Archive for the 'osx' Category

A Day with TextMate

Saturday, January 27th, 2007

A few months ago, I tried TextMate just to see what all the fuss was about. I was skeptical with it, and a bit confused — it came from a totally different mindset than Emacs and one that I didn’t necessarily get. I quickly removed it and enjoyed life with Aquamacs. Fast forward to [...]

Smart Playlist hacking in iTunes

Monday, January 15th, 2007

I really enjoy having my iPod on while I work. I have ecliptic music tastes (my wife says “random” but whatever). I actually don’t mind having songs go from Chris Rice to The Faint and then to Tom T. Hall. No, really, that’s just fine with me.

The problem was getting the right [...]

GeoToad

Monday, January 8th, 2007

I discovered GeoToad this weekend.  I haven’t messed with too much, but I already like it.

It’s written in Ruby, so it will run everywhere natively (i.e without Cygwin or a Unix environment).  I’ve been having problems with the geo-* tools that I have raved about before.  They assume that you are using GNU tools and [...]

Sparky Power Supply

Wednesday, December 27th, 2006

At my parent’s house over the holiday weekend, I was getting ready to show my mom some of the joys and wonders of OSX. When I went to move my MacBook Pro, I noted that the plastic around the magnetic cord was beginning to melt and I saw sparks fly out of that little [...]

My Favorite OSX Apps of 2006

Wednesday, December 13th, 2006

I know a couple of people that are getting new Macs in the next couple of months and said they would appreciate a list of my favorite tools. Instead of given that to them in email, I thought the masses would enjoy my favorite apps and tools of the moments. You know who [...]

Getting Acquainted with Quicksilver

Sunday, December 3rd, 2006

This is the first entry in a periodic series about Quicksilver, an application launcher/Swiss Army knife for Mac OSX.

“That’s vague,” you’re saying.  ”What is it really?”

Well, that’s hard to describe.  That’s what I think this periodic series will help to identify.

I’ve been a Quicksilver user for a long time, but have only recently been trying [...]

Not Disco, but Cyberduck

Friday, December 1st, 2006

Confession time — I’ve never really liked GUI ftp programs. I don’t find ftp commands too cryptic (anymore) but have always thought that GUI ftp programs were too complex. Wanna get a directory? “mget *”. Simple and easy. I did use FileZilla briefly, but it really screwed up some files [...]

Installing PHP5 on OSX: Many Paths, One True Road

Sunday, November 19th, 2006

A week or so ago, I needed to play with some PHP apps on my MacBook Pro. The hosting provider that this may go up on uses PHP5 but OSX comes standard with PHP4. So I decided to install it myself. I thought that this would be an easy task and I was quite wrong.

The [...]

Yep — it’s a good document keeper

Sunday, October 29th, 2006

I first heard of Kip from FreeMacWare.com and then ran into it again on a blog cast. Both places described it as ”iPhoto for PDF’s, only easier”.  When I went to Kip’s webpage this weekend and noted that it has been renamed Yep.  That’s okay — it’s still a great system.

It’s easy — tell Yep to import in your PDF file and then you can tag it to your heart’s content. But what it’s a paper your signing?   Well, just scan it in.   Yep has direct support for a scanner, but I have my printer-scanner on a different PC.  I scanned them in and saved them as EPS and JPG files and Yep was able to import them in and save them to a PDF (not as magic as you think, since Preview does it, so this is built into the OS).

Okay, so you have [...]

Macintosh: Opera and Flash; Wal-Mart and Mac Classic

Sunday, October 22nd, 2006

Two unrelated Mac OSX notes:

Opera and Flash

As I’ve said before, Opera is my new browser of choice.  But I’ve been having problem running Flash in it (no Flash == no YouTube).  At first, I thought it was Adobe’s fault — their Flash 8 player was PowerPC only and I read somewhere that running a Rosetta-powered [...]