Shubas Exist

Growing up, my favorite books were the Green-Sky Trilogy, by Zilpha Keatly Snyder. I also played the Commodore 64 game, Below the Root, a sequel to the books set in the same universe. The residents of Green-Sky, a low-gravity world, could jump off the branches of the giant trees they lived on, open the wings of their silken shubas, and fly. Description from the video game manual:

SHUBA: The shuba is an outer garment worn by the residents of the Green-Sky world. It allows your character to glide through the air safely. It can be torn if your character falls or trips too often. Beware of SPIDERS and SNAKES as these will make your character fall. (http://www.gamesover.com/walkthroughs/belowthe.txt)

Judging from this video my brother just sent me, shubas now actually exist in real life, and they’re called wingsuits:



wingsuit base jumping from Ali on Vimeo.

I notice this video doesn’t show any shots of people landing, but I assume they have some plan for that too, since they seem to be around to give interviews afterwards.  

Edit: It’s all explained, including the landing, in the Wikipedia article about BASE jumping.

Using Quicksilver and Applescript to Keep a Stack of Safari URLs

My friend posted this question on Hacker News. I answered:

If you’re on a Mac and you’re using Safari you might like Urly (http://www.zenonez.com/urly/news.html). It lets you make a pretty basic stack of browser links. If you don’t like that (and you’re a Quicksilver user), it might be worth writing some Quicksilver triggers to push and pop urls using a text file as a stack.

I decided I might as well code my solution. I’d never written any Applescript before, so what have is cobbled together from various examples I found online and very likely not the best way to do it.  I made two scripts.
 
bpush.scpt:
tell application "Safari"
 
set theurl to URL of front document
end tell
 
set clipFil to (path to documents folder as text) & "tobrowse.txt"
try
close access file clipFil
end try
set filRef to open for access file clipFil with write permission
write (return & (theurl)) to filRef starting at eof
close access filRef
tell application "Safari" to activate

bpop:scpt:
set clipFil to (path to documents folder as text) & "tobrowse.txt"
 
try
close access file clipFil
end try
 
set filRef to open for access file clipFil with write permission
set filetext to (read filRef)
set thelist to every paragraph of filetext
set theurl to item (length of thelist) of thelist
set item (length of thelist) of thelist to ""
set newtext to (thelist) as text
set eof of filRef to 0
write newtext to filRef
close access filRef
 
tell application "Safari"
activate
set URL of document 1 to theurl
end tell

I can activate these by just typing bpush and bpop into Quicksilver. I’ve tried using this while browsing for the past hour or so and it’s definitely too soon to say for sure, but I think I might actually use these.