimp stir-fry. I thought I was being really clever, but turns out this combo is one of the most popular stir-fry recipes out there. Not only that, but almost all of them are served in a restrained and slightly gloopy sauce. I could try to create a good version of that recipe, or go in a completely different direction. (I chose the latter.)

    Reading through Fuchsia Dunlop's Land of Plenty, I came across a technique that I knew would set this stir-fry apart. Briefly listed as a variation for hot-and-numbing tiny fish, there was a recipe for crispy shrimp with salt and Sichuan peppercorn. The shrimp are marinated for 15 minutes, tossed in flour, and deep-fried until golden and crunchy. They are then sautéed quickly with chilies and Sichuan peppercorn. This results in crunchy shrimp, both spicy and numbing.

    All I had to do was incorporate the snap peas into the picture. I decided to cook them before the fried shrimp were added back to the pan, along with a handful of bean sprouts. This mostly worked, but since there was no sauce to tie everything together, the peas came off as a little bland. Fortunately, a simple drizzle of soy sauce at the end solved the problem, coating the vegetables in the same addictive blend that adheres so easily to the the shrimp.

  • Am I Responsive? – SEE YOUR SITE RESPONSIVE
  • Style Tiles – Style Tiles are a design deliverable consisting of fonts, colors and interface elements that communicate the essence of a visual brand for the web.

    They help form a common visual language between the designers and the stakeholders and provide a catalyst for discussions around the preferences and goals of the client.

  • How to move a physical machine / server to a VMware VM | Krypted.com – In recent months I have had a lot of questions regarding to to migrate physical serves to VM’s. And while VMware provides an excellent tool (VMware converter) for migrating physical machines / server , this tool does unfortunately  not support OS X as a source…..VMware hint hint !!
    So what are your options? Fortunately VMware has ported their vmware-vdiskmanager tool and vmware-rawdiskCreator tool to OS X as part of their VMware Fusion package !
  • BetterTouchTool – BetterTouchTool is a great, feature packed FREE app that allows you to configure many gestures for your Magic Mouse, Macbook Trackpad and Magic Trackpad. It also allows you to configure actions for keyboard shortcuts, normal mice and the Apple Remote. In addition to this it has an iOS companion App (BTT Remote) which can also be configured to control your Mac the way you want.

    BetterTouchTool includes many goodies, like window snapping or an integrated window switcher.

  • Useful Xcode 4 Plugins | cocoa:naut – This is just a short collection of some useful Xcode 4 plugins I use. Most of us Cocoa devs, I guess, are looking about for making our development environment a more friendly and “warm” place with features enriching the user experience.

    This list is far off being complete and will be extended permanently. So if you like it you should take a look at it from time to time. (-:

  • appdotnet/piha · GitHub – We wanted to make our social buttons as flexible as possible, so instead of forcing you to use our hosted version of them, we are opening them up so you can self host them. Below we've documented how to deploy them to 2 different services: Heroku and AWS.

    If you don't want to host your own buttons, we still have a hosted version you can use if you don't want to go through the process of setting it up yourself. Just follow the same configuration process, and use our hosted JavaScript.

  • josh mcarthur – Sublime Text 2: Do not reopen files – For quite some time now, I've been using alloy's fork of Macvim as my primary editor, along with janus, and it's been working out really well.

    I've just started trying out Sublime Text 2 though, and it's been pretty nice (although I still have reservations). Something I can't stand in a developer application though, is for an application to re-open all the files you had open last time the application was used. Sure enough, this is something that Sublime Text 2 does.