A few posts back I described my experience trying to create a workflow to automate the process of exporting my Delicious Library (DL) catalog toLibraryThing (LT).

Here is the Automator workflow I created: open up Delicious Library, export the book catalog (an XML file) to my desktop, copy the location path of this newly created document to the clipboard, open my browser (Firefox) to the LibraryThing import page, tab to the appropriate form field (I used tabs so it was not relative to browser window location), paste the path from the clipboard into the ‘Upload File’ field on the LT import page, then use tabs and returns to activate the form and upload the file. Finally, move the exported DeliciousLibrary file to the Trash. Once that’s all complete, I threw in a Growl notification to let me know it was done.

And here is the Mac 101 tutorial for starters. Here are a few sources for more automator workflow actions, tips and tutorials:

1. Automator.us: This site has some good tutorials and a great variety of downloadable actions
2. AutomatorWorld.com: Look for more advanced Automator stuff here
3. Apple.com Automator Actions downloads: check out the most popular downloads

If the skies are clear where you live tomorrow night (or tonight, depending on your time zone), don’t miss your chance to witness the last lunar eclipse until Dec. 2010.

Here in Hawaii, I’ll be heading out to the beach around 11 p.m. While I won’t be bringing my Mac with me, this event marks a great occasion to highlight a few of the astronomy programs available for OS X. These tools are excellent teaching aids and are just plain enjoyable. If you don’t have a Mac, no worries: each of these apps run on Mac, Windows, and Linux.

If you go outside to watch for the eclipse, keep an eye out for Saturn (if you have a telescope the rings will be visible) and Regulus (the 22nd brightest star in the night sky, in the Leo constellation).

Saturn and Regulus will be the brightest points in the sky nearest to the eclipsed moon. Exactly where they will appear relative to you, of course, will depend on your location and the time you go outside to have a look — but they will appear to be close to the moon.

Cloudy out? View the solar system on your Mac

1. Stellarium — Free. This planetarium application specializes on views of the sky from an earthly perspective. Enter your coordinates to see what's going on in your sky on a given night. This is my app of choice for casual desktop sky-gazing; it's also a great learning aid. I enjoy setting the program to fast-forward so I can watch the sky come to life in quicktime. There are many user-contributed scripts available to enhance your Stellarium experience which make an already interesting program even more engaging. This is a great program to keep on your Mac for those times when you want to quickly identify a star or constellation.

2. Google Earth — Free. It isn’t just for earth-browsing any more. Check out the ‘Sky’ view mode for a full-featured astronomy package chock full of user-contributed goodness. I’ve lost many hours engrossed in the ‘Sky’ view; this Google Earth expansion is still a pretty new feature, but it keeps getting better and better.

3. Celestia — Free. Celestia doesn’t confine you to viewing stars from an earth-bound perspective. You are free to fly around the visible universe in dizzying three dimensions. There are many, many expansions available for Celestia that make it even more fun and valuable as a learning tool. The one thing about Celestia is that it’s not quite as easy to use as the other programs; still, it’s an amazing tool with a dedicated user base and it’s a joy to use.

4. Starry Night — Expensive. I own an old Mac OS 9 version of Starry Night Pro and I still use it on my old iBook G4 in Classic mode (note that Classic only runs on Tiger and earlier versions of Mac OS X). It’s come a long way since then and is worth checking out if you really enjoy astronomy and want a feature-rich package with many great animations and photo-realistic imagery. Even the old version of Starry Night that I own is visually very beautiful. It’s a great teaching aid to view the solar system in motion from any perspective, watch eclipses, find satellites, view the earth from distant planets, and more. If you go for the Pro package, you can hook up your Mac to your telescope to track distant objects. My only problem with Starry Night is that it seems to have gone overboard a bit with commercialization — there are now at least six SN packages to choose from, and all of them are pricey.

My favorite experience with Starry Night? Heading out in a canoe late at night with my old iBook back in my home state of Maine on Nicatous Lake (far, far away from any light pollution), turning on Starry Night’s ‘night vision mode’ and spending a few hours looking up at the sky. Note that this is only enjoyable in the summer while doused with about one gallon of bug spray to keep the mosquitos away.

More Mac astronomy links

If Mac astronomy software interests you, check out Pure Mac's comprehensive list of astronomy apps for more ideas. Hope the skies are clear wherever you may live.

I recently completed a project that began with installing VMware Fusion on my Intel iMac and (unexpectedly) ended with an old Compaq Presario laptop running Linux. If you’re an adventurous type and wish to reclaim an old PC, or if you just switched to a mac and now have an old PC collecting dust, read on. In my case, a friend donated an old Compaq laptop to me (she switched to an iMac) so I could use it to test out websites on Internet Explorer. It did the job … but just barely. Windows XP just doesn’t run well on 58MB of RAM! My workflow went like this: launch Explorer, go for a snack, take a bathroom break, play with the cat, then arrive back at the laptop to either (a) load the page I wished to preview or (b) discover the machine had inexplicably froze.

Thankfully, my intel-based iMac is now handily running Windows XP and the old laptop is now obsolete. Or so I thought. On a whim, I installed Ubuntu Linux on my iMac (again, using virtual machine wizadry) just to test it out. I was amazed - it was fast, enjoyable, and very useable. One nice thing about Linux is that the OS shares the same Unix underpinnings as Mac OSX, so if you’ve been using X for a while, you’ll feel fairly comfortable in the new environment. When I started learning more about Linux, I was surprised at the dozens of ‘flavors’ of this OS and the vaster number of open source (free) software applications that run on it (all of which can run on Mac OS too, by the way). I am in awe that there are so many people out there developing this stuff out of sheer passion and dedication. How cool is that?

It was then that inspiration struck. Why not install Linux on my old Compaq paperweight? What a great way to use an old machine, and to learn more about Linux (and Unix) - skills that will make me a better Mac user too. I was not dissapointed. Linux turned my Compaq into a very usable machine that is suprisingly responsive (I won’t say it’s speedy - but it runs like lightning compared to running Windows). For the first time in my life, I actually enjoyed using a Compaq (despair over a Compaq drove me to switch to a mac in 2000!). I now have a risk-free platform on which I can learn about Linux and develop my Unix skills. It also serves, simply, as an extra PC around the house. True, I can also learn Unix commands via the Terminal on my mac (on Mac OSX or using a virtual machine to run Linux), but it gives me greater peace of mind to explore the inner workings of Unix on a totally separate machine. I can try things I would be hesitant to try on the mac. And if I really mess something up on my Compaq (and I already have), I don’t really care. I just reinstall the operating system and try again.

The Linux version I’m using — Puppy Linux — is under 100MB, so it’s quick to reload. A warning to you, though: it took me (a Unix novice with no prior Linux experience) several days of experimentation to get everything up and running on the laptop. Now that I have the process down, I can reformat the partition of the hard drive and reinstall a clean version of Linux in about 15 minutes. But you should know that you may have to get under the hood and expirement to get it working (here, I’m mainly talking about the drivers for your USB plug-ins, network connection, or printer) … but that’s what makes it so much fun. It’s a good way to learn.

To be fair, I think my experience had a lot to do with the Compaq and my inexperience and little to do with the Linux packages I tried (searching user forums, I discovered that many people aptly refer to these old Compaq laptops as ‘craptops’). If you are installing Linux on a newer laptop (newer than my Presario 1200 running at 500Mhz with 58MB RAM) or perhaps on a laptop of higher quality, you may have no trouble at all. I had plenty of trouble. And that leads us to the first rule to follow before you start any project like this: backup any data on the target machine that you wish to keep! I’ll post about how I choose a Linux version to install and the steps I took to get it running very soon. I want to end on this note: you will not get a laptop out of this that can run all your mac or pc applications. You’ll be using freeware versions of applications that do much of the same thing. So what’s it good for? You get a machine for light text work, email, and web browsing on a machine that was formerly unbearable to use. You get to experience an operating system that is increasingly used around the world because it’s free and it works well. And you get a platform on which you can learn Unix. Not bad for a PC I formerly considered trash.

I encountered yet another Dvorak bug today. For the benefit of those (ok, probably all of you) who do not know what Dvorak is, it’s an alternative keyboard layout. It’s generally considered faster and more efficient than the standard QWERTY layout.

I can certainly type quite fast and, since the Dvorak keys are not in the same place as the QWERTY keys, I learned to type without ever looking down … it wouldn’t help anyways. Never needing to look down is a plus in my book. Anyhow, it turns out that TextExpander does not support the Dvorak-Qwerty keyboard layout. Dvorak-Qwerty is a Mac OS option (available via the International/Input Menu preference pane) that allows one to type in Dvorak but still access the command shortcut keys in their designated QWERTY positions. That means that I can type in Dvorak, but still use the QWERTY Command-C/V/Q etc. The tech support guy (who responded to my query very quickly, I should add) said that the add this support to the feature request list, although he was not authorized to say if it would or would not be fixed to add this support.

So what’s the bug? When the keyboard setting is DQ (that’s short for Dvorak-Qwerty), TextExpander cannot expand text. You type in the short cut, and your shortcut is replaced by … nothing. You just get an empty string where your expanded text should go. This is frustrating. Sometimes I feel like I’m the only Dvorak user out there, though I’m sure I am not. A great feature of the Mac OS is the built in Dvorak support with QWERTY command keys. While Windows supports Dvorak as an option, it does not (and apparently will never) support the QWERTY command function.

Even though I use this alternate layout, I am a slave to Mac keyboard shortcuts (the QWERTY style shortcuts). The Mac OS has long supported this, recognizing the need amongst mac users to have command-C map to the ‘C’ character printed on the physical keyboard, even though it’s not the ‘C’ character in the Dvorak layout is located where the I character is printed. Make sense? Windows does not have this. I was using a freeware program called Hotkeyz on my Windows (work) machine to remap my keys. This solved the PC problem beautifully. But, alas, my IT staff made me take it off because of my workplace ‘no shareware or freeware policy.’ Blah.

Anyhow, most mac programs work fairly well with Dvorak-Qwerty. Except for TextExpander, and except for Adobe CS3 (actually, I don’t believe Adobe products have ever supported Dvorak-Qwerty … and except for Mac MS Office (which I don’t use - iWork handles Dvorak quite well). What this means for me is that I have to turn Qwerty on when using Photoshop, because Command-C otherwise does not work. I could re-learn the shortcuts for the remapped Dvorak keys, but I don’t want to. I like the shortcut keys mapped to what’s printed on the keyboard. Besides, I’m so conditioned to type the Command key shortcuts that it would take major reconditioning to learn the alternate locations. The bottom line for me is this: I know there aren’t many of us out there, but there are people out there that rely on Dvorak-Qwerty. The combo, exclusive to the mac, is one of those little things that makes my mac experience better than my work-a-day PC experience. I can’t imagine it would take much of a code fix to support this feature … it is built in to the OS, after all. So, Adobe and Smile on My Mac … please support the DQ keyboard layout!!

By the way, I found this nice little freeware app that fixes one annoying DQ layout problem - the inability to use command+shift in DQ

I thought I'd share a few photos taken this evening after I returned home from work. Greetings from Hawaii.

(p.s. if you click on the image you'll be taken to my flickr page)