Jason Clarke

“It’s A Brick” – Tesla Motors’ Devastating Design Problem

After reading this article from theunderstatement.com, my desire to own a Tesla Roadster went from 100 to 0 in 10 seconds flat:

Tesla Motors’ lineup of all-electric vehicles — its existing Roadster, almost certainly its impending Model S, and possibly its future Model X — apparently suffer from a severe limitation that can largely destroy the value of the vehicle. If the battery is ever totally discharged, the owner is left with what Tesla describes as a “brick”: a completely immobile vehicle that cannot be started or even pushed down the street. The only known remedy is for the owner to pay Tesla approximately $40,000 to replace the entire battery. Unlike practically every other modern car problem, neither Tesla’s warranty nor typical car insurance policies provide any protection from this major financial loss.

Source: understatementblog

How to use Keyboard Maestro to add hotkeys for Twitter lists in Twitterrific

With the addition of Tweet Marker support, Twitterrific has become my go-to Twitter client on my Mac. Aside from Tweet Marker support, one of my favourite things about Twitterrific is its very well thought out set of keyboard shortcuts.

Unfortunately, though Twitterrific does a nice job supporting Twitter Lists, there are no keyboard shortcuts to switch your timeline view to look at them. There are keyboard shortcuts to switch to All Tweets (⌘1), Mentions (⌘2), Messages (⌘3), and Favorites (⌘4), but that’s it.

The good news is that you can use Keyboard Maestro to add in the missing keyboard shortcuts. You simply set up a set of macros that are available only in Twitterrific, then use the Move or Click Mouse action to click on the appropriate list. Since your macros will only run when Twitterrific is the active application, you can use ⌘5, ⌘6, etc. as your shortcuts.

I like to keep the sidebar hidden in Twitterrific, so I added the keystroke ⌘L before and after the automated click, which shows the sidebar just long enough to allow the action to occur.

How to Add a Snooze Button to Gmail, No Extensions Required

This post by Lifehacker (based on scripts by Google engineer Justin Goldfeder) is a fantastic alternative to Boomerang, who recently came out of beta. While I love their service, it would cost me $20/mo to continue using it on both my personal and business accounts, and I just can’t justify that.

The primary reason I used Boomerang was to snooze messages for later, and this free alternative, while a bit fiddly, does the trick surprisingly well. And as an added bonus, it works on any browser, including mobile, right out of the box. In fact, because its functionality is based on labels (which are treated as folders by IMAP clients), you can snooze a message from any mail client you have attached to your Gmail account, including your phone’s built-in mail client.

That’s something you can’t do with Boomerang.

I ever-so-slightly modified the script to support up to two weeks of snooze time (14 days instead of the default 7), and used the configuration items at the top of the script to set messages that arrive back to the inbox as unread, while also attaching a new “Unsnoozed” label to them so that I know where the message came from.