Even though I consider myself quite skilled with computers, I am slow when it comes to applying technology to my life in new ways. It was just last week that I decided to try out Google Earth’s ‘path’ feature to measure the length of my run. Unfortunately, when I got into the program, I realized that a saved path couldn’t be measured, and a measured path couldn’t be saved. What a dilemma!
After a little bit of searching, I discovered a site that will allow you to calculate the distance of any saved path in Google Earth. If you highlight the path name in the sidebar and copy it, you can paste it into the box on the site as xml.
The picture above is the run I did last Saturday, before exams destroyed my life. School is on the left and the Cobb’s Hill Reservoir, my destination, is on the far right. The path I made put the distance at 9.3 miles. I’ve made the kmz file available for download.
I suppose I could just measure the path once, but I really would like to be able to keep these paths, for two reasons. It would be nice to be able to change them later on, in case I make a slight variation on a run. But the real reason is that I just love data. I think it would be really neat to make an entire collection of the runs that my team does, and then put them on the internet for anyone to download - new freshmen, other area runners, etc.
I also want to use Google Earth to find some new places to run this summer. I’ve been canvassing the same trails for five or six years, and they are getting worn out. A lot of my runs need to be extended to fit college training distance as well.
I am relatively new to TextMate, having been converted from Emacs less than a year ago. Emacs (pictured below) has extensive support for coding in VHDL. I was quite surprised, then, when I learned that there is no VHDL bundle available for TextMate. It turns out that both VHDL and Verilog (the two most popular hardware description languages) are on the bundle request list.
When I think about this more, it makes sense. The Macintosh is not the platform of choice for hardware designers, who are probably using UNIX or Linux. The VHDL simulation software that we use in school only runs on Windows, but there are some command-line simulation tools such as GHDL that have been ported to run on Mac OS X.
I’m considering writing my own bundle, which would be a good excuse to buy that new TextMate book that I’ve been wanting. Syntax highlighting and commonly used snippets/declarations would be the main priority, followed in the future by GHDL integration. Of course, I would add the bundle to the Macromates SVN repository once it was in a useful state.
If you got here from Google, what functionality would you like to see in a TextMate VHDL bundle?
As mentioned in this article at TUAW, the fullscreen behavior of applications such as QuickTime, DVD Player, and iTunes is determined by the preferences in the Quicktime Player application. If you have two monitors, and you want fullscreen video to show up on the secondary monitor, you must change the preferences in QuickTime. However, if you do not have QuickTime Pro, you cannot access these preferences through the application. This article describes how to enable fullscreen in QuickTime (the non-Pro version) and how to manipulate some of these preferences to determine which monitor the output is on.
Enable Fullscreen: This tip comes from Macworld. The easiest way to get fullscreen in QuickTime without buying the Pro version is with a simple AppleScript. Open up Script Editor, located at /Applications/AppleScript/Script Editor.app, and copy and paste these next few lines into a new script.
tell application "QuickTime Player"
present front movie scale screen
end tell
Continue reading ‘Hacking Fullscreen without Quicktime Pro’
Latest Comments
RSS