Open Selected URL via Quicksilver

I am a big fan of Quicksilver, a free application launcher (and so much more) available for free on your Mac. It is a great way to avoid endless clicking when opening an app, and allows for some things that the built-in Mac OS X Spotlight search feature does not.

While marking my CS30 student’s php assignments, I was selecting the URL of the “live version” of their code, and thought their must be a better way than having to copy the URL, open Safari, select the location bar, and then paste in the URL. So, I spent a minute or two Googling it, and found a post from 43Folders explaining how to “Send to Quicksilver”.

In summary, you can open a selected URL from any application by simply hitting “CMD-Escape” (which sends the text to Quicksilver), and hit “Enter”. Two quick keyboard commands. Much nicer, and I will definitely be using the send to Quicksilver functionality much more…

Fixing MS Office’s Stupidity Regarding Equation Editor

Note to self:

To fix Word’s (completely inexplicable) occasional inability to open up the built-in Equation Editor on Mac OS 10.4 (perhaps earlier versions of OS X as well), just delete the whole ~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft folder. It took me a couple of minutes to find this again, and it’s the third time I’ve had to do it, so I’m making it easy to find if it happens again.