Square Peg

Organising screenshots with Hazel and CloudApp

To help clean up my desktop, I’ve created a little Hazel rule to hide theses pesky screenshot files away. The issue I had, was that I use CloudApp to automatically upload screenshots and I didn’t want to lose that. Luckily, there is a Ruby API called cloudapp_api which can upload a file via a Ruby script.

The result is this:

Before setting up Hazel, you will need to install the cloudapp_api. To do this open up Terminal and enter

$ sudo gem install cloudapp_api

Now back to Hazel, let me walk through what I did.

1: Search for files that contain the words “Screen Shot” (OS X names screenshot files like this “Screen Shot 2012-11-04 at 12.25.43.png”) and is a png.

2: I really don’t need to know it’s a “screenshot”. Next Hazel renames the file to just a simple date and time stamp. e.g 2012-11-04_1.30.48.png

3: Move the file to a screenshots folder I made in my pictures folder.

4: Now to get the CloudApp upload working. Add a “Run shell script”, make sure that the shell is set to “/usr/bin/ruby” and paste: (or download from here)

 require 'rubygems' 
 require 'cloudapp_api' 
 #Replace with your username and password 
 CloudApp.authenticate "USERNAME", "PASSWORD" 
 #Get file from hazel file = ARGV[0] 
 #Upload file to CloudApp 
 @drop = CloudApp::Drop.create :upload, :file => file 
 #Copy file URL to clipboard 
 IO.popen('pbcopy', 'r+').puts @drop.data["url"] 
 exit 0

5: Final step just for fun, is to add a little bit of applescript to play sound when it’s complete.

do shell script "afplay '/System/Library/Sounds/Glass.aiff'"

All done!

20% Off Hazel Screencast

Right, time to become a Hazel ninja. Macstories are running a 20% discount off the Hazel screencast by Mac OS X Screencasts. 

http://www.macstories.net/links/macstoriesdeals-20-off-hazel-screencast-superstorm-sandy-donations/

Storing important files in a sparse bundle disk image

I thought I better take some better security steps with scanned copies of my personal documents. I’ve heard David Sparks talk about using secure disk images to store important files before but I never got around to using them.

I came across a post on creating secure disk image files over at gigaom. But in the comments I saw this

One problem with this is that your disk image is kept in a single monster-sized file, and if you use Time Machine, the whole file must be written to the archive whenever you change *anything* in the virtual disk.

A solution is to select an image format of “sparse bundle disk image”. A sparse bundle acts much like a dmg file but it is actually made up of many small files and is therefore much more efficient for backing up.

So here is my sparse bundle for my personal documents.

Folder Naming Take 1

Now I have a blank canvas, let’s begin.

Before I look at folder/file naming and organising, I want to look at the file system concept. As I go down this path, I am taking a lot of inspiration from Oliver Reichenstein who develops Ai Writer. Oliver has written a great post on Mountain Lion’s New File System over on his blog. He outlines a problem I always have, “where the hell shall I put this file?” and folders inside of folder, that are inside folders issue.

Classic folder systems don’t perform too well. One reason is that organizing folders is engaging in the tiring discipline of information architecture. Information architecture is hard brain work. Just like a chess problem, it seems obvious once done, but takes considerable mental energy to figure out a clear and simple information architecture. And mainly, you just don’t want to do it all the time.

…

Folders tend to grow deeper and deeper. As soon as we have more than a handful of notions, or (beware!) more than one hierarchical level of notions, it gets hard for most brains to build a mental model of that information architecture. While it is common to have several hierarchy levels in applications and file systems, they actually don’t work very well. We are just not smart enough to deal with notional pyramids. Trying to picture notional systems with several levels is like thinking three moves ahead in chess. Everybody believes that they can, but only a few skilled people really can do it. If you doubt this, prove me wrong by telling me what is in each file menu in your browser…

And I am crap at chess! Heavy folder depth drives me crazy. The idea of a one level document system really resonates with me. I don’t think I could quite go for the dump anything loose in your documents folder and search for it approach but limiting my folder depth seems sensible.

iCloud

Oliver’s post is mostly based around his move into using the iCloud Document Library. Currently I don’t really use iCloud for much other then backing up my iPhone. I use google for all my email, contact and calendar syncing. I do not own an iPad and I haven’t installed iWork on my iPhone so I’ve never bothered using iCloud for that. But the quote that got me thinking was this:

However, what matters is I don’t need to think before putting a file away anymore.

I’m not sure where to start with incorporating iCloud into my workflow but the vision of not having to think about where to store and find a file is very attractive to me. I’m sure it’s too good to be true and there are downfalls to it but we are talking about a system that is only just over a year old. Anyway I’m intrigued but I’ll leave this for another time.

Where to start

Ok let get back to looking at my Documents folder. How do I achieve a simple file system with limited sub-folders?

Time for some inspiration! Since getting my iPhone around 5 months ago, I’ve really got back into Podcasting which I hadn’t really touched in 3 or 4 years. One Podcast i’m really enjoying is Mikes On Mics with Michael Schechter and Mike Vardy. Beyond the fact that Ale makes everything better, I’ve been learning a lot of great productivity tips from them. So naturally I went searching through their blogs for inspiration and came back with 2 posts I like. Mike Vardy’s How I Organize My Mac and Michael Schechter’s nvALT 101.

What I like about Michael’s nvALT post is about naming your files, even though the idea is from someone else.

I use a naming convention that is effectively stolen from Merlin Mann (and by that, I mean it is entirely stolen from Merlin Mann). My file names include one of several category keywords, a one-to-five word description (this should be whatever you’re most likely to type when searching for this file) and the creation date. I know this sounds confusing, so here are a few of my own examples:

Blogx – Blog Post Title – 11–05–20 
Workx – Any work meeting or writing project – 11–05–20 
Ideax – Actionable idea – 11–05–20 
Thoughtx – Tangent for blog or idea – 11–05–20 
Runx – Running lists of books, unprocessed to-dos, calls, etc (no date)

For those who are wondering why I place the x at the end of the category keyword, it is so that when I search for files, I don’t pull up everything that includes that word (another Merlin tip).

I’ve actually been using this kind of system for a few weeks. This post encouraged me to try out nvALT and this naming system.

I want to couple that naming system with my folder system. In comes the other Mike.

I don’t stack too many folders inside of others unless they are warranted, but when you look at the top-level folders in Documents, Music and Pictures on my MacBook Air, you’ll see several folders for each project inside. I don’t keep one called “Online Writing” and then stack my various folders that contain my contributions to websites inside those. Instead (as you may have noticed above), I simply keep folders called “Posts – ” and then add the corresponding website to the folder name so I can know what’s what with just a glance. And by using the first portion, I’m able to better narrow down where I have to look in a Finder window to find my drafts for writing online are stored (I simply look for the letter “P” and go from there).

Conclusion

Ok let’s pull this together. I’m going to try and split folders up more. For example, before I had a folder called “_Projects” then subfolders that had the project files in it. Now I’m just going to have a top level folder called “projectx - PROJECT NAME”. If I want to find all my projects, just a quick search of “projects” will bring them up all.

I’ve created some text expander snippets to help.

I’m bored of just talking, time to walk the walk. I’ll be back once I start adding stuff back to my documents folder.

Removing unwanted application data from your Documents folder

So in the process of trying to remove anything from my Documents folder to start afresh, I encountered a few problems with application data stuck in there.

The first culprit was Microsoft Office. Sadly I do need Microsoft Office installed as I create PowerPoints on behalf of my clients. Office leaves a nice pointless folder called “Microsoft User Data” in your Documents. Lucky I found this solution.

Simply move “Microsoft User Data” folder from “Documents” to Users/ (YOUR USER NAME)/Library/Preferences/

It seems to working fine so far. I also had folders from AutoCAD and my DYMO label printer in there. I’ll never need to see these folders and I couldn’t really be bothered to move them. So I just used “chflags hidden” command in Terminal to hide the folders.

chflags hidden DYMO\ Label\ Software/

chflags hidden autocad/

All done! 

Current Mess

This is where most of documents currently live based on a previous attempt to clean my file system (I won’t show you the mess below…).

• Archive: Not really much in there, just some old file I wanted out of sight. I don’t think anything new has gone in there for 2 years.
• Business: Meant to be freelance stuff, accounts, cv’s, client file etc but has ended up with lots of project folders.
• Important Documents: I run a pretty much paperless (though not very efficient) home, all scanned letters and receipts end up here. New clients I work for generally want to see my insurance policies, driving license and passport so I keep scanned copies of these here, ready to be fired off in a email.
• Projects: Where most of web and graphic projects start. It also contains design resources but I’ve never found a good system for organising that (one of my other goals).

Where to start?

Time to boot up my Drobo, archive this stuff and begin working on a new system.

First Post

I am starting this blog because I’m a person who is frustrated with my data overflow and file systems, I’ve just had enough. This is 2012, if there’re people in the world that can deploy software updates to a computer on Mars then there must be an easier, less frustrating and better way to organise my data.

Me

First let me talk about myself for some context. My first job out of school was as a PHP developer and graphic designer for a fine art printing company. As much as I had been a computer geek through my school life and I could knock up a HTML/CSS website, I was never taught any programming foundations (that is a post for another time though). I was able to pickup the PHP but at some point I hit a point where I got frustrated with my inefficient programming skills. Coupled with a desire not to be seventeen and stuck in an office working 9-5, despite earning a good wage for my age I quit (well kinda, read on) after 12 months. I went off to college to pursue a career as a Sound Engineer. I funded my way through education by doing freelance web design. The company I worked for couldn’t find a replacement for me so I also carried on working for them on a freelance bases and full-time during holidays.

Fast forward to 2012, I’ve been working as a Sound Engineer for 2 years now. The first year I worked full-time for a corporate events company and now I’ve freelance for a year. You’ll notice I work in 1 year cycles and I hate working for the man.

Why?

I’m still young and if I’m frustrated now, what it going to be like when I have a more hectic life? I want to sort my shit out now and layout some good computer foundations for life. I am also a business man at heart and I have a few business startups that I’m working on, I want to have a good system I place before then.

So what is this blog?

Basically documenting my journey to becoming a more efficient person. From sorting out my data, getting things done and a general vent for technology related stuff.

I do not pretend to have any good writing skills, I scraped a D in English at GCSE but I really couldn’t care and I’m not going to let that stop me.

That is a short introduction to me and why I am doing this.