cd ~/Libary/PDF\ Services
ln -s ~/path/ "descriptive_alias"

You may have to create the directory ~/Libary/PDF Services. Some people recommend using the directory /Libary/PDF Services, but this is bad style unless you really want the change to be universal. Even if you are the only user on the computer, it is safer to use the Library folder under your user account.

When looking in the /Libary/PDF Services directory, I noticed that the contents are just Automator workflows. This means it is easy for non-programmers to customize the behavior. One option that I somehow hadn’t noticed before today is Save PDF to Web Receipts Folder.pdfworkflow. With online billing this is incredibly useful. I typically use the “Save PDF as” option, saving the PDF in this year’s receipts directory, with the date as a prefix. This makes receipts for monthly bills easy to find. I looked at “Save PDF to Web Receipts Folder” to see how easy it would be to alter to my preferred style. Instead of being an Automator workflow, this is actually a Python script and a few property lists. Great! Python is my favorite language. I copied the files to ~/Libary/PDF Services and edited them. The Python script is in a file named tool. This script is well written, making it easy to modify. Here are the basic changes:

• Because I want to use timestamps, I added import time after the other import statements.
• I changed the destDirectory to my preferred directory. The script already creates the destination directory if it doesn’t exist, so altering the directory by date is easy, I added destDirectory = os.path.join(destDirectory, time.strftime("%Y")) to automatically append the subdirectory for the year.
• The file uses the title of the webpage as the filename. To add the date as a prefix, add the line title = "%s-%s" % (time.strftime( "%Y%m%d"), title) to the build path section. You can easily customize the date format.
• I prefer lowercase filenames, so I added filename = filename.lower() to the safeFilename function.
• If a file with this name already exists, the script appends a number to the name. I prefer different character than the default, so I changed it.

The final step was to I update the property list files so that the PDF menu shows the name I gave the command, instead of the original name from Apple.

I now have an even quicker way to save my receipts. Because the program is automatically generating the filenames using my preferences, I don’t have to change the name every time, and can avoid some typos and incorrect dates.

One of the many modern ‘conveniences’ that actually take more time than they save is voicemail. Answering machines and voicemail are occasionally useful, but more often than not, someone just leaves a rambling message with details they end up repeating when you call them back. Fortunately, Caller ID has mostly eliminated the need for voicemail: if you need to leave a message, I probably need to return your call. Since visual voicemail hasn’t yet been universally adopted—and some people still leave voicemails—I sometimes have to check my voicemail account. This has allowed phone companies to waste tons of customer time by forcing us to listen to long instructions describing voicemail. There are no obvious ways to avoid this wasted time. Thanks to David Pogue, I learned the non-obvious way, “1 * #”. If you are leaving a voice mail, one of those will probably get you out of listening to the pointless 30 second message.

You can look in the voicemail help for your carrier to find the correct code for your own voicemail.

• T-Mobile: VoiceMail Shortcuts
• Verizon: Voice Mail Instructions; different instructions depending on your region
• AT&T: Voicemail Quickguide
• Sprint: gave up on search; different instructions by phone

Source: LIVEdigitally through Pogue’s Posts.

[Update 2009-08-11] Anti-glare is back on the 15 inch MacBook Pro! Now for the 13 inch…

[Clarification 2009-08-24] By anti-glare, I don’t mean a matte display. Keep the glass covering, but use anti-reflection coating. The glass is nice, but reflections make the displays unusable.

I’m sick of the silly animated menus on movies. They were moderately interesting the first four times ten years ago. Then they became more and more annoying. I don’t want to put a DVD in, wait several minutes to get to the main menu, scroll to scene selection, watch an animation, select a scene, then start the movie. I want to put the disc in and have the movie start. If I want the menu, I’ll hit the menu button. If I want to watch trailers, I’ll select trailers. Direct access was supposed to be one of the benefits of DVD over tape. But since many DVD players don’t let you skip all the animations, you may as well be fast forwarding through trailers. Not that I want to go back to tape, but new technology should make life better, not just different.

The second problem is the CRAP included on DVD and Blu-ray. It is bad on DVD. The CRAP on Blu-ray it is so bad I refuse to ever buy a Blu-ray disc.

I may as well include a third problem: How do all rental DVDs end up scratched? Are people playing frisbee with them? Using them as coasters? I have never scratched a CD or DVD, yet most rental DVDs are scratched enough to loose whole scenes.

I hope whatever high-definiton format (HVD?) we end up with in a couple years fixes these problems. Maybe we’ll even get a decent frame rate, 24 or 30 frames per second flickers way too much…

P.S. For those less informed on the ethics of technology: DRM is an acronym for Digital Rights Management. It is used as a euphemism for copy-control. Some companies try to control the ethical–and legal–fair use of music, video, and text. A common method is encryption designed to only allow files to be accessed on approved devices. Good examples are Blu-ray disks and some PDF files. These encryption systems are superfluous and unethical. This is why the euphemism DRM commonly makes lists of technology terms to avoid: Some Confusing or Loaded Words and Phrases that are Worth Avoiding, and Tech Terms to Avoid. We settled on the term CRAP: Controlled Reading and Playing.

This is silly.

The idea that increased domestic oil production will lower prices has several flaws. “Drill, baby, drill” oversimplifies supply and demand. It ignores physics. It assumes that oil companies are altruistic. It forgets that oil is a fungible commodity on a world market.

I’ll start with physics. Oil is called a fossil fuel for a reason. It was deposited in the past. The supply isn’t increasing. The law of conservation of mass doesn’t make a special exception for oil. There is only so much petroleum in the earth. Oil doesn’t magically reappear some time after a well runs dry. Once we use oil, it is gone. Oil isn’t produced, it is tapped from limited reservoirs. Increasing the rate of withdraw doesn’t increase supply, it decreases the time the fixed supply lasts.

“Drill, baby, drill” forgets that oil companies are for-profit businesses. It assumes that an increase in their ability to tap oil means they will increase availability, lowering prices. This action wouldn’t make sense for oil companies. As dealers of a limited resource, their goal is to make as much money as possible off the resource before it is gone. They need to maximize their lifetime profit per barrel. Increasing the rate of delivery to higher than demand lowers profits. Lowering the rate of delivery leads to higher prices. Using this basic supply and demand idea, it is in the interest of oil companies to decrease the rate of production.

This is also an oversimplification. Increases in oil prices encourages people to look into alternatives. As more people switch to alternatives, the demand for petroleum decreases, leading to lower prices. The profit maximizing strategy for oil companies is to keep delivery as low as possible to maximize the price per barrel, but high enough that demand doesn’t decrease. This is what they are doing.

To make this strategy more effective, they are also pursuing political and public relations. They admit that we need more than oil, but then claim that alternatives aren’t ready yet. This helps lower the interest in alternatives, keeping oil demand high. The high price and demand encourage people to thing that increasing availability will lower prices. This lets oil companies claim that they would increase production, but these pesky taxes and environmental regulations are in the way. So the call goes out to practically give them public land and have the public take the responsibility for cleaning up later. Now they are not only maximizing profit and ensuring demand, they are lowering future costs. The calls for drilling now are exactly what the oil companies need to maximize their long term petroleum profits.

The calls for “increased domestic production” to lower prices also ignore the fact that oil is a fungible commodity. The oil tapped in the US isn’t reserved strictly for use in the US. Increasing delivery rate in one country increases the rate for the world. Any price change in the US would be the result of a price change on world markets. While the remaining supplies of petroleum in the US sound large compared to American consumption, what matters to price is how they compare to world supplies. While American oil consumption is very high, consumption outside the US is increasing faster. This means that any change in American delivery is becoming less important.

The call for more drilling ignores the fact that it takes time to create the infrastructure to make newly tapped petroleum useful. Most estimates I have seen say that the soonest we would get oil from new American wells would be ten years. Then the oil would be withdrawn over several years. So the best case is we add a little oil to the world market from ten to twenty years from now. There no short term decrease in gas prices. Only a ten year delay. We are then left in the same position as now, but with no reserves.

The solution to the cost of energy in the US isn’t increased tapping of oil. The lag between drilling and delivery would be better used to increase efficiency, decrease demand, and switch to renewable energy sources.

In college, before video games, we would amuse ourselves by posing programming exercises. One of the favorites was to write the shortest self-reproducing program. Since this is an exercise divorced from reality, the usual vehicle was FORTRAN. Actually, FORTRAN was the language of choice for the same reason that three-legged races are popular. –Ken Thompson, “Reflections on Trusting Trust” 1984

Ah, yes, the joys of FORTRAN.