Emacs hack: yank URL from Chrome (on Mac)

Damn is this going to be useful:

(defun yank-chrome-url ()
 "Yank current URL from Chrome"
  (interactive)
  (require 'apples-mode)
  (apples-do-applescript "tell application \"Google Chrome\"
 get URL of active tab of first window
end tell"
    #'(lambda (url status script)
        ;; comes back with quotes which we strip off
        (insert (subseq url 1 (1- (length url)))))))

I suppose I should have separate blogs for stupid hacks and Deep Contemplations of the Nature of Things, but who has the time to manage multiple web presences?

Useful Emacs Dired launch hack

[leavening some technical stuff into the usual political/philosophical content. I'm curious to see if search engines pick it up.]

I live my computational life inside Emacs, which is the best user interface for almost everything; but it's sometimes frustrating that you can't escape Emacs' text-only world. Well, here is a little hack that lets you launch arbitrary files from a Dired view of a directory; using the operating system's registered application; ie, if you navigate to a .pdf file and hit 'l', Acrobat (or whatever) will launch and show you the file. Now I never have to use the accursed Finder. Works on Mac OS X and Ubuntu; might need modifcations for other systems.

;;; Hack dired to launch files with 'l' key.  Put this in your ~/.emacs file

(defun dired-launch-command ()
  (interactive)
  (dired-do-shell-command 
   (case system-type       
     (gnu/linux "gnome-open") ;right for gnome (ubuntu), not for other systems
     (darwin "open"))
   nil
   (dired-get-marked-files t current-prefix-arg)))

(setq dired-load-hook
      (lambda (&rest ignore)
 (define-key dired-mode-map
   "l" 'dired-launch-command)))