Here’s five of the more obscure Mac keyboard shortcuts I use, plus some bonus tips for good measure. If you know about all of them already, you’re probably really über-geeky (umlaut tip: hit Option-U to prepare an umlaut; it’ll then appear over then next character you type.)

Changing Sound Input and Output Devices

Useful for the audio hackers out there: since Snow Leopard, you’ve been able to change sound input and output sources really easily by holding down Option (Alt) when you click on the speaker icon in the menubar. Before OS X 10.6, you’d have had to install Rogue Amoeba’s handy SoundSource freebie to get the same functionality.

Bonus menubar tip: Holding down Option will also get you extra information from the Bluetooth and WiFi icons. Connected to WiFi at the moment? Hold Option and click the antenna icon, and you’ll see some extra-geeky information about your connection.

Fine-Tune Your Volume Control

Continuing on the audio theme, ever wanted to fine-tune your volume output? Hold down Option+Shift at the same time as hitting your volume up/down buttons on the Apple keyboard, and you’ll find you get far more fine-grained up/down steps. This may be a Snow Leopard-only tip, too; I can’t remember when the feature first appeared.

Bonus audio control tip: Holding Option while hitting your Volume Up button will open up Sound Preferences.

Boolean Spotlight Search

So, you’re searching for something in a Finder window, using the little Spotlight search, top right. And, being a hardcore geek, you don’t want just the vanilla search, no, you want a complicated Boolean search. So, again with the Option key. When you’re adding criteria, hold down Option. The little plus symbol turns into an ellipsis, and clicking it kicks off a new group of search parameters. You can choose to match on “Any”, “All” or “None” of the group criteria being true.

Bonus tip: Hitting Command+Option+F will drop your keyboard focus straight into the Search box in both Finder and Safari.

iTunes Podcast Lists

If you’re a heavy podcast listener, you probably spend a fair bit of time in the Podcast list in iTunes. But did you know about these two tricks? Both of these work on the little triangle icons that appear next to the main entry for each podcast, to expand and collapse the list of downloaded episodes.

First off, try holding Command down when you click on one of the little triangles. The episode list will expand or collapse as normal, but so will the episode list of every other podcast you subscribe to. Very handy for tidying up the view in one easy step.

Next, find a podcast that you’ve been listening to for a while. Expand the episode list. You’ll probably see just the episodes that you’ve currently got downloaded and ready to listen to. Collapse the list, then expand it again, this time with the Option key held down. This will expand the list as normal, but after a second or two to query the podcast feed, iTunes will show you every episode in the feed, whether you’ve downloaded it or not. This really speeds up checking for and downloading episodes you might’ve missed.

Bonus iTunes tip: In current versions of iTunes, hitting the little green “maximise” button at the top of the iTunes window toggles iTunes into a miniature “playback controls” window, the “mini player”. If you actually want to maximise/restore the window, as the button normally does, hold down Option while you click it. This is exactly the reverse behaviour of older iTunes versions, where Option+clicking the maximise button would show the mini player.

Quitting Apps From the Command+Tab List

This may be a little less obscure, but there’s still plenty of people who don’t know about it.

Most people are familiar with switching between apps using the task list that pops up when you hit Command+Tab. But did you know you can do other things than just switch to the application? Hit Command+Tab, then, keeping Command held down, tab to an app. At this point, where you’d normally let go of Command to switch to the app, instead hit “Q” (still keeping Command held down.) That’ll quit the app, without switching to it. “H” instead of “Q” will Hide/Unhide rather than quitting. Since Snow Leopard, hitting the up or down arrow keys will fire up Exposé on the selected application, too.

Oh — and don’t forget that Command+Shift+Tab will cycle backwards through the list of applications, and Command+‘ (backtick) will cycle through the open windows of the current application.

Bonus mouse tip: If you’ve got a big list of applications in your Command+Tab “task switcher”, you don’t actually have to cycle through them using the keyboard. Once you’ve brought up the task list with Command+Tab, again, keep the list on the screen by keeping Command held down. Then just click your mouse on any of the app icons to switch directly to it. This can sometimes save you some fiddly switching-through-apps work.

Any More?

That’s my five. Do you have any off-the-beaten track Mac keyboard tips? Feel free to comment…

One thing that’s very important here: everyone is different. There is no silver bullet, there is no brilliant productivity system that works for everyone. The best way of getting better at producing stuff is to keep trying different things until you find methods that work for you.

Without further ado, here’s my first instalment: An Experiment in Time.

Time is, essentially, the only real asset you’ve got. It’s going to keep on arriving, and how you live in it determines what you produce, and what kind of person you are. So it’s important to get a handle on how much time you’re spending on doing any given thing, especially when it comes to estimating jobs, and being realistic about your potential.

When I first tried The Pomodoro Technique™, the biggest benefit it had for me was letting me know that my sense of time was calibrated wrong.

Now, the Pomodoro Technique is a complete time management technique, and if you’ve not tried it, it’s most definitely worth a look — it may well work for you. But the experiment I’m suggesting today is a smaller, simpler beast.

Find something on your “to-do” list, or whatever you use for storing Stuff You Need To Get Done. You’ll need a task that you think will take around a half-hour. “Clear ten emails from my inbox”, “clean the kitchen”, whatever. It’s important that you use a task that has a definite end-point, even if it’s only in your head — the exact state of the kitchen when you’re officially done, say.

Grab a timer — it doesn’t have to be one of those tomato-shaped kitchen timers that The Pomodoro Technique is named after, just whatever you normally use to time stuff. It’s important that it can be (a) out of your sight while you work, and (b) has an alarm of some kind at the end.

Lose any clocks from the area you’ll be working in. Take the clock off the wall and stick it in another room. If you’re on the computer, stick a sticky note over the corner of the screen with the clock in it. Turn your phone over onto its front. Whatever.

Now, set the timer for half an hour, put it out of sight — maybe in an adjoining room, where you’ll still hear it — and do your chosen job.

That’s the experiment. Repeat it a few times, with a different tasks. You don’t have to do this all on one day. Try it at different times of the day, too.

So, how was that for you? Did the timer go off when you were still head-down, halfway through? Were you still on the first email in your inbox and hadn’t even got to the other nine? Did you finish a lot faster than you expected, and find you still had twenty minutes left?

That’s the point of the experiment, really — calibrating your sense of time, and becoming more realistic about what you can take on in the time you have available. The more often you predict how fast you’ll do something, then measure the reality, the better you’ll get at doing stuff.

Incidentally, The Pomodoro Technique is well worth trying if you’re struggling with doing stuff. If you finally finished a few outstanding jobs when you were trying this little experiment, and you were surprised with how easy they actually turned out to be, you should definitely give it a go.

So, I experimented. And the good news is that since Snow Leopard came out, with its improvements to the Services menu and Automator support, adding Markdown conversion to the Services menu yourself is an absolute doddle. I took a guess and what I did worked first time.

First, fire up Automator. Choose “Service” as the template you want to use.

I chose the default options for the Service, except I checked the “Replaces selected text” option, so the new Markdown format text would replace whatever text I had highlighted:

Then I added a “Run Shell Script” action from the Action Library (I just searched for “script” to find it):

Finally, I added the path to Markdown.pl (obviously, you have to have a working Markdown installation in place — see Gruber’s original Markdown article if you’ve not, and come back when you’re done.) On my system, I shoved Markdown.pl in /usr/local/bin. Just shove the path to wherever your Markdown is in the Run Shell Script action body:

…and you’re done, really! Save the Service under whatever name you want.

And you’re good to go. To experiment, I fired up TextEdit and typed in some Markdown, then chose my shiny new “Markdown” option from the right-click menu:

And, after a couple of seconds of clicking and whirring, bingo! Shiny fresh HTML replaced the Markdown text:

Verily, the ease of adding Services to OS X using Automator these days is a draggy droppy joy.

“I feel like a doctor… and I feel like periodically I get this stream of people who are almost dead from a brain tumour the size of a volleyball, and they mainly want me to find out where they can get bigger hats. And with all of my might, I try to say to them: you’ve got a bigger problem than hats right now.”

A surprising number of people have asked my advice about getting things done recently. And I’m so bad at that stuff that I feel embarrassed to venture an answer. Mostly I refer them to the estimable Mr. Merlin Mann. This recent incarnation of his talk on Time and Attention, available here in audio or video, is an excellent place to start.

My confirmation email tells me that I’ve ordered the “Kindle Wireless Reading Device, Free 3G + Wi-Fi, 6″ Display, Graphite, 3G Works Globally — Latest Generation”.

Just trips off the tongue, doesn’t it?

There’s a lot of strange things about the way the Kindle is sold. When it first came to the UK, it didn’t really feel like a UK product. The announcement on Amazon’s front page was a big graphic full of text from Jeff Bezos — not plain, easy-to-read, scalable, screen-reader and search engine-friendly text, but a single big block graphic. Which was a bit odd. And if you clicked through this announcement on the Amazon.co.uk front page, you got taken to the US store, where you could buy a Kindle in US dollars only, and had to make sure you selected a UK mains charger to go with it.

The latest announcement is also a big block graphic. A Bezos Big Block Graphic, as I’m starting to think of them. Click through for the full thing.

The Bezos Big Block Graphic

Amazon are often pointed out as a market leader in e-commerce web design and usability. Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think! — probably the best usability book ever — cites Amazon as a good example all over the place, so I’m a little bemused as to why they’re doing this.

I mean, this thing is actually an imagemap, just to allow the four things in it that look like links to be clicked on. Remember imagemaps? Probably not, unless you were a web developer back in the 1990s…

If this were a little website I’d never heard of, I’d just think, “oh, these people must have really, really wanted to use that particular font, and don’t know much about all the different ways you could do that better in this millennium.” But with Amazon I just sit here with a little quizzical expression on my face and wonder why. Anybody got a clue?

I have a similar problem with the name. Companies agonise over product names, trying to make them search-engine friendly. There’s a lot of speculation that Apple’s apparent quick-change from “iPhone 3G S” to “iPhone 3GS” (note the now-missing space) was done to make it easier for customers to find information about that particular model of phone.

So, for example, I can Google “iPhone 3GS leather case” and what I get back is mostly a helpful bunch of shopping results that show cases that are compatible with my particular model of iPhone.

But what if I want to find out if anyone other than Amazon is selling cases for this new Kindle? (Not an unlikely desire, when you see that Amazon’s price for their own basic leather case is £29.99 — more than a quarter of the cost of the new entry-level Kindle it’s meant to wrap!)

What do I search for? Googling “Kindle Wireless Reading Device, Free 3G + Wi-Fi, 6″ Display, Graphite, 3G Works Globally — Latest Generation leather case” doesn’t do much good. And Googling “Kindle leather case” just brings back a ton of cases that won’t fit, because they’re all for the previous Kindle incarnations.

Please, Amazon, give your products model numbers. You’ll be saving people an awful lot of search pain for years to come. It really doesn’t matter if it’s a snappy, well-thought out progression, or a goofy random number like digital cameras always seem to get. At least I can search for accessories for my Sony CyberSomething DSC48-TX1A, even if I have to look at the front of the camera to remember which model I’ve got every single time…

Still, at least you can now actually buy the latest Kindle in UK currency. And apparently there will be a new UK Kindle Store, which sounds promising. I’d tell you more about it, but I can’t copy and paste the information from the latest Bezos Big Block Graphic, of course, and I’m buggered if I’m typing it all in again.

More on the Kindle when mine arrives. Amazon haven’t given me a shipping date yet, so I can’t be sure when that’ll be.

The IBM-PC had something that came to be known as the OEM character set which provided some accented characters for European languages and a bunch of line drawing characters… horizontal bars, vertical bars, horizontal bars with little dingle-dangles dangling off the right side, etc., and you could use these line drawing characters to make spiffy boxes and lines on the screen, which you can still see running on the 8088 computer at your dry cleaners’.

via The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) — Joel on Software.

Probably best watched on YouTube itself in the original 480p (you may need to use the video quality pop-out menu), so you stand a chance of reading the screen.

Note I’m using the Audacity 1.3.12, in the beta series, not the 1.2 stable. If you want to follow along with the video, I’d recommend grabbing the beta. It’s not crashed on me yet, and it’s got lots of new features and bug-fixes over 1.2.

If you want your blog to look at least a bit different from everyone else’s, adding a custom header picture is probably the best first step. Changing themes entirely would do a more radical job, but there won’t be many themes yet that take advantage of all the WordPress 3 features like Twenty Ten — which is built to showcase them — does.

So, here’s a couple of shiny header graphics I created from this snap of mine taken on last year’s Worldwide Photo Walk, and this one taken just this afternoon. These links take you through to the full-size versions; they’re pretty small files, weighing in 40KB max: Full size daisy. Full size Cosmos (the purple one!)

Once you’ve made your header, or grabbed mine, the page you want in the WordPress 3 Admin interface is under “Header”, under the “Appearance” sub-menu. It’ll be there by default in a fresh install of WordPress 3, as part of the Twenty Twenty theme.

Just upload the file using the top option there. There won’t be any prompt to crop the photo if you’ve used one that’s exactly 940x198 pixels. Both of the files above are exactly that size, so once you’ve uploaded the file, that should be the job done!

Wait for WordPress to tell you the new graphic is in place, then go view your site and you should see your new, non-default header, and have a WordPress site that doesn’t look exactly like all the other new WordPress 3 installs!

I bought a shiny new ZyXEL P-660HN. It’s a lovely little ADSL wireless router, it got a string of 5-star reviews on eBuyer, and everything worked well out of the box. I only had one problem — well, apart from not being able to spell “ZyXEL” — which I’m documenting here just in case anyone else is having it and desperately looking for help on the internet.

I couldn’t get the Apple Remote App for iPhone to work with it. Not reliably, anyway. It would occasionally work, after rebooting everything, but it wouldn’t stay working. Crucially, I also couldn’t get the AirTunes Remote Speakers (hanging off my Airport Express) to work, either.

After I shuffled around the internet for a bit, I thought it might be something to do with Bonjour, but the ZyXEL didn’t seem to be clamping down with its firewall on the Bonjour ports internally. In fact, I eliminated the firewall completely: turning it off didn’t fix the problem.

Plunging further into the net, I found a couple of places that tangentially mentioned a couple of other apps in the same breath as the Apple Remote, including the 1Password app, which syncs with 1Password over WiFi. I tried that app for the first time with the new router, and what do you know? That didn’t work either.

My big clue came from this blog entry at packetevents.com, which goes into some really geeky detail about what happens when you fire up the Remote App:

When the iPhone remote starts, it began to send  a Multicast-DNS packet to 224.0.0.251. This is a multicast which means the devices and computers in the same group will hear this packet.

Multicast. That’s the secret. I remembered seeing a setting for that on the ZyXEL, which I didn’t think was on by default. Sure enough, on the Network > LAN > IP page of the router’s configuration screens, there’s an Advanced Setup button. Click that, and there’s an RIP & Multicast Setup section. Multicast was set to “None” on my system.

I had no idea which of the options to choose — IGMP-v1, 2 or 3 — so I just chose the biggest number, on the grounds that version 3 of things is generally better than version 1 or 2. As soon as I’d chosen that and hit “Apply”, everything started working just fine. 1Password started syncing, my Remote app started working, and I’m listening to music over the AirTunes speakers right now.

So — got a problem with a ZyXEL router and your iPhone apps? Try enabling multicast!

‘This is just like when you post what you think is a really fucking original photo to Flickr and the first fucking comment you get is “Hi! I’m an admin for the ‘Upside-down photos of penguins wearing bobblehats (shot on Velvia)’ group, and we’d love to have your photo added to the 2,947,341 photos that are already in our group pool.”…’

I have created a new web site. Purely for a rant. It’s called domainillneverfuckinguse.com.