Handy calculator for the command-line. Hey, it’s already on the mac.
Some useful OS X hacks
Saturday, February 9, 2008
Lighten OS X’s Load with:
Turn off widgets:
In a terminal type:
defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES
killall Dock
You can turn widgets back on with:
defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean NO
killall Dock
Make hidden apps ( in 10.5) look transparent:
defaults write com.apple.Dock showhidden -bool YES
killall Dock
Bookmarklets
Saturday, January 26, 2008
If you’re like me anything that makes your life easier is worth spending a few minutes accomplishing. Bookmarklets, typically, are single line javascript applications. According to this wikipedia article, “Steve Kangas of www.bookmarklets.com coined the term “bookmarklet,” which he started to create based on an idea suggested in the Netscape JavaScript Guide.” With the help of John Gruber’s bookmarklet building perl script you have to know even less about javascript. In about an hour I whipped up a little bookmarklet that takes me ecarlist.com’s various client web sites. That same bookmarklet code can be embedded in a link as well. Here’s an example: ecarlist (Hint: enter the number 199). Of course this is a stripped down version, the real one has a few extra lines worth of error correction. Here’s another example further highlighting the usefulness and cross-platform availability of bookmarklets; Drew McLellan wrote a bookmarklet that replaces the iPhone/ iPod-Touch WebClip Bookmarks with one’s of your own choosing.
Embed Tags for Quicktime
Monday, January 14, 2008
I’m working on a personal project for the iPhone. Specifically, I’d like to make an ajaxed index of all my music organized by artist. It’s a spare time project, and I don’t have much of that right now, but it’s coming along well. I started out by making an HTML index of a directory of directories with perl (you can find that here).
Since I don’t really know any javascript I’m relying on iUI to handle most of that for me.
Now I’m looking for a way to embed an mp3 on a page, but I can’t find anything iPhone or mp3 specific and searching Google brings up broken links. This is really more of a bookmark for me, but I plan on trying Apple’s generic instructions for movies with an mp3. You can find the embed tags for quicktime here. Alternatively, Apple’s devcenter does have iPhone specific material, but nothing mp3 specific (login required).
Create Custom Search-Engines On the Fly
Monday, January 7, 2008
Google just keeps getting better, and easier, to use. You’ve been able to customize your Google searches for a while. Now, Google has made it copy and paste simple with its onthefly link.
Read more at Google Operating System
Internet Connection Sharing with OS X
Friday, December 21, 2007
With OSX this is brain-dead simple. To share an Internet connection through the AirPort, go to System Preferences and click on the Sharing item. Highlight “Internet Sharing” from the list on the left (but leave it unchecked). Next, select the connection you wish to share, from the drop down list and how you would like to share.
Full Filenames in the Finder
Sunday, December 16, 2007
By running the two commands below, in a terminal, it’s possible to get OS X’s Finder to display the current full path as the window’s title.
$ defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES
$ killall Finder
It’s not possible to edit or “grab” the path. Power users might like the Finder’s “Path Bar” more. You can enable the Path Bar through “View -> Show Path Bar”
Build wget for the Mac
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Looks like Apple has neglected to include the command line tool wget for a while now. I was able to find a precompiled binary for 10.4, but 10.5 is so recent that it looks like wget hasn’t make it’s way on to the tubes. If you’re looking for wget why not build it yourself? The install is pretty straight forward with no modifications or file editing required. Directions are as follows:
- Install Apple’s Dev Tools.
- Download wget’s source.
- Unpack the download: tar xzvf wget-1.12.tar.gz
- Open a terminal and “cd” in to the unpacked wget directory
- Configure the build with
./configure - Start the build process with
make - Finish the install with
sudo make install
You should be able to find wget in /usr/local/bin . I’ve confirmed that this works with 10.5.1 Leopard on PowerPC and Intel processors.
You can download my pre-compiled binary Intel Binary and
Power PC binary
Stream MythTV to the iPhone/iPod Touch
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
If you’ve set mythTV up then following this wiki entry isn’t going to be a problem.
iPhone Streaming with .htaccess
Sunday, October 14, 2007
It appears that Safari on the iPhone does not like .htaccess. Your likely to receive an error message when you play anything password protected. The work around goes something like http://username:password@host.com/foo.mp3
Good luck with that. I’m thinking about writing a little javascript to work around this. I’ll update this post if I ever get to it.