Iâve known about Markdown for quite some time, but for some reason, Iâve always just stuck with writing up my blog posts in plain olâ HTML. Since Iâm now trying out MarsEdit, and it has preview functionality for Markdown, I thought Iâd give it a shot. Turns out, I love it, especially the human-readability of it, which I suppose is really the entire point.

I had a really hard time, however, finding a good cheat sheet. Several links to one made by Ollieman indicate he had the best one, but as his site is currently down, I ended up making my own. Please share and enjoy!

Since I use WordPress for my blog, and I have installed PHP Markdown Extra as a plug-in, I have also included an addendum on the second page of the cheat sheet noting the additions and changes in the “Extra” version.

I would also note that several popular text editors have support for Markdown translations, such as my much beloved TextMate, in which I am writing this very post. In fact, there is an excellent screencast which demonstrates use of the Blogging Bundle for TextMate, and gives a good overview of how Markdown can be used inside the editor, and how to export to various formats.

Many thanks to John Gruber and Aaron Swartz for creating Markdown, and Michel Fortin for creating the PHP “Extra” version.

Thankfully, there is an easy way to get around this. Just hit apple-option-space to bring the Spotlight window up directly, type in your search and go, and then you can get back to whatever you were doing while Spotlight works its magic. If that doesn't work for you, just open System Preferences... > Spotlight > Search Results and check the bottom of the window to make sure the box for "Spotlight window keyboard shortcut" is checked, and look at the pop-up menu next to it to check which shortcut it's set to. Instant productivity!

Sure, but underneath the glossy Mac surface, the Unix system does something else. It creates an alias to the drive, and puts it in the folder at the root of the drive you start up from (your boot drive). That folder is known as /Volumes. You don't see it? That's because Mac OS X hides it from you--- it's a special folder that normally the system uses just fine on its own, thankyouverymuch, and doesn't want you mucking about in it.

However, you can get to the folder by going to the menu item Finder > Go > Go to Folder...

...and in the dialogue box that pops up, type "/Volumes" (capitalization counts):

Then it will pop up the folder in question, and you can see what's in it:

Now, you can see here that my startup drive, Stone, is listed, as well as my 2 extra drives, Boulder and Pebble. Even DVD_VIDEO_RECORDER, a disc I burned on my living room DVD recorder shows up in here. Those little curved arrows in the lower left mean they're aliases, which aren't real folders at all, but just a pointer to the original drives.

You can also see that there is a real folder that is called FireWalkWithMe. Well, that's the name of my portable FireWire drive, but that's not connected to my Mac right now--- so what happened?

Some of the apps that run on Mac OS X are much more in tune with the Unix side than the Mac side of things, and so if, for instance, you have set your removable drive as the default place for it to save things, the app may just assume that drive is always going to be there, instead of checking to make sure that it actually is.

In this case, the app I had been using was Azureus, which while being an otherwise great BitTorrent client, was negligent in this way. I had foolishly set the default save directory to my FireWire drive, and according to Azureus, that meant it was saving things to:

/Volumes/FireWalkWithMe/saved_files.zip

So what happens is the next time I download something with this app, it tells the system to write to that path, first the hidden Volumes folder, then the FireWalkWithMe folder, then the saved file. But if my drive isn't attached, Azureus doesn't know, and so the system, not smart enough to know otherwise, takes that directory at face value, and when it encounters a folder in that path that doesn't exist, it goes ahead and creates it, hence the creation of the real FireWalkWithMe folder that is not an alias to my portable drive.

So, now I get this folder that Azureus has saved files into that has the exact same name as my FireWire drive. So, what happens the next time I connect my drive? Well, most of the time Mac OS X is smart enough to create an alias with a slightly different name, like FireWalkWithMe1, and still mount it on your desktop. However, sometimes it gets confused enough to not mount your drive at all, thinking since there's already a folder in there with the same name, it must already be mounted. Even if it does mount okay, there still the issue that the app that mistakenly created that folder will go right on saving into that folder instead of your drive, because it's still telling the system to look for /Volumes/FireWalkWithMe and not /Volumes/FireWalkWithMe1.

So, how do we fix this? Pretty simple, now that we know what to look for. If you Go to the /Volumes folder, and there's a real folder in there, first check to make sure there isn't anything inside you want to save, and then chuck that folder in the trash. The next time you connect your removable drive, it should mount with its proper alias name again, and all will be right with the world. Yay!

1. Hirolog announces the release of DarwiinRemote
2. DawiinRemote SourceForge page
   

Want to contribute a how-to for an episode of HowTube? Email us at howtube@gmail.com, and we'll work with you to get your how-to featured on the podcast!

Transcript will be posted separately next week, as well as bonus tips on how to use much the same workflow to prepare video from DVDs to go up on the web. That very request-- by a TV host who wants to grab interview clips of himself from DVDs that he's burned from his TiVo-- is exactly what prompted me to create this episode in the first place.

Bonus Bonus Tip: Don't fool yourself into thinking that in the midst of the myriad other tasks you have to do before you go on a 5-day business trip that you will in any way have the time to properly produce a 6-minute how-to video podcast. Either something not going to get done (at least to your satisfaction), or you're not going to sleep. At all.