#Tip Tuesday: Add Weather to iCal

Awesome tip for such a craptastic morning here in Boston. I came in sick to work this morning and I’ll be honest- I have no real work to do so I’ll probably be queuing up some post for the week. Before I do that it seemed fitting to share a little tip to collect weather updates into iCal. Here’s the step by step:

First, go to Weather Underground and type in the city state or zip for the forecast you want in your iCal and hit Return.

In the resulting page, there’s a link towards the top right that says “Add to Favorites” which is right next to the “ICAL” and “RSS” buttons. Right click on the “ICAL” button and choose “Copy Link” (“Copy Link Location” if you’re in FireFox).

Next, open iCal and choose Calendar > Subscribe… from the menu bar.

Paste the link you copied into the “Calendar URL” field provided and hit Return.

Now, just rename the calendar “weather” or something and choose how often you’d like it to auto refresh. I set mine to every day. Once you’ve done that, click OK.

Now you should have a suscribed calendar that lists each day’s weather as an all day event. Double clicking the events will give you the full weather description and a link to the website. It should look a little like this:

The Millenium Falcon That Flies

$50 FOR THIS THING?! THAT’S IT?!

My first #toy tuesday.

Anonymous asked: dear b, i heard a rumor (my anti-mac best friend told me) that evidence of cigarette smoking will void an iMac warrenty. should i start crying now? -not lisa kippon

EDIT: I stand corrected? Apparently THIS happened. I, however will honor these warranties until Apple’s independent providers and self service account techs are told that this is how it is. This is why you should support your local independent Apple service shops, guys.

OPEN IN PREVIEW, DAMMIT!

I sort of hate reading PDF in my browser window. I just wish it would download the PDF and open it in Preview.app…

…what’s that you say? You think so too? Well let’s stop whining about it and use the Terminal like big boys and girls! Quit Safari and put this into a Terminal window:

defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitOmitPDFSupport -bool YES

There we go. Problem solved. If you ever want to go back to opening PDFs in Safari for some strange reason just change the YES to a NO.

My Tumblr Feature Proposal

Hey Tumblr, it’s me.

I really love you. I think thats obvious. You guys give me access to all the HTML and CSS I can handle and give beginners all the beautiful templates and ideas they can process. You truly established an awesome community of bloggers (and teenage hipster girls who have an inflated sense of relevance, but I’m ok with that. I mean, some people probably think that about me too). My dashboard is full of varying opinions and interests to reblog and agree or disagree with. Here’s the problem though: I can only do this with other tumblr users and tumblr doesn’t own the internet (yet).

So while there are a ton of great Tumblr blogs, there are also a lot of great non-Tumblr blogs that I subscribe to via RSS. I’ve read these blogs via NetNewsWire and recently started using Socialite as an RSS reader. I LOVE native apps and usually hate web apps, but I prefer your web app to my native RSS readers. You guys let me aggregate RSS feeds to my blog if I want to (I don’t want to), but here’s your missing feature and It is a killer feature:

Why can’t I use my Tumblr Dashboard to read RSS feeds of blogs that aren’t Tumblr blogs? If I could, I would then be able to reblog and comment on stories not posted on Tumblr. Can I has this?

dbreunig:

Hunter S Thompson calls tech support. Seriously.

Best thing all week. (via @joeljohnson, via margotdouaihy1)

It’s even funnier when you imagine Johnny Depp doing this in character while messing with wires.

A Possible Fix For Slow Mouse Tracking.

One thing I’ve always been annoyed by on Mac OS X and Apple mice is that I have to max out the tracking speed to get it to where I can even avoid getting carpal tunnel. I can’t figure out how people with 30” monitors deal with it this way.

A fix for this is once again hidden in the UNIX Terminal (Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app).

Open Terminal and type
defaults write -g com.apple.mouse.scaling number

where the word number denotes an actual number. The default maximum mouse speed is 3.0 so I would start with 4.0 or 5.0 to get a feel for the speed increase. To make sure the changes take effect, you probably will want to log out.

BE REALLY CAREFUL WITH THIS. If you set the sensitivity too high your mouse will become unusable.

This also works with the trackpad, which I don’t personally recommend futzing with at all, but for the sake of being your favorite mac helper I’ll give you the command anyways:

defaults write -g com.apple.trackpad.scaling number

The trackpad has a different default max speed of 1.5 so be sure you take that into account when changing the number value. I can’t say I’ve tried it, but I assume using the same number value for both the mouse and the trackpad would be unwise to say the least.

Anonymous asked: Hmmmm... Why don't guys call when they say they will? Why are tacos so delicious? What should I have for dinner? How are you not a dr who fan? Oh wait, you meant anything about computers? I got nothing.

-Because women love the mystery and the chase. You can disagree but it explains why guys who actually WOULD call are not on your radar.

-Because they have cheese and meat and tortillas and all sorts of wonderful spicy things in them.

- It’s easy not to like a show that COULD be good if it had any good acting or production value but doesn’t.

-Yes, I did.

-No, you don’t.

(This has been a nonsensical answer to a nonsensical question by forbetaorworse. This is why you don’t ask me about non computer related things.  I’m an idiot.)

File Under: Things I signed up to be updated on and would like to beta test.

I’ll be ridding myself of as much paper as possible on 2010…

Also: That is Adam Lisagor in this video that he made and is starring in. His blog is here, his iPhone app has an awesome video here and he often posts here. Funny guy.

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