I tend to use Markdown syntax for most of my document creation needs. Then I use TextMate’s built-in Markdown support to convert to a Word document, RTF, PDF, etc… as necessary.

The one problem I have is that a lot of the so-called MultiMarkdown commands in TextMate leave me opening a file in my /tmp folder. If I forget to do a Save As… my document is lost forever. No good!

Here’s how you fix it…

My current project is to enable network backups of my Mac and my wife’s PC over the internet, so that we have an off-site backup of last resort, should our house burn down, fall over, and then sink into the swamp.

Anyone who’s used a Mac for a long time knows that transferring Mac-native files over the internet is fraught with peril. You risk losing type and creator codes and resource forks, as well as a number of other forms of metadata introduced with MacOS X. So my first step was to determine how I could safely encode my files so that they could make the trip to a foreign server (which would either by a Linux-type box on my web host, or an Amazon S3 account) and then back again, with the file intact for recovery.

ss64.com hosts this awesome reference to every single command line program and option available in MacOS X, Linux (Bash), Windows and (ugh) Oracle.

Wonderful reference and a great companion to Apple’s shell scripting primer.

Visor, the new application from Blacktree, creates a half-screen terminal window that pops up with the press of a hot key. This terminal is persistent, so when it’s in the background, it just keeps on going and going and going.

Very clever little hack, and extremely useful if you’re prone to bouncing between the terminal and your desktop.

The only problem I’ve had with it is that it’s only one window. So I invoke screen as soon as it starts up, and that pretty much takes care of it.

Thanks, Blacktree!