O’Reilly’s Deal of the day

The publishers O’Reilly have an ongoing promotion which is the O’Reilly Deal of the Day, where select e-books are sold at a discounted rate (usually 50% of the retail price). There is even a feed you can subscribe to to get the notifications of deals delivered to your RSS reader of choice. I have bought several of these, but there is no need to wait for a particular book to become a “deal of the day” to get it on the cheap.

If you have an account with them, every day can be a “deal of the day”-day. As a member, you get a discount code that gives you a free e-book for every book you buy. I am not sure if this is a time limited promotion or not, but it has been active for a long time, and I have used it many times to get great deals on books I need for work, or buy out of interest.

So if there are any O’Reilly titles that you are craving, sign up for an account and go shopping. The discount code will show on your membership page.

Posted on February 9, 2011 ()

Using Dropbox as a inter-machine clipboard

My workflow involves several machines on my desk, and I often work on one of them and need to quickly transfer a snippet of text to the other.

Having Dropbox available has made this simpler, as I could save a text file in the Dropbox and retrieve it on the other machine. Once I had done this a few times, I realised that this was a process that was begging for automation.

On my Mac, I already use Keyboard Maestro which lets me assign keyboard shortcuts to macros, and on the Windows machine a program called AutoHotkey was doing the same.

My idea was to create special shortcuts for cut and paste that instead of just cutting and pasting to and from the local machine’s clipboard, would additionally copy to a dropbox file and paste from a dropbox file.

Using Ruby, it was quick to whip up a couple of scripts that would write to a file from the clipboard, and read from a file to the clipboard, so now I have a working system where I can easily copy text on one machine, then paste it on the other machine. It makes my day a lot easier! If anyone is interested in seeing how the scripts are working, the code is on github.

My custom copy command now copies to the clipboard as usual, but in addition writes the clipboard contents to a file in my Dropbox. The custom paste command works the other way around by first reading from the file into the clipboard, and then pasting the clipboard as usual.

Tagged: ruby sync