David Nunez

David Nunez lives, wonders, tinkers and builds in Boston.

Posts Tagged ‘Build’

dorkbot12: Last dorkbot of the 2007 season + Arduino SIG

November 5, 2007  |  Uncategorized  |  , , ,  |  Comments Off  | 

dorkbot12: Last dorkbot of the 2007 season + Arduino SIG:
NOTE THAT THERE IS A DATE CHANGE

Thursday, November 15, 7PM
Cafe Mundi
1704 E 5th St. (a few blocks east of I-35)
(512) 236-8634
Yummy food and beverages to accompany your dork euphoria.
FREE EVENT

Robot Marionette Got 3 Blue Ribbons at Maker Faire

November 2, 2007  |  Uncategorized  |  , , , , ,  |  1 Comment  | 

1680550214 A9Ebaca6D9 O-6
photo (CC) Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

My Robot Marionette at Maker Faire was awarded 3 Editor’s Choice Ribbons!

This was a big surprise; this, plus the feedback I was receiving from passerby who stopped dead in their tracks with gaping maws really made it all worthwhile. I had a lot of “fun” building him, lost enormous amounts of sleep, growled a lot, and gained some really valuable personal insight… probably worth a blog post, actually.

I’ll be showing him off again with some enhancements in December at the Indie Fest at Red Scoot in Austin. Stay tuned.

Spam and Email System

November 1, 2007  |  Uncategorized  |  , , , ,  |  Comments Off  | 

I think I have finally nailed down a reasonable email handling / spam fighting strategy after about a year of tweaking.

I’m going to slowly describe my system over a series of posts. It’s pretty good, if I do say so myself.

Here are a couple of ranty things I’d like to just put out on the table, first.

I wish I had a quarter for whenever somebody says, “Oh, man, I get SOOO many email messages every day that I don’t have time to read them all, much less respond.”

It’s usually followed by some quantification, “I get over 1000 messages everyday” and always includes some corollary about, “I subscribe to 100 mailing lists” and “I have 20 email addresses I check” and “that doesn’t even include SPAM!”

I’m going to carry around blue ribbons and certificates for whenever somebody says this.

What they are trying to explain to you is that they are important. And important people get lots of email. And since they are more important than you, they mask their immense fear of being discovered as disorganized or type-B or luddites with a cloud of digital detritus that enables them to defraud their families and employers by engaging ineffectively with pointless busywork rather than actually contributing to society.

Here’s the reality check:

  1. Human beings can’t process thousands of messages a day.
  2. Good news. Most email does not deserve your attention.
  3. You will not have to act on all of the messages you receive each day.
  4. Saying “I have too many pieces of email” is admitting you have poor skills at prioritizing.
  5. Shut up and deal… we’re all faced with the same (or worse) email and spam barrage.
  6. If you can’t deal with your avalanche of email, then you and your system are outdated and broken. Upgrade, dinosaur.
  7. Will the world end or will people suffer and die if you don’t handle all your email? If so, why the hell are you talking to me instead of clearing your inbox?
  8. Coping mechanisms: Hire assistants. Hit the delete key. Go read Lifehacker. Streamline your system. Get in touch with yourself. Climb a mountain and meditate on what’s truly important.

So here’s me: 4000 messages daily (including SPAM, including mailing lists, including automated notices) that pass through my multiple servers hosting multiple email addresses.

The system I use filters that down to roughly 20 per day that MAY require a response or action. They all come to the one inbox.

Using some Mail.app plugins to triage, route, and deal, I can handle these in under 30 minutes.

The rest are handled by autoresponders or are filed away through a set of rules. I’ve recently implemented some steps that automagically archive older stuff into a MySQL database in the most absurdly remote, almost impossible chance I’d need to refer back to those posts some years down the line.

That beats Pareto 20/80 easily, and I’m going to share how I do it.

Pre-requisites: Go read Merlin Mann’s inbox zero series for some theory. Implement and live with his system for a while. Only then should you consider my tweaks. You’ll need a computer running OS X using Mail.app as your primary client. You’ll have to purchase roughly $100 worth software. (ask yourself how much your time is worth before balking at that).

One other pet peeve: It’s “email messages” or “email posts” or “pieces of email” or sometimes just “email.” It is NEVER CORRECT to say “emails.” This is the same as never saying, “I’m going to the post office to drop off mails.”

And yes… with my backlog of owed responses, I’m self-aware enough to recognize “Pot. Kettle. Black.” That’s why I’m projecting so strongly.

Upcoming: Mail.app baseline setup. IMAP, Inbox, Archives, and Smart Folders I Use

dorkbot-sxsw wrap-up

March 23, 2007  |  Uncategorized  |  ,  |  Comments Off  | 

I just posted the dorkbot6 wrapup.

Applescript to import NNW smart folder into Yojimbo

March 20, 2007  |  Uncategorized  |  , , ,  |  Comments Off  | 

Today I modified this script which facilitates Yojimbo importing from NetNewsWire

I’ve set up a smart folder in NetNewsWire that grabs the latest 50 flagged headlines from any feed.

I needed this script because I had a technorati watch feed for dorkbot and I wanted to collect blog mentions to send around. I was just flagging articles that mentioned dorkbot-austin and wanted to export a list of bookmarks.

With this, the workflow is now:

  1. Quickly scan headlines in NetNewsWire and do CMD-Shift-L to flag interesting content.
  2. Run this script on the smart folder (this creates a web archive in Yojimbo of each of these articles and removes the flag on the headline in NetNewsWire)
  3. Over time, spend a few minutes working down the list of archived articles in Yojimbo and tag/delete them further as necessary.

Potential problem: This makes it really easy to procrastinate making decisions on what to read and what to do with what I read. Following this strategy will lead to a large pile of unsorted links which I’ll very likely will never find the time to sort through.

I think DEVONThink does a better job of scanning and grouping incoming pieces of text.

I should probably rewrite this to send flagged content directly to DEVONThink. Then, instead of queueing up a long list of articles to read, I’ll let DEVONThink suggest articles for me to read as I do research. Anything that I think I’d want to read immediately I could tag with “@Read” or something similar.

    tell application "NetNewsWire"
        try
            set userInput to text returned of (display dialog "Enter Tag:" default answer "untagged")
            set oldDelims to AppleScript's text item delimiters
            set AppleScript's text item delimiters to {", ", ","}
            set h_tags to text items of userInput
            set AppleScript's text item delimiters to oldDelims
            if (index of selected tab is not 0) then
                set tabnum to index of selected tab + 1
                set taburls to URLs of tabs
                set h_URL to (get item tabnum of taburls)
                set tabtitles to titles of tabs
                set newItemTitle to (get item tabnum of tabtitles)
                tell application "Yojimbo"
                    --set newItem to make new bookmark item with properties {name:newItemTitle, location:h_URL}
                    set newItem to make new web archive item with contents h_URL
                    add tags h_tags to newItem
                    set flagged of newItem to true
                    set isFlagged of h to false
                end tell
            else if exists selectedSubscription then
                repeat with h in headlines of selectedSubscription
                    set h_URL to URL of h
                    set h_title to title of h
                    set isFlagged of h to false
                    tell application "Yojimbo"
                        --set newItem to make new bookmark item with properties {name:h_title, location:h_URL}
                        set newItem to make new web archive item with contents h_URL
                        add tags h_tags to newItem
                        set flagged of newItem to true
                    end tell
                end repeat
            else
                error "No headline is selected."
            end if
        on error error_message number error_number
            if the error_number is not -128 then
                try
                    display alert "NetNewsWire" message error_message as warning
                on error number error_number
                    if error_number is -1708 then display dialog error_message buttons {"OK"} default button 1
                end try
            end if
        end try
    end tell