Station in the Metro

It always pays.

Jun 4, 2014 ramblings, tunes

I realize this is a very Southern Maryland-centric request, but does anyone out there possibly have an audio or video recording of the ads for the supermarket McKay’s Food Store with their crazy earworm of a jingle? Extra bonus points if you come up with the late-80s/early-90s TV ad with jingle that consists entirely of grocery employees nodding in slow motion at customers, and shaking their hands.

The song:

It always pays to shop at McKay’s,
Where quality is discount every day!
To you and your family,
We give you this guarantee,
It always pays to shop at McKay’s!
…McKay’s Food Store!
Copy File Path as Text in Mac OS X

Jun 4, 2014 geek, howto
Posting this here because I keep needing to recreate it whenever I start using a new machine:
- Open Automator.
- Select the Service template.
- Set options at the top to “Service receives selected files or folders in Finder.”
- Drag over “Copy to Clipboard.”
- Save the service with a name like “Copy Path.”
That’s it! Now you can right-click on any selection in the Finder (even multiple selections) and select Services > Copy Path and then paste the text anywhere you like.

You can also use the keyboard system preferences to assign a custom hot key such as Option-Command-C to the service, so you can invoke it directly.

To do this: System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Services > Files and Folders > Copy Path > Add Shortcut. I usually use ⌥⌘C (but only because ⇧⌘C is default for Go > Computer).

Some details via this post on CNET.
Django MultiRangeField and MultiRangeFormField

Jun 1, 2014 geek, howto
I’m building a website, and needed a way to save a list of pages and page ranges from a book or magazine. I wanted to to be a little more strict than just saving it as a string without any cleanup or validation, so I wrote a custom Django model field (and accompanying form field).

It either just validates and cleans so that
```
4-33, 43, 45, 60-65, 44, 59
```
becomes the tidy
```
4-33, 43-45, 59-65
```
…or, if you comment out the raising of the ValidationError in the form field’s validate() method, it will actually clean up any junk characters for you, so even this horrible mess:
```
;4-33, 46a fads i44 ,p45o
```
gets cleaned to
```
4-33, 44-46
```
Enjoy!
3D Printer Re-calibration

Feb 22, 2014 geek

It’s been six months since we moved to Seattle, so I thought it was finally time to get my 3D printer out of mothballs. Well, at least that giant box full of Styrofoam peanuts.

I hadn’t left it in a great state the last time I used it. ABS plastic had gotten stuck in the […]
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Renaissance 2014 — How to App Video

Jan 31, 2014 editing, geek, howto

These are the “show notes” from my half of the Master Video talk at Renaissance 2014, on January 21, 2014 at 10:30 am.
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2014 SF Tiki Crawl

Jan 24, 2014 ramblings

This coming Tuesday, 2014-01-28, is the Bobtiki Crawl!

If you’re native to San Francisco, or just in town for Renaissance 2014 (like I am), I’d love to have you along. The generous and lovely Jen Tiki (part of the Tiki Oasis crew) will be leading us on a journey from the Tonga Room to […]
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Vertical Horizon

Jan 22, 2014 editing, rants

Ever since the iPhone first started shooting video, people have decried the use of the vertical orientation. Why would you do that? It looks so horrible! It’s unnatural! Hang on a moment while I pass judgement on you.

Stop it.

Let’s take a look at the history of film aspect ratios for a moment. […]
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Mark Boszko

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