Chemex retailers near Washington, D.C.

Purchasing filters for our Chemex coffee maker turned into a bigger ordeal than it should have been. Although there are numerous online outlets that sell Chemex filters, I couldn’t find any with free shipping.

The Chemex web site recommends you email or call them to find local retailers in your region. I called them, so — on the remote chance this information is useful to someone — here are the Chemex retailers in the Washington, D.C./Northern Virginia area:

Dean & Deluca
3276 M Street NW,
Washington, D.C.
(202) 342-2500‎
Coffee in the Works
1627 Connecticut Avenue,
Washington, D.C.
(202) 483-3050
So’s Your Mom
1831 Columbia Ave NW,
Washington, D.C.
(202) 462-3666‎
Le Grand Cafe
1327 Chain Bridge Rd
McLean, VA
(703) 734-9082
M. E. Swing (Downtown)
1702 G Street NW
Washington, D.C.
(202) 628.7601‎
M. E. Swing (Alexandria)
612-D S. Pickett St
Alexandria, VA
(703) 370-5050‎

Most of these retailers have limited evening/weekend hours, and on my first trip to Dean & Deluca, the filters were sold out, so an advance phone call is recommended.

Get Newsfeeds via Safari and NetNewsWire – script updated

NetNewsWire often does a good job finding the newsfeed of a site — but it does sometimes choke.

The updated script will still attempt to get the newsfeed straight from NNW. If NNW has instant success, the script will display the feed and offer to copy it to your clipboard:

After one second, if NNW was unsuccessful, the script will direct Safari search for the feed. The searches initiated (in new tabs, of course) include Google (“site:x rss OR subscribe”) and RSS Micro.

Quick note about RSS Micro: unlike most blog search engines (Google blog search included), it provides direct links to the relevant feeds. Just click on the RSS icon:

Finally: the download includes a script that initiates these searches from Safari without invoking NetNewsWire. Useful if you don’t use NNW or don’t want to open it.

Download here.

Find URL feed via bookmarklet

For a browser-agnostic method of finding a site’s RSS feed, try this bookmarklet:

g:RSS

Drag it to your menu bar and name it what you will (“g:RSS” works for me).

When clicked, it will initiate a Google search of “rss OR subscribe”, restricted to the site you’re in. A little sloppier than the NNW script below.

Find URL feed via Safari and NetNewsWire

Guy Kawasaki asked for quick ways to find the RSS feed of a web site. NetNewsWire does a fine job subscribing to sites so I thought it might be up to the task. It is.

Run this to pull the current website from Safari, subscribe in NetNewsWire, and return the RSS feed URL, optionally copying it to the clipboard.

[code lang="AppleScript"]
tell application "Safari"
    set thisPage to do JavaScript "document.URL" in document 1
end tell
tell application "NetNewsWire"
    activate
    set subcount to (count of subscriptions)
    set theresult to subscribe to thisPage
    delay 2  --gives NNW time to retrieve the RSS feed
    set thefeed to RSS URL of subscription (subcount + 1)
    if thefeed is equal to thisPage then
        display dialog "No feed found"
        return
    end if
    display dialog thefeed buttons {"Clipboard", "OK"} default button 1
    if the button returned of the result is "Clipboard" then
        set the clipboard to thefeed
    end if
end tell
[/code]

Click here to open the script and give it a whirl.

Update: Renamed “NetNewsWire 3” to “NetNewsWire” since that’s what the app is called when you download it.

Also, NetNewsWire takes a split second to work its magic. If the script isn’t working for a site, try increasing the “delay 2” line to “delay 5” or something.

Access 1Password data on your PC via Firefox

5/26/10 update: I haven’t tried this in a couple years, so consider these directions outdated. If you have any luck, feel free to leave a comment.

Important: As of 8/6/08, version 2.7.2 works interchangeably with the current versions, but this may change without notice.

Updated 7/28/08 to address truncation issues with Safari

1Password, the acclaimed password manager for Mac, recently introduced an iPhone export function that provides on-the-go access to sensitive data. This is accomplished by creating an encrypted bookmarklet in Safari, which is in turn synchronized to your iPhone. Excellent.

Firefox recognizes this bookmarklet as well — meaning that Windows-by-day users no longer have to suffer without their critical logins. (Note that this trick does not work with Internet Explorer.)

To accomplish this:

In 1Password, click on the “Sync to iPhone” icon in the toolbar and choose an access code for encryption. (This will create the bookmarklet in Safari.)
Switch to your Safari bookmarks, where you will find two new categories, each with a bookmarklet. The 1Password bookmarklet enables a browsable list of all your 1Password data; the 1Password Logins bookmarklet provides a one-click login to the current page.

The data in the Address column is what you need to copy to your PC; however, Safari only lets you copy the first 32,000 characters of a bookmark’s address field, so copying from here is likely to fail. To work around this, drag the bookmark to Firefox on your Mac (either directly or via the Finder) to copy the data there. Then, in Firefox, select the bookmarklet properties. This is what you’ll see:

Hit Tab once to select the Location field. Copy the text into a plain-text file, and email it to yourself.
Get it onto your Windows machine. (Easiest method: email it to yourself using the aforementioned plain text file.)
Finally, create your bookmarklet in Firefox. To do this, first bookmark any page to your Firefox bookmarks bar. Then, right-click on the bookmark and choose “Properties”. Rename it as desired (“1P” suffices for my needs), and replace the Location field with the long string you emailed to yourself. For the 1Password bookmarklet, you’ll want to select “Load this bookmark in the sidebar”. For the 1Password Logins bookmarklet, leave it deselected.

Firefox now has a secure, functional bookmarklet with your passwords and other data available.

1Password Logins bookmarklet in action:

1Password bookmarklet in action:

(Use of the search function is recommended here as the tool sorts web forms by name)

1Password also provides a full-fledged html export, which you can keep on a thumb drive or upload to a server. (I wouldn’t recommend uploading the file — out of 6 billion people in the world, surely someone is bound to find the file and start playing.)

Bonus: For even easier synchronization, install Foxmarks to synchronize your Firefox bookmarks between your Mac and PC. Now you can copy straight from Safari to Firefox on your Mac and let Foxmarks do the synching. Update: Foxmarks didn’t work with the 1Password bookmarklets the last time I tried it; your mileage may vary.

OmniFocus Defer Script

OmniFocus rocks. I can’t really imagine managing myself personally or professionally without this tool. Nevertheless, despite thousands of hours of development and beta testing, it has its share of quirks. Notably, in my work I have a few daily-type tasks I set to repeat every day. Unfortunately, there’s no “workday” option in the repeat choices, so every weekend I end up with a Saturday and Sunday repetition. I could either:

Mark them complete (ignoring the fact that I’ve just claimed to have done nonexistent work);
Mark them complete and delete the “done” items before they disappear (solving the first issue)
Change the start/due dates in the Inspector (cumbersome)

AppleScript to the rescue.

My Defer script allows you to defer, or ‘snooze’, selected projects or tasks by a given number of days. (Disclaimer for GTD pedants: my use of the word “defer” here is sanctioned by the New Oxford American Dictionary, not David Allen.)

Usage: Select the task(s) and/or project(s) you wish to defer. Invoke the script from the toolbar or script menu:

Enter the number of days to defer the items in the resulting dialog box and select “OK” (default is 1, so feel free to just hit Return to ‘snooze for a day’).

The script will then prompt you whether to defer both start and end dates of the items. “Due [date] only” is the default option, so again, feel free to hit return to snooze your due date only.

Finally: a Growl notification to signify your success. (If desired, you can use a standard OS alert dialog or no alert at all. See the script for details.)

Download here.

19 Feb 2009: version 0.2 is now available. Release notes here. Download link is for current version.

bylr.net

"you're at this website. i guarantee it." -dan byler

February 2008