Onlinenerd24

Apple only “allows” certain (rather ugly) colors to be set as a solid background color on OS X. I don’t even want to go into how utterly stupid I think this is…

Ok, here’s how you can easily set an arbitrary color on OS X.

1. Save this 1×1 transparent PNG to your “Pictures” directory.
2. Open the “Desktop & Screensavers” preferences pane in the “System Preferences”.
3. Select “Folders / Pictures”
4. Select the trans.png (might not be visible, but the image square is in the directory listing to the right)
5. You might have to select “Center”
6. Now you should see a color selector which lets you set your color.

Here’s how the preference pane should look like:

Well, let me explain… I have several podcasts subsscribed in iTunes. I use Net News Wire as a local RSS feed reader. This morning I thought it would be nice to have new podcast episodes displayed in my feed reader as soon, as they are downloaded.

So I sat down and wrote my very first piece of AppleScript. And boy, does this “language” suck… It even lacks a simple string replacement function. Stunningly stupid… So I only got a half baked script, which at least displays me new podcast episodes in Net News Wire. Download it here

In Net News Wire go in the menu “File -> New Special Subscription -> Script…” and select the downloaded file (you can put it anywhere on your computer). The script should work with other feed readers as well, but of course only with local applications. You probably have to subscribe to “file://pathtodirectory/listPodcasts.scpt”, I don’t know. Feel free to tell me in the comments!

Ah, if you don’t trust me (why would you? ), you can open the downloaded file in a simple text editor and investigate it to make sure I don’t mess with your computer