Author Archives: Andrew

April/May’s reading/watching/playing

As a result of travel, a busy entertaining schedule, and some work stuff, I’m way behind. On everything.

In March and April I watched a number of Marvel films. I’m well into “Phase Two” now, having watched Captain America: Winter Soldier, and Ant-Man. I’ve even dipped a toe into “Phase Three”, with the second Guardians of the Galaxy.

I finished Meditation for Fidgety Sceptics. I recommend it. I got the audio book, and admit I had to relisten to a few passages, but I’d recommend going that way. If you’re already familiar with mindfulness meditation, it’s not going to really teach you anything new. It’s a good primer, though, and the central message is a good one: just start, start again if you mess up, and even a little bit helps.

Dead Space 3 is still happening. It’s too stressful, given that I mostly game just before bed. Instead, I’d get all lazy and play Destiny 2.

Currently reading: Annihilation (on my lovely new Kobo Aura, which replaced my refurbished second-gen Kobo which literally fell apart)
Currently watching: The Good Place

Media plan for 2018, and what I’m reading/watching/playing now

For a wide variety of reasons in 2017, I really neglected my media consumption. Neglected in the “garden gone to seed” way, not in the sense that I didn’t do any. I finished a few books, but ended up doing more comfort rereading than anything else. Similarly the TV was mostly on when cleaning, cooking, etc., so that was mostly reruns. I hardly watched any movies. Music was selected by playlist or algorithm. So for this year I’m actively planning what I’m going to watch, read, and play. Music may be a part of it, but I haven’t figured that out yet. (For what it’s worth, I’m trying some of Spotify’s “Fresh Finds” playlists of artists and genres I’ve never tried before.) For January, here’s what I have teed up:

PC/Console: Night in the Woods
Book: Seveneves
Movie: Guardians of the Galaxy vol 2
Comic: The Star Wars
Mobile Game: Monument Valley: Forgotten Shores and Monument Valley 2

Link dump

Reading: Felicia Day’s autobiography, You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost). In fact, I’m listening to it. First crack at using my library’s audio book reservation. It’s a fantastic book; very relatable and touching. A story of an interaction with a fan may have made my bus ride home uncomfortably dusty.

Listening to: Chipzel radio on Google Play Music. Making my peace with the upcoming death of Songza.

Playing: Toca Builders on iPhone. Yes, it’s for kids. But it’s really great. On my Mac, I’m playing Last Horizon.

Using BBEdit’s shell worksheet to rename files

BBedit’s shell worksheet can be a really handy tool for batch renaming files. I was inspired to give it a shot after seeing a script that handed off a directory listing for editing. Here’s a really trivial example. Let’s say I have a directory containing the following files (and I’ve cd‘d to it in the worksheet):

foo1.txt
foo2.txt
foo3.txt

And let’s say those files are actually Markdown, so I want to change the extension to .md.

First, type ls and execute it with Control-Return to get the listing of those files in your worksheet window. The result looks like the example above.

Next, highlight the listing, and bring up the “Find” dialogue. Make sure that “Grep” and “Selected text only” are selected.

Enter the pattern (.*?)(\.txt), meaning a lazy search of any characters up to a literal .txt, broken into two tokens. The first token is the file name, the second token is the extension. You want to replace that with mv \1\2 \1.md;. The result will look like this:

mv foo1.txt foo1.md;
mv foo2.txt foo2.md;
mv foo3.txt foo3.md;

Select those lines and execute them using Control-Return. If you do another ls, you’ll see your files have been renamed.

This example is really simple, just to get you thinking about the kind of file renaming you can do. Remember that a shell worksheet in BBEdit is a regular editing window. Any snippets, scripts, or text factory you have set up are available to you.