General

iShopIndian.com

Seeing canned palak paneer at Cost Plus World Market got me thinking that surely $3.99/can was highway robbery, and surely it’d be cheaper on the Interweb — I mean, CPWM has to order that stuff from somewhere.

After some digging, I found iShopIndian.com, which seems to have some really good prices for most of the Indian and Asian food that I’d otherwise get from Whole Foods. For example, their palak paneer is $1.99, which is cheap even after I add in shipping.

Searching the Spotlight Database From The Command-Line

I’ve got a lot of MP3s, and I’m slightly obsessed with managing them. The problem is, I don’t know which ones are listed in my iTunes Library, and which ones aren’t.

Here’s how I used Spotlight to locate all the missing, “un-databased” MP3s.

First off, currently it’s not easy to create a Smart Folder that will match on a Boolean NOT. It’s possible, but not easy. The way to do it is to enclose the NOT term in parentheses, with a hyphen. For example, “bugs(-aphids)” would show all instances of “bugs”, and not “aphids”. As far as I know, there’s no good way to search for an empty set, or “”.

AppRocket Sucks

In reference to this post, yeah, AppRocket sucks.

It’s fairly good as a launcher — better than most, but it still gets confused by multiple matching Start Menu items. For example, if you type ‘FIR’, intending to launch Firefox, AppRocket will show you multiple instances of Firefox: one for “All users”, and one for your account. Overall, the program is no Quicksilver.

It still would’ve been a keeper had it not been ninja-payware. Nowhere on the AppRocket webpage or on the download page is anything listed about how the app will self-destruct after about a month if you don’t buy it. I’ve checked all around the site and still see nothing about this auto-expiry.

Gas Prices

This site shows a stack-ranked list of gas prices, low to high, for the Atlanta area.

Make a calendar in Excel

Here’s a nifty formula that’ll create a calendar in Excel:

Make a calendar in Excel:

=IF(MONTH(DATE(YEAR(NOW()),MONTH(NOW()),1))
<>MONTH(DATE(YEAR(NOW()),MONTH(NOW()),1)-
(WEEKDAY(DATE(YEAR(NOW()),MONTH(NOW()),1))-1)
{0;1;2;3;4;5}*7 {1,2,3,4,5,6,7}-1),””,DATE(YEAR(NOW()),
MONTH(NOW()),1)-(WEEKDAY(DATE(YEAR(NOW()),
MONTH(NOW()),1))-1) {0;1;2;3;4;5}*7 {1,2,3,4,5,6,7}-1)

To use it:

  1. Copy the formula text to the clipboard
  2. Activate an Excel sheet and select a 7-col by 6-row range
  3. Press F2
  4. Press Ctrl V to paste the formula into the active cell
  5. Press Ctrl Shift Enter (to make it a multicell array formula)
  6. Format the cells using the “Date” number format.

Cut

Oooh, here’s a neato site full of instructions on how to cut food.