-
The Aeropress
Working at an office can be a sad and soul sucking experience, especially if there’s an illusion of coffee in the break room. The AeroPress is the perfect way to free yourself from the shackles of terrible bean juice without dropping tons of money or spending half your day doing dishes.
So what is the office worker with taste to do? Fleeing to Starbucks might get you by, but it serves as a slow drain on your bank account and you have to deal with long lines of people with 10 syllable coffee orders when you just want some decent coffee. There’s the option of bringing in a thermos, but that means having to remember to carry it back and forth. Add a lunch, your laptop bag and suddenly you look like a homeless sherpa on the elevator every day.
You could buy one of those Keurig machines for your office, but that coffee sucks too…just not as much as the standard stuff. Perhaps the Chemex. They make a smaller version that might work well. Alas, there’s no grinder at the office and half the fun of the Chemex is watching the bloom. A French press seems like a viable option, until you have to spend 15 minutes cleaning the thing.
Maybe tea? That introduces a whole other world of complication and frustration.
###Enter The AeroPress
The Aeropress is similar to a French press without the frustration. The parts include:
*A cylinder to hold the water and the grounds
*A plunger to push the water through
*A tray for the small paper filter
*Paper filters
*A funnel to help dump your grounds into the cylinder without making a mess
*A coffee scoop
*A stirrer
The process for brewing is more simple than it seems.
*Put the filter in
*Add your grounds
*Add some water and stir
*Wait
*Push the water through
*Remove the filter tray
*Push the grounds into the trash (or compost bin if you work for hippies)
*Enjoy The whole process takes less than 5 minutes for me, which is great. Let’s break down the details.
There are a number of challenges facing every cup of coffee. First comes the beans themselves. At home, we can grind our own. Not as easy at the office so you may need to compromise by grinding at home or at the store. 1 I keep my grounds in one of those little Ziploc tubs that are about a dollar a piece. You want the grind to be perhaps a little more fine than you’d use for drip coffee.
Next comes the water. If your office is like mine, then the Bunn spits out hot water in addition to bad coffee which eliminates the need to boil or heat your own, which is important if you’re in close quarters or don’t want to spend half your day making yourself coffee. What might be tough is finding water that’s hot enough. When I bought my AeroPress I got a little thermometer for a couple dollars more. I’ve found that the Bunn on my floor isn’t the best…putting out water that’s closer to 150 than 170. It will still work fine at 150, but if I’ve got the time I’ll go to a different floor where the water is hotter.
Even if you’re going to make a couple compromises with water temperature and grind freshness, what you’re going to get out of the AeroPress is going to be superior to both the office crap, Starbucks or carrying your own back and forth.
###Other Notes
As you research the AeroPress you’ll read about the “inverted” technique. While I’m not sure that it makes a big difference in the output it is nice to have more control over how long the water stays in contact with the grounds.
Preheating your mug is a great idea. It will help your coffee stay hot and doesn’t add any extra time to the process. I like to use the decaf coffee that’s in the Bunn to do this. Not only is it effective without depleting the store of hot water, it does those poor poor decaf drinkers a service by using some of that coffee so that if they come back at 4:00 they aren’t pulling off the same pot that was made at 6:00 that morning.
The AeroPress is a conversation starter. They’ll be curious about what it is, how it works and will probably want a demonstration. Then there’s the appearance of the AeroPress itself. Let’s not beat around the bush…it looks a little like you’re carrying a bong from your office to the break room.
-
Scrivener and MultiMarkdown - Mostly a One Way Street
Last week I had the pleasure of delivering a short talk on Markdown at CCCKC. One of the reasons cited as a big benefit of the format is that it can be manipulated and output through Scrivener to just about anything. As I worked in Scrivener with some prior writings, I started to run into some frustrating problems, primarily with links and footnotes. This led me to find the edges of support for MultiMarkdown within Scrivener.
The developers of Scrivener do a nice job of touting its support for MultiMarkdown. While this is warranted, they don’t do enough to explain the limits of this support.
As nice as Scrivener for drafting is, TextMate is still my favorite MultiMarkdown editor. I have some considerable muscle memory dedicated to the shortcuts I built which let me to fly though text, adding reference links and footnotes. Scrivener’s document compilation features are nearly perfect. Scrivener also will sync projects to text files and folders which seems like the perfect match for this kind of workflow.
When you read about writers using Scrivener and MultiMarkdown together, it appears that they are:
*Primarily using scrivener as their main writing program
*Using MultiMarkdown as an export format only…not as a format for working files
Here’s my problem. I want to
*Use Scrivener primarily as a document manager and other tools for my actual writing
*Use MultiMarkdown as a working and archival format, with other formats like RTF or PDF as the distributed format for my final product
The problem is that while Scrivener can convert its own link and footnote formats to MMD during a compile, it can’t go both ways. Once you sync the Scrivener document to text, you’re stuck with only adding things like text formatting to the document. If you want to add things like footnotes and links, you’re out of luck since Scrivener just sees them as plain text. It doesn’t mess up the formatting when you export to MultiMarkdown, but that’s not really the point.
When I write in Scrivener, it’s a big document which is most probably destined to end up in PDF. This means footnotes should go at the bottom of the current page and not at the end of the document which is what happens when you export to MMD. This is fine for HTML output but not for PDF.
There are two possible workarounds for this. First is to export from Scrivener as MultiMarkdown then to LaTeX. The second is to go from MultiMarkdown to OpenDoc then to PDF. Neither of these options is great at this point.
LaTeX shows some real promise, but holy crap it appears to be very complex. The approach is the right one in that it it formats based on my markup and a style sheet outputting to a beautiful PDF. Great in theory. However there is a reason that students outside the physics and match departments of universities never hear about this. The syntax is really tough to pick up quickly. As much as I want to set up templates that conform with the styles I’ve developed based on Typography for Lawyers it looks like it would take a considerable amount of time or effort.
Round tripping through ODF brings its own set of headaches. LibreOffice and OpenOffice are crazy ugly and their support for styles is confusing and bizarre. Most importantly there is no way to apply a set of styles to the entire document once it’s been imported. If you’re only tweaking the typeface and font size it’s no big deal but I’m way to particular about the typesetting to view this as a good option.
While I hope to update this post, crossing out all that I’ve said about Scrivener’s handling of incoming MMD syntax, I’m not optimistic. For now, I’m sticking to using Scrivener as my primary editor when I’m looking to publish to PDF and TextMate for everything else.
Hopefully they will open the other side of the street soon.
-
Getting Into Keyboard Maestro
Recently I acquired a license to Keyboard Maestro through the Productive Macs bundle. I’ve really taken to TextExpander, and find myself missing it when I’m away from a computer that I can’t control. I’d read some stuff about KM, but even after a little time tinkering I didn’t see it becoming a real part of how I work. That changed this weekend.
I’ve been looking for a better path towards a unified writing platform, regardless of whether I’m writing a long form post like this one, or a link with some quick commentary. TextMate is, and will remain for quite some time, my tool of choice. What I wanted was a way to:
*Quickly jump into TextMate with the link I want to point to
*Write whatever I’d like to accompany the post in MultiMarkdown
*Make sure that I’ve got a copy saved as plain text for future reference and archival purposes
*Get the post on the web without having to rely on another program (MarsEdit) or spend much time fiddling in the WordPress control panel
Keyboard Maestro ended up solving almost all these issues.
I’ve got a screenshot below, but in about 20 minutes, I have taken almost all of the overhead clicking and typing from the process. Now when I highlight a link and mash CMD+F5, I’m asked what I want to title the post. After inputting the title, a text file containing my naming convention (blogx - YYYYMMDD - $title) is saved to DropBox and my link is added to the top with a period at the end to facilitate the whole rss-title-as-link thing that I like so much.
When I’m done, I hit Shift+CMD+F5 which converts the markdown to HTML, copies it to the clipboard and then opens up the PressThis window in my browser. The only thing left to do is remove an extra paragraph tag that gets inserted to my link at the top.
I think this is extremely slick, and see some more of these macros in my future.
-
TextMate and MultiMarkdown - The Definitive Guide
I’ve really fallen in love with the killer combination of TextMate and MultiMarkdown in the past few months. Once you pair these two tools with Marked you might not even need a full blown word processor anymore.
The challenge in getting this all together is that the resources for getting everthing set up are spread out and a little confusing. Since I write on as many as three computers, I’ve had to get all this going as many as five times in the past few months so I thought I’d pull the steps together into one unified set of instructions.
I take no credit for developing any of these, that credit goes to Fletcher Penny, the mysterious Dr. Drang, Brett Terpstra and Ethan Schoonover.
Needless to say, you should download TextMate before getting started.
##Setup
This should take about 30 minutes. Hopefully less with this step by step tutorial.
###MultiMarkdown
*Download and install the MultiMarkdown package from GitHub
*Download and install the MultiMarkdown Support package from the same page
*Download and install the MultiMarkdown MultiMarkdown TextMate bundle from a slightly different page at GitHub
*Make sure that everything is good by firing up the terminal and typing “which mmd” to confirm that everything is there.
###TextMate Magic
This is where things can get a little confusing as Dr. Drang has made some changes over time to his snippets and has added additional posts instead of creating one canonical set of instructions. Hopefully this will alleviate some of the confusion that I’ve suffered while doing this a few times.
Reference Links on the Fly
Use this when you’re typing along and want to immediately insert a link.
*Go to this page and copy the little perl script to your clipboard
*Follow the instructions on this page using the perl script that’s on your clipboard instead of the perl script that’s there
*For the macro, use the key combination of CTL+L instead of what’s listed (this is my preference…you can use whatever you like)
Reference Links for Selections
Use this when you’re editing a piece and want to add links to existing text without having to retype anything.
*Follow the instructions on this page without any changes.
*For the macro, use the key combination of CTL+OPT+L (you’ll notice that the more fancy the fu, the more keys you mash)
Footnotes
Dr. Drang actually posted a footnotes bundle in 2010, but I find that the original instructions from 2006 are a little more effective. By now you’re getting into the swing of creating the command and recording the macro so why not do this one by hand too?
*Follow the instructions on this page and set the key combination to Ctl+F.
###Cleaning Up the TextMate Menus
If you’re relatively new to TextMate that Bundles menu can be overwhelming and cluttered. I like to clean it up a little bit.
*Open the Bundle Editor and click the “Filter List” button. This lets you hide the bundles from view without deleting them. Uncheck the bundles that you don’t need. Click “Done” when you’re finished.
*Now that we’ve got macros recorded for links and footnotes, we don’t need to see the behind the scenes commands in the menu. Click on MultiMarkdown and drag the Brackets, Reference Link Selection, Footnote and My Link commands to the Excluded Items section. They’ll still do their jobs, you just don’t have to see them in the bundles menu.
###Setting up Solarized (Optional)
I’ve written about Solarized before and still love it. I’m hoping for some better MultiMarkdown syntax highlighting but it’s still pretty decent out of the box.
*Go grab the full Solarized package from Ethan’s site.
*Find the TextMate Colors folder and just double click on both the light and the dark themes.
*I also like to install the terminal color schemes as well as the Solarized color palette found in the apple-colorpalette folder. That one’s a little tricky, so be sure to check out the readme.md file.
###Install Marked
This one’s easy. Go to the Mac App store and buy Marked.
##Usage
Now that you’re all set, you’re free to start writing. Obviously you use the regular MultiMarkdown syntax as you’re writing and use the keyboard to insert links and footnotes. Just use the Tab button to move between your display text, the reference or footnote number and the link or footnote text. As you keep hitting Tab, you’ll get right back into the main body of your text.
The key combinations are laid out below:
Key Combo
Result
Ctl+L
Insert a reference link
Ctl+Opt+L
Turn selected text into a reference link
Ctl+F
Insert a footnote
As you work, you can get quasi real time preview of the output by dragging the icon in the title bar of TextMate to Marked in the dock. This is especially handy if you want to do some MultiMarkdown tables as shown above.
When you’re satisfied with your draft, use Marked to copy and paste rich text into another word processor, export to PDF or copy the HTML by hitting Command+Shift+C.
-
TextExpander for Lawyers - Sending Email to Clients
It can be a challenge for people engaged in electronic discovery to identify privileged email communications. Filtering on domain names only goes so far, and because of the boilerplate language included in corporate and firm email searching for terms such as “privileged” or “confidential” can be ineffective.
One way to make this easier is to explicitly state that communications are intended to be privileged in an email. Adding this text is tedious at best, and I can’t tell you how many time’s I’ve typed the phrase “Privileged and Confidential Attorney Client Communication.”
TextExpander, of course, can make that less painful. The following snippet can be triggered from the subject line. It queries you for the actual subject, tabs into the body of the message and inserts the language one more time for good measure.
This may seem like overkill, but a few extra bytes and keystrokes are much better than having a privileged email be produced to opposing counsel.
Privileged and Confidential - %fill:Subject%%key:tab% Privileged and Confidential Attorney Client Communication%key:return%%key:return%
subscribe via RSS