There have been many times that my battery is almost and about to die and I don’t pay attention to the icon in my menubar. Even then the battery level is below 10% before you get a visual warning. Recently however, this problem started causing more pain. My battery needs to be replaced, because of which at about 23% the machine will just shutdown. So I wrote a small script that calculates the battery power and along with some launchctl magic and growl, I now get a notification when my batter level is below 30%.  Read more...

Recently I was discussing with my manager and a colleague on tips to give a great presentation. Some of the points we talked about  Read more...

You type verses from the Quran all the time, in Arabic? Yes. How about doing it in less than a second? No? Read on then.
What I’m talking about are text expansion softwares. These are small utilities that run in the background and look for what you type. When you type a pre-configured sequence of characters, magic happens. So no matter what application I’m using, as soon as I type the letters ‘w b r’, this utility auto expands right at that place into ‘with best regards’. This is a huge time saver for people who do a lot of typing on their computers. It’s even useful to us software developers. For the code snippets you might need on a regular basis, these utilities can make you more productive.
It’s east to imagine the benefits of this amazing utility. You don’t type often used word or phrases over and over, you save time, type faster etc etc. To me this utility presented another idea. Before I talk about that, let me briefly mention my project so you’ll understand what I’m doing.
As an active seeker of Islamic knowledge I often find the need to include Quranic verses in my notes. The most naive way us to start typing it. It not only is painstakingly slow, you can make mistakes unintentionally. Another and most common way is to copy paste. That too can take some time. Since you have to first search or navigate to the ayah and then copy paste. So to ease this task I came up with the following idea(mind you this is all for mac users. Sorry I don’t develop for windows).  Read more...

I got asked the infamous question again, “What Islamic software should I install on the mac?” My theory is, if you get asked more than once, its probably worth putting pen to paper. Err, in this case fingers on the keyboard . Anyways here goes my list of apps.  Read more...

Ever since Gmail came out with their tasks feature I’ve loved it. For my limited use, its simple, easy and usable. If you are using OS X, here is a quick way to create a dashboard widget. All you need is Safari, both versions 3 and 4 will work in the manner detailed below.  Read more...