What happened on April 15/16? (And more dodgy Blogger stats)

My blog is a fairly modest affair that gets around 500 pageviews a day - mostly of old posts. However, this week has seen a rather unexpected spike in activity:

What happened on the 15^th of April? It seems to be something to do with MacBook Air storage expansion, as that’s the post that seems to have the lion’s share of pageviews this week:

The odd thing is that in the detailed stats view, the peak of views is on the 16^th. More dodgy Blogger stats it seems. Clearly unimportant but if anyone knows what’s going on (in either case), I’d be interested to hear!

Connecting to an AWOL bluetooth mouse on Mac OSX

If you are like me, you sometimes turn your Apple Magic Mouse off when leaving your computer unattended for a while. The problem is that sometimes it does not seem to want to connect again when you turn it back on. What to do? Without a mouse, how do you open the mouse preferences to reconnect?

One option is obviously to attach some other kind of pointer - a trackpad or USB mouse - and use this. But (a) you might not have one to hand, and (b) that’s rather labour intensive. So, instead, use the keyboard shortcuts:

1. In Finder (use cmd+tab to cycle through to Finder if other applications are open), use shift+cmd+a to open the Applications folder.

2. Select System Preferences using the arrow keys. You might need to tab into the window first. Hitting t will jump you to the first T… application, then just use the up arrow.

3. Open System Preferences with cmd+o.

4. Hit tab to enter the Search box and start typing mouse. The Mouse icon will get highlighted. Hit enter to open.

5. After a few seconds of looking, your bluetooth mouse should be found. Hit enter to connect. Job done!

How to stop Outlook on Mac OSX replacing quotes & apostrophes with superscript numbers

Since switching to a Mac, I have been experiencing an odd issue with Outlook: although in my message editor all would look well, recipients of my messages would often find the apostrophes (’) replaced with a ¹ and “” quotes with ³ & ².

Today, I had had enough and tried to find the reason/solution. The former, it seems, is because Macs have their own version of ISO-8859 encoding, which means that other platforms do not correctly interpret text encoded in this format. The solution is simply force Outlook to use a different "Preferred encoding" in the Composing Preferences - UTF-8 works for me.

Changing file extension associations on a Mac

One of the problems with making the switch from Windows to Mac is that you lose a lot of little tricks and tips that you have picked up over the years. Despite claims that Macs are much more intuitive than Windows machines (something that I have never found, personally), I quite often find myself frustrated at the lack of an obvious way to do something that I know how to do in Windows.

Yesterday, it was file extensions that briefly gave me angst. For historical (i.e. forgotten!) reasons, I have a lot of programs generating *.tdt files, which are tab delimited text. (The correct extension for such things actually seems to be *.tsv, or tab separated values.) Being a biologist, I generally like to open my delimited files to look at in Microsoft Excel - the number one bioinformatics tool in world! (By use, that is!) Naive Macs (and naive Windows machines) do not know what a *.tdt file is, though, so they will generally offer a text editor instead. Similarly, I have a lot of draft notes in Markdown, saved as *.md files, but Finder wants to open them in TextWrangler rather than Mou, my Markdown Editor of choice.

Happily, the internet has once again come to the rescue, in the form of a 2009 post on OSXDaily, Change File Associations in Mac OS X. Simply right-click (or ctrl+click) in Finder and select Get Info.

You can then change the program to open that file with and choose Change All to change the default action for all similar files (e.g. those with the same extension). This was so useful that I thought I would re-share here.

Marvellous Markdown

Another positive outcome of the recent Software Carpentry boot camp was the excuse and opportunity to get a bit more to grips with Markdown. This is really useful pseudocode that retains a high degree of human readability in plain text form, whilst being easily converted to HTML and other rich text formats. I'd already used it a bit for some of my content on the University of Southampton Computational Modelling Group website but I'd never fully realised its flexibility, value and potential until I started writing README files in it.

I won't try to explain Markdown itself here. The Wikipedia article is pretty informative if you want to know more. Instead, this a quick post to highlight/bookmark some useful Markdown tools that I've come across.

Markable

The first is the Markable website.

This is great if you just want to try your hand at a bit of Markdown and see what the HTML conversion would look like. Simply type your text in the online Markable editor and the HTML window will automatically update to reflect the changes! You can then copy the Markdown to the clipboard or export Markdown/HTML to a file.

If you see yourself using Markdown a lot, as I now do, you can register and take advantage of a whole bunch of other tools, such as (auto)saving content to work on later or exporting the Markdown (or HTML) directly into Dropbox.

Markdown Service Tools

Of course, if you are like me then saving to HTML code might not be enough for you. You might want to see the HTML code and/or copy it for use elsewhere. (I write all my blog posts in the HTML editor, for example.) On a Mac there is the tremendously useful Markdown Service Tools by Brett Terpstra that, among other things, includes tools for precisely this. Simply download the zip file, unpack and then copy the relevant *.workflow files to your OS X System Service folder:

~/Library/Services/

(Brett has a description of how to install Services here. You might have to make the Services/ folder first - I did.) This makes those services available via the Services menu item (or right-click → Services) across a range of Apple applications. My favourite so far is the "md - Convert - HTML to Clipboard" service, which converts highlighted Markdown text to HTML and copies it directly onto the clipboard. In combination with the Markable editor, I think this could be really useful.

Python-Markdown

It's worth quickly mentioning that there's a Markdown Python library, if for no other reason than that is appears in the Markable screen grab above! This can be used for easy conversions between formats, which might be handy for coding up batch conversions of *.md to HTML README files etc. I really need to save this one for another day as I am still getting to grips with it and working out how/where it can be useful for me.

Mac Links and Shortcuts

The biggest problem of moving from PC to Mac is that all the shortcuts are different. Maybe it's just because I have been a PC user for so many years but, generally, I find the PC shortcuts to be much more intuitive. For example, to take a screen grab to the clipboard on a PC you hit "Print Screen", on a Mac you press Command+Control+Shift+3. (Obviously, duh!)

The flip-spide is that hunting down the basic shortcuts reveals a host of other shortcuts of related functions. I am not sure if PCs have so many or not but here are the screen grab options from MacRumors:

• Command-Shift-3: Take a screenshot of the screen, and save it as a file on the desktop
  
• Command-Shift-4, then select an area: Take a screenshot of an area and save it as a file on the desktop
  
• Command-Shift-4, then space, then click a window: Take a screenshot of a window and save it as a file on the desktop
  
• Command-Control-Shift-3: Take a screenshot of the screen, and save it to the clipboard
  
• Command-Control-Shift-4, then select an area: Take a screenshot of an area and save it to the clipboard
  
• Command-Control-Shift-4, then space, then click a window: Take a screenshot of a window and save it to the clipboard
  

In Leopard and later, the following keys can be held down while selecting an area (via Command-Shift-4 or Command-Control-Shift-4):

• Space, to lock the size of the selected region and instead move it when the mouse moves
  
• Shift, to resize only one edge of the selected region
  
• Option (Alt), to resize the selected region with its center as the anchor point

I've decided to start keeping track of the shortcuts (and links to lists of shortcuts) useful to me personally here. Although Google works pretty well, suggestions of good resources are welcome. Now, if only we could convince Apple and PC laptop manufacturers to come up with a universal standard for where to put the shift, function, control, alt and command keys, life for the shortcut-user would be good. (Of course, you would want the Apple command key where the windows control key lives.)

Turning to the Dark Side

So, I have finally joined the Dark Side and bought myself an Apple computer. One of the new MacBook Air laptops in fact. And it's lovely! (Hello!) I know that not everyone will agree with my casting of Apple as the Dark Side. For years, Microsoft seemed to be the corporation that everybody loved to hate.

Microsoft never achieved the monopoly of Apple, though. With a PC, you could change components yourself, therefore benefiting from a free market. The same even applies to operating systems - if you really hate Microsoft, put Linux on your PC. (I did recently on my little Dell netbook after the upgrade to Windows 7 at work made it utterly useless.) Different hardware. Different software. Different strokes for different folks. PCs were the computers for the real geeks.

Apple, on the other hand, made pretty gadgets but always seemed greedy. Oh, you want to connect one of our devices to the rest of the world, not to another one of our devices? That'll be another £15 for a special adaptor, please. Want to upgrade your memory? Well, you'll have to get that from us too. Etc.

On the other hand, there is something to be said for a monopoly. Apple control their products. There's none of the PC irritation of buying a game only to find that the two hundred different graphics cards supported does not include the one you have or that, for unknown reasons, your particular motherboard/memory/hard drive combination just doesn't seem to work together as well as the individual numbers would suggest. Then there are all the things claiming to speed up your system, or clean your registry, or check for viruses and spyware and yadayadayada. When I was young, I enjoyed finding out about this stuff but it doesn't seem like such fun anymore. An Apple, in contrast, just works. And if it doesn't, there is one person to blame: Apple.

Luke: Is the dark side stronger?

Yoda: No. Quicker. Easier. More seductive.

I still think I am a geek but maybe I am getting old, or computers are just a lot more complicated than they used to be, but these I want something where everything just works! And boy, does the new MacBook Air work! Everything about it is a joy. Lovely to look at, lovely to use. I'm still getting used to the different short-cuts and the like, and no delete key (only a backspace - Fn+BACKSPACE is the PC "delete", by the way) but, on the whole, I am really liking what I see. Best of all, there's no stupid Windows compatibility or performance issues. So far, at least. (I am still in the Honeymoon period and even Windows 7 takes a while before it seems to grind the whole system to a halt at random.)

Someone accused me recently of becoming an Apple advert (I'm already in the iPhone and iPad fan clubs) and I think I may be just about there! My only real criticism (other than dark rumours about the usual shenanigans of a multinational giant that is bigger than many countries) is the usual cable nonsense. Happily, I don't really intend to plug my MacBook into anything other than USB devices - this is for play, not work, so no projector connection or PowerPoint issues for me!

Will I ever go back to a PC, now I have tasted the Apple? It's early days. I am yet to try any programming on it, or see if MS Office works (including Excel Macros) but early indications are probably not. They say that "once you go Mac you can't go back".

Once you start down the Dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny.