Hackszine.com: Productivity Archives

Archive: Productivity

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October 21, 2008

Scripting Photoshop with Javascript - anti-redaction example

Thomas Robinson was experimenting with a way to recover censored text from documents that use the Photoshop "mosaic" filter to redact text. One way to brute force a solution to a redacted message is to run the mosaic filter with a number of input letters, looking for visual matches that progressively uncover the censored text.

Manually performing this trial and error approach would take quite a bit of time, but Thomas was able to automate this by writing a Javascript program that interfaces directly with Photoshop CS3 and performs the necessary filters and test operations to uncover the secret message. This is cool on a number of levels, not only for the particulars of the example, but also for the fact that you can now script Photoshop in plain old Javascript.

There are so many cool things you could do with an easy scripting interface to Photoshop. Check the video above to see this particular application in action, or follow the links below for the full discussion and example code for writing the Javascript code to make something like this work.

Recovering Censored Text Using Photoshop and JavaScript
Photoshop Redaction Recovery Sample Code

October 13, 2008

HOWTO - track stocks in Google Spreadsheets

One of the most convenient features in Google Spreadsheets is the ability to pull live external data sources into any worksheet. Instead of copying data into your worksheet, when the linked source changes, the cells in your spreadsheet will automatically update, which can save a lot of work if you pull reports regularly. This external data can be pulled from XML, other spreadsheet documents, and even (assuming you can bear to look) current and historical stock quotes from Google Finance.

Linking a worksheet to Google Finance is as simple as calling the GoogleFinance spreadsheet function. There are two ways to use it: you can pull current information on a ticker symbol, or you can pull historical trade data for a particular date range. Here's how:

Retrieving Current Stock Information

If you call the GoogleFinance function with two attributes, you can link to current market data for a particular ticker symbol. Just open any cell in your worksheet and enter the following:

=GoogleFinance("symbol", "attribute")

Replace "symbol" with the ticker id, such as GOOG or AAPL. The attribute parameter determines what information will be retrieved for that symbol. There are a number of supported attributes, including price, volume, tradetime, beta, pe (price to earnings ratio), and changepct. If you omit the attribute parameter, it will default to "price". There are a number of other possible attributes which I haven't listed, including some specific to mutual funds, so check the documentation link below for the full list.

Pulling Historical Stock Data

Another thing that you can do is retrieve historical stock data over a large date range. Once you have this in your spreadsheets, you can use formulas to process, compare, and chart this information over time.

Here's the syntax for pulling historical stock data:

=GoogleFinance("symbol", "attribute", "start_date", "end_date", "interval")

As in the previous example, "symbol" needs to be replaced with the desired ticker ID. The "attribute" parameter, however, works a little differently. It's possible values are limited to high, low, open, close, vol, and all. "start_date" and "end_date" define the range of data that will be retrieved, and interval should be set to "DAILY", "WEEKLY", or a number from 1-7, which represents the number of days between measurements.

When the stock data is retrieved, a number of columns and rows will be consumed to capture the linked data, so make sure you have room to accommodate the data you've requested. It's not a bad practice to contain this data in separate sheet. One thing I noticed is that the column names always appear in French for me, despite my language preference settings. If you notice this as well, you'll just have to ignore it until it's fixed.

You can have up to 250 of these Google Finance feeds in a single spreadsheet. It's not an unlimited amount, but it's not exactly lightning fast to pull that much data anyway. If you need more than that , one possible option is to separate your report data into different spreadsheets and then refresh them as needed.

Example Google Finance Spreadsheet
GoogleFinance Documentation and Examples

July 22, 2008

PocketMod and Mapufacture: the anti-iPhone

Here's a clever way to fold an 8.5x11 sheet of paper into a small book. The way it's folded, all of the book's 8 outward-facing pages are from the same side of the sheet of paper. This allows you to easily construct a handy little daily planner by printing a single sheet of paper. When you're done folding, the first and third leaf will have a little pouch that you can shove a business card or two inside.

The PocketMod website has a flash application that lets you quickly build a layout for your planner. You can drag calendars, todo-lists, grids, conversion tables, and even RSS feed articles to the page and print it directly from your browser.

I love it. It's the iPhone for the mobile Luddite.

You're probably thinking: this pocketmod thing is awesome and all, but what about maps? Well, PocketMod does maps too. Or rather, a cool Web2.0 mapping service does PocketMods.

At mapufacture.com, you can create and manage custom maps and import data layers from news sources, geo blogging services, and Google My Maps. In addition to all the normal embedding and sharing tools that you'd expect, they also have a PocketMod export, allowing you to convert your map into a handy format that you can put in your back pocket.

You can't make phone calls on your PocketMod and it doesn't hold any songs you can't sing or whistle yourself. On the other hand, it's crazy slim, 3rd party application writing is a cinch, the data plan is affordable, and you won't believe the battery life.

PocketMod
Mapufacture - create custom multilayer maps (with pocketmod output support)

October 3, 2007

HOWTO - read RSS with a POP email client using FreePOPs

FreePOPs is an open source, plugin-based POP proxy that you can run on your local machine. It was originally designed to allow you to use a normal POP email client to read your mail on a multitude of webmail systems. You point your mail client at the FreePOPs server, and it connects and screen-scrapes your webmail account so that you can read your email in the comfort of your favorite mail reader.

The great thing about FreePOPs is its filter plugin architecture. There are a number of different plugins to support the specific requirements of most of the popular web-based email systems. There's even an RSS plugin that will pull an RSS feed and make it look like a normal POP mailbox. Thankfully, you don't need to configure anything on the server. Instead, you connect to the FreePOPs server using a particular username and password format to activate the appropriate plugin.

Here's how to set up an RSS-to-POP mailbox using FreePOPs and the standard OS X Mail.app email client.

Read full story

May 25, 2007

How Scoble reads 622 RSS feeds every morning

Every morning Robert Scoble starts his day by sifting through 622 RSS feeds. In this interview, he describes the tools and tricks that enable him to accomplish the immense task of personally aggregating the live web. Here are a few spoiler tips:

Use Google Reader (keyboard commands make browsing faster)
Use "all items view" to see the full river of news in chronological order
Filter out potentials in the first pass. Take a top level filter for topic, information density, author, and quality of post. Only articles that make the cut are looked at in more detail.
Superhuman abilities help

How Scoble Reads 622 RSS Feeds Each Morning - Link

May 11, 2007

Bubbl.us: online brainstorming tool

Bubbl.us is a simple online tool for making flowcharts. It's easy to use, which makes it a nice way to quickly brainstorm ideas without getting too caught up in the details with Dia/Xfig or Visio. It'll also allow you to export your sessions as a png, jpg, xml, or html, so that you can archive or share them with others - Link.

April 11, 2007

Skitch Screencast

Click To Play

A couple months ago, I mentioned the new (Mac-only) Skitch screen-capture and annotation app from Plasq. At the time, I wasn't able to register for their mailing list (the captcha issue is fixed now, so do head over to sign up), but I just got a sneak peak at the private beta, and it's everything I'd hoped it would be. Check out the screencast for a quick walkthrough and my initial impressions. In brief, I can think of many productive uses for it, but the time I waste playing with it will likely negate all of them.- Link to video download.

March 15, 2007

(10+2)*5 - Procrastination Hack

This productivity hack caught my attention because it's very similar to the strategy I find myself using to help maintain focus and forward progress, despite my proclivities for procrastination. The scheme is called (10+2)*5, and it breaks down like this:

Work hard on a discrete, small task for 10 minutes.
Take a 2 minute break.
Repeat the first two steps 5 times

Before you know it, an hour will have passed, you'll have gotten a lot done, and you'll be looking forward to the next work/play session. If you follow an agile/iterative software development methodology, you'll probably notice some similarities here, in that the focus is on maintaining forward momentum while achieving small, manageable goals.

The key to this hack is to reward yourself with a break regardless of whether the task was completed or not. You are rewarding progress made, not work completed, and this makes even the most daunting tasks seem more manageable (especially when the hardest part is getting started).

I think what's probably going on here is that you are structuring for yourself a positive reinforcement conditioning system. By keeping the increments short, it's much easier to form the association between the work stimulus and the break reward. Compare this to the 2 week cycle on the typical pay check reward, or the 30 day invoice roundabout if you're a freelancer, or even no reward for those thankless around the house tasks that always need to be done... Procrastinators just need something more immediate and obvious as encouraging reinforcement.

What do you think about this? Have a productivity hack that works better for you? Chat about it in the comments!

43 Folders' Procrastination hack: "(10+2)*5" -Link.

March 8, 2007

Scanning and Whiteboard Archive Via Cell Phone

scanR is a free service that transforms phonecam photos of documents, business cards, or whiteboards into cleaned-up PDFs that it will then fax or email on your behalf.

Documents are placed through an OCR process, so the text is selectable and searchable (though I'd probably rather have my documents converted to plain text or html). For whiteboards, you don't even need to take the shot head on. The software will take cues from the whiteboard's edge to transform the image into proper alignment.

Save a trip to the fax machine, and never write "Do Not Erase" again -Link.

March 7, 2007

Simplify Blogging Tasks with TextExpander

TextExpander for Amazon Affiliate Links

Over at the SmileOnMyMac Blog, Gordon Meyer (author of Smart Home Hacks) offers a great tip for speeding up tedious blogging tasks with TextExpander (Mac only):

Here's a great tip for bloggers and the like. I use TextExpander to create a handy macro for creating Amazon Affiliate links. It's much easier than using Amazon's web interface.

After defining a shortcut in TextExpander, adding an Amazon product link to his blog with his unique Amazon Affiliate information is as easy as copying the product's ISBN or ASIN the clipboard and activating the defined trigger, a task that could be repurposed for a variety of other repetitive processes.

Related:

Merlin Mann's TextExpander video tutorial for MacBreak

March 6, 2007

Three Solid Gmail Productivity Tips

Gmail Productivity

Matt Cutts shares three solid Gmail productivity tips to help keep your inbox under control, including keeping mailing lists out of there (using filters), prioritizing messages (using Greasemonkey and persistent searches), and excluding messages from certain accounts (using filters and labels).

Teach via IM with One-Way Video Chat

Click To Play

Over at O'Reilly's Mac DevCenter, Erica Sadun points out a little-known (at least to me) feature in the current version of iChat:

By control-clicking (right-clicking) a buddy's name, a contextual menu pops up offering the option to invite that person to a one-way video chat. This means that they can watch your video but will not send video back to you in return.

How have I missed this option for so long? Though Erica wants to use this feature to iPodcast (stream via IM) movies and TV shows to her friends, I see this as a great opportunity for "hands-on" instruction you normally don't have access to when you're not physically in the same room with someone.

For example, crafts like knitting are notoriously hard to teach without visual cues, and even the most detailed books often suffer from their lack of moving pictures. When I learned to knit, I used books as a crutch, but actually learning required sitting next to my mother-in-law to see how it was done. Even now, when I hit a roadblock with a new technique, I need to wait till the next time we're together. But if we had a feature like this, we likely wouldn't have to wait. I could just "look over her shoulder" as she described what she was doing.

The most obvious benefit of one-way video is that it doesn't require the recipient to have a video camera on their end, but as Erica notes, for instructional content as with streaming movies, one-way video has another notable advantage over two-way video conferencing:

you don't have to watch the other person watching your video. You don't have to see them adjusting their hair, performing nasal maintenance, or any of the other unconscious things people do when they get involved in watching TV as opposed to engaging actively in a social situation.

The pedagogical opportunities for this feature are virtually limitless, and it will add a whole new dimension to tech support with the release of Mac OS X Leopard, when we finally get iChat Screen Sharing. - Link to video download.

March 1, 2007

Pass the Ly Detector

Ly Detector

Writing wonks and anal editors rejoice! Gina Trapani just released her Ly Detector as a Greasemonkey script!

If you're at all familiar with Strunk and White, you know that excessive use of adverbs - words that end in -ly - isn't a sign of strong writing. All of us writers struggle with sentence-weakening generally's and relatively's at times, but now there's a Greasemonkey script that highlights adverbial transgressions on the web automatically. (Whoops!)

Once it's installed, The Ly Detector Greasemonkey script takes a yellow highlighter to adverbs, like obviously and previously to help web writers stay on their non-adverbial toes. The Ly Detector's great for bloggers who are trying to improve their skills with the quill - or just those who want to make fun of them. After the jump, the script download, and some more details of how this works.

I've been a longtime fan of Gina's Ly Detector, from way back (before Greasemonkey existed) when it was published as a bookmarklet to her (now defunct) personal site, so I'm incredibly thrilled to see it so amazingly updated (transgressions intentional, to throw off the yellow flag for readers putting me to the test).

Related:

Greasemonkey Hacks

Browse Craigslist Photos with Listpic

Listpic

Over at Parent Hacks, Asha Dornfest points to Listpic, a "visual Craigslist browser" that lets you search your city's Craigslist listings by keyword or category and display the results as image thumbnails. Price and location are included with the photo, mousing over reveals some details on the item, and clicking the image opens a pop-up of the detailed listing. This view helps weed out the listings with generic promotional photos, getting right to items that appear to be real, and becomes a big help for those of us who have a "no photo, no interest" policy for online bargain hunting.

February 26, 2007

Send Company Email From Gmail

Customized From Address

When my access to O'Reilly's email server went out today, I still managed to send a message to tech support from my O'Reilly email address. Since I'd already added my other address to Gmail, here's all I needed to do:

Log in to your Gmail account at mail.google.com.
Click Compose.
Use the drop-down menu in the From field to select the address you'd like to use to send the message.
Compose and send!

Sure, it's more of a tip than a hack, since it's built into Gmail, but it sure saved me in a pinch today, so I thought it qualified for a Hackszine mention.

Related: