Jerry Stratton's Blog, page 35

Catalina vs. Mojave for Scripters

More detail about the issues I ran into updating the scripts from 42 Astounding Scripts for Catalina.

Play music faster in the Music App

If you enjoy Marvin and the Chipmunks, you’ll love this AppleScript.

COVID Lessons: Government Monopolies are Still Monopolies

Our response to COVID-19 was almost designed to make it worse. We shut down the nimble small businesses that could respond quickly, and relied almost solely on large corporations and the government monopolies that failed us, because they are monopolies.

42 Astounding Scripts, Catalina edition

I’ve updated 42 Astounding Scripts for Catalina, and added “one more thing”.

Battery-operated floor lamp

A battery-operated lamp removes the need for unsightly and even dangerous cords.

COVID Lessons: Shutting down innovation

Our response to COVID-19 was almost entirely to make the problem worse. We shut down everything that could help, and when people started thinking up ways to neutralize the virus’s spread, we shut them down, too. We actually fined people for innovating means of continuing to work safely; and of course we told everyone to shut down but still pay your taxes.

Release: The Dream of Poor Bazin

A great journalistic adventure in the style of Dumas or Waugh, four hard-drinking reporters taking on the corruption, toadying, and even murder in America’s beltway.

Hunt the Wumpus: Conditional code and include files in SuperBASIC

Hunt the Wumpus can talk to you if you have a speech synthesizer.

COVID Lessons: The Health Care Shutdown

It’s fortunate that COVID-19 was not as bad as the experts said, because our response was almost entirely to make the problem worse. We shut down everything that could help, including health care for co-morbidities. We locked the healthy and the sick together, and cut people off from routine care. Most of the deaths “from” COVID-19 were probably due more to our response than to the virus itself.

Avoiding lockFocus when drawing images in Swift on macOS

Apple’s recommendation is to avoid lockFocus if you’re not creating images directly for the screen. Here are some examples from my own Swift scripts. You can use this to draw text into an image, and to resize images.