Latest In Tech

Backwoods Home Magazine

admin — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 18:14:41 +0000

Backwoods Home Magazine is dedicated to the promotion of a more self-reliant living style. Everything from the ammo shortage to how to buy a used mobile home.

Full Screen Terminal Keyboard Command on a Mac

admin — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 19:53:55 +0000

Purists wouldn’t call this full-screen but it’s close enough.

In System Preferences->Keyboard & Mouse->Keyboard Shortcuts
Use the plus sign (+) to create a new shortcut. Use the drop down, labeled Application, to assign our new shortcut to the Terminal.
Menu Title will be “Zoom” no quotes.
Use any keyboard shortcut you’d like, I prefer command+f.
Restart the terminal.

Another keyboard shortcut I use with the Terminal is Select Previous Tab command + left arrow, and Select Next Tab command + right arrow.

Install rar and unrar on a Mac OX 10.5+

admin — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 02:55:09 +0000

A great tutorial can be found here.

Perl grabbing output from a shell command

admin — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 22:00:19 +0000

$result = `ls -l $file 2>&1`;

Synergy (running in the background on a Mac 10.5+)

admin — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 21:51:35 +0000

Synergy is an application that allows you to share one keyboard and mouse between several different computers (Windows, Linux, and OS X). Unfortunately, running synergy in the background on a mac doesn’t work so well. Here’s one of the work-arounds I’ve found on the Internet.

This involves running the app through launchctl a replacement for rc.d/ scripts in linux.

Succesfully get synergy running (server and client) in the foreground
Download the appropriate file and change .txt to .plist . On the server use the file synergys.txt, on the client use the file synergyc.txt
In synergys.plist and synergyc.plist you’ll need to point to the correct location of your installed synergy program and .conf file.
In synergyc.plist you’ll need to change “server-host-name” to the correct server host name
Move this file to ~/Library/LaunchAgents/
run the following two commands (change synergyc.plist to synergys.plist for the server)
launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/synergyc.plist launchctl start com.synergyc

Synergy server plist

Re-configuring CPAN

admin — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 16:42:56 +0000

sudo perl -MCPAN -e shell
o conf init

Move Podcast track from Podcast to Music in iTunes

admin — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 21:33:54 +0000

Once in a while there’s a song in the Stereo gum mp3 feed that I actually want to keep. Here’s how I do it.

Select the podcasts you wish to convert to normal audio files.
Right click and select “Convert ID3 tags”.
Change the ID3 tags to version 1.0
Drag the podcast tracks out to your Desktop
Delete the originals from iTunes
Drag the files back in to iTunes
Change the ID3 tags back to the highest version available.
Fix any missing tags.

Works like a charm for me.

Xargs choking on whitespace

admin — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 16:59:53 +0000

Every once in a while the normal recursive bash command doesn’t work and I resort to using find with xargs. Of course xargs hates whitespace and I often find myself working with files created by others. xargs chokes on whitespace thinking it’s an indication of a new file. The solution is to get find to send null separated values instead of newline separated values, and get xargs to check for null characters instead of newlines. Both can be accomplished, find’s -print0 sends null values, xarg’s -0 will accept null values.

Here’s an example:
find ./website/ ! -perm -775 -print0 | xargs -0 chown production:wheel

via linuxdevcenter

Enable Emoji icons on the iPhone

admin — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 22:36:54 +0000

So far this has started to work on the latest (2.2) firmware for the iPhone.

You need to edit the file /User/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Preferences.plist on the device ->

I found it best to sftp in to the phone, make a backup, and edit the file using Apple’s Property List Editor. Copy the file back to /User/Library/Preferences/ . On the iPhone go to Settings -> General -> Keyboard -> International Keyboards -> Japanese and enable Emoji. That’s it.

Via High Caffeine Content

Catching System output from Perl

admin — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 22:00:09 +0000

I’m too lazy to install a perl module, on a local computer, for a quick whois on a few domains. Catching the shell’s output is more convenient in this case.

Instead of first writing and then reading from a file, it makes more sense to use a pipe. Here’s a quick example:

#!/usr/bin/perl open (WHOIS, "/usr/bin/whois ewayauto.com |"); $i=1; while (){ print "Line # ".$i." ".$_; $i++; } print "All done!\n"; close WHOIS;

Thanks to netadmintools for this one.