Archive for November, 2007
« Previous EntriesFFOSS (Freeware/Free & Open Source Software) Friday
Friday, November 30th, 2007Caring.com
Sat, 24 Nov 2007 23:19:17
This one falls a bit out of my usual categories list (freeware, Open Source, free downloadable content, or interactive web service). However, I’ve been thinking and speaking a lot about Enterprise Knowledge Capture as it relates to an aging workforce in my day job. And, like many other people I have parents that are aging (doing well so far!). And, of course, me and my fellow Baby Boomers are aging too. So, I figured some fellow baby boomers might find this site interesting/useful…
Sandy Your Personal Email Assistant
Wed, 21 Nov 2007 22:45:26
Sandy Your Personal Email Assistant comes from values of n. This is the group led by former O’Reilly CTO Rael Dornfest. They previously launched stikkit which used a similar natural language interpreter to schedule events.
Internet Archive: Moving Image Archive
Tue, 20 Nov 2007 20:43:32
The long holiday season the U.S. starts with Thanksgiving weekend (and the Black Friday store sales). Here’s something to let you you legally load up videos for your travels whether short or long…
Internet Archive: Moving Image Archive
…contains thousands of free movies, films, and videos.
Mapdaze: Maps for Facebook Photos
Sun, 18 Nov 2007 22:07:46
Hmm, should I create a separate category for Facebook applications? In any case, here’s an interesting looking Facebook application: Mapdaze Photo Map. It is a mashup that lets you use Google Maps to display the locations of photos in your Facebook account. You need a Facebook account to read more about this and use it.
10.5: Install a Processor System Preferences panel
Friday, November 30th, 2007
Hidden in the Developer Tools package, there is a System Preferences panel that serves the same purpose as this hint about the CPU Palette.
After installing Xcode, navigate to /Developer » Extras » PreferencePanes, and then double-click on Processor.prefPane to install it. The Processor panel will add itself in the Hardware (not Other) section within System Preferences.
Using this panel, you can do everything you can do with the CPU Palette, minus the graphs but plus some L2 Cache and frontside bus info. The best part, however, is the fact that you can use the panel to add a menu bar item that replaces CPU Palette. From the menu bar icon, you’ll have access to the preference pane, the option to use two or one cores, and the CPU Palette itself.
Create new tabs from dragged text in Safari 3
Friday, November 30th, 2007When using Safari 3 in 10.4 or 10.5, you can select a URL from a source (Safari, TextEdit, another browser, whatever), and drag it to an empty space in Safari’s tab bar. When you drop the URL, Safari will then open another tab with this URL.
[robg adds: If you drop the text in Safari’s main window, instead of the tab bar, the URL will open in the current tab.]
10.5: See Title and Chapter sub-menus in DVD Player
Friday, November 30th, 2007One thing missing from 10.5’s DVD Player is the Navigator window, which allowed you to see the Title and Chapter info (with pop-up menus for both with direct navigation, if the disc allowed it).
This is nowhere to be found in the new DVD Player, unless you control-click on the Viewer window — then you have access to Title and Chapter sub-menus. It’s not quite as convenient as the old Navigator window, but at least you can find out where you are in a DVD (mostly useful for ripping a portion of a DVD in another program).
Use custom iPhone ring tones with the 1.1.2 firmware
Friday, November 30th, 2007According to some posts on tuaw.com (here and here), it’s now (once again) easy to add your own 30 to 40 second (maximum) ringtones to the iPhone.
Just trim down a song or sound (using iTunes, GarageBand, Audacity, etc.), save an AAC-encoded version, change the .m4a suffix to .m4r, and drag the file into the Ringtones folder of the iTunes library (you may have to delete the original .m4a file from the library if it’s already in iTunes).
Y
ou can add songs longer than 40 or so seconds to the iTunes ringtone section of the library, but they won’t sync to the iPhone or show up in ringtones tab of the iPhone sync page in iTunes.
Use custom iPhone ring tones with the 1.1.2 firmware
Friday, November 30th, 2007According to some posts on tuaw.com (here and here), it’s now (once again) easy to add your own 30 to 40 second (maximum) ringtones to the iPhone.
Just trim down a song or sound (using iTunes, GarageBand, Audacity, etc.), save an AAC-encoded version, change the .m4a suffix to .m4r, and drag the file into the Ringtones folder of the iTunes library (you may have to delete the original .m4a file from the library if it’s already in iTunes).
Y
ou can add songs longer than 40 or so seconds to the iTunes ringtone section of the library, but they won’t sync to the iPhone or show up in ringtones tab of the iPhone sync page in iTunes.
10.5: Get a free upgrade to 802.11n in 10.5
Friday, November 30th, 2007This is not quite a hint, hack, or anything, but it’s still of interest for those who like me were interested in upgrading their 802.11n-capable iMacs to the rank of 802.11n-enabled iMacs.
Well, I happened to decide only now that I would do that update after many months of resistence. (I didn’t have the need for it as my router doesn’t support 802.11n, but I am actually thinking of changing my router to a better one, so why not get an “n” one?). To my surprise, the Enabler wouldn’t install or work on my iMac, even though it is 802.11n capable. So I looked into some Tech Support Docs, namely this one which describes how to tell if your machine is n-enabled or not.
To my surprise, I found…
10.5: Get a free upgrade to 802.11n in 10.5
Friday, November 30th, 2007This is not quite a hint, hack, or anything, but it’s still of interest for those who like me were interested in upgrading their 802.11n-capable iMacs to the rank of 802.11n-enabled iMacs.
Well, I happened to decide only now that I would do that update after many months of resistence. (I didn’t have the need for it as my router doesn’t support 802.11n, but I am actually thinking of changing my router to a better one, so why not get an “n” one?). To my surprise, the Enabler wouldn’t install or work on my iMac, even though it is 802.11n capable. So I looked into some Tech Support Docs, namely this one which describes how to tell if your machine is n-enabled or not.
To my surprise, I found…
10.5: Automount Bonjour-published NFS shares in Finder
Friday, November 30th, 2007Mac OS X Leopard does not discover and automatically mount NFS shares publsihed via Bonjour/ZeroConf as Tiger did. (If you own a Linux based server, you can publish all kinds of Bonjour servers via a daemon called avahi). 10.5 only discovers AFP and SMB Bonjour published shares as far as I am aware.
To work around this temporary bug/missing feature, I wrote a simple Ruby-based daemon which you can install so it starts up every time Leopard boots. This daemon simply continuously browses for and resolves published NFS shares and will mount them automatically if they are not already mounted for your user account. Let’s hope Apple will fix this soon so we do not need anymore workarounds like this.
[robg adds: I have mirrored the source [4KB download] here o…
10.5: Find the previous version of a file in Time Machine
Friday, November 30th, 2007Time Machine can help you easily find the place in your backups when a file was changed. Start Time Machine and select a file in the Finder whose previous version you’d like to locate. If you put the Finder in List view, then you can see the preview for the file, including modified date (and version for an application).
Click on the big “back in time” arrow once to search through the list of backups. Time Machine will automatically stop at the point where the file was last changed. If you click the back arrow again, it will stop at the next previous change point. Likewise, the forward arrow scans towards the present for changes.
As an example, I applied the 10.5.1 update today. I started Time Machine and went into my Application folder and selected the Mail program. It showed version 3.1. I clicked on the back arrow, and I was taken immediately to the point where the pr…
10.5: Close Time Machine via the Close button
Friday, November 30th, 2007When you are in Time Machine, you can press the red close button at the top left of the window being viewed to close Time Machine. When you do so, the window itself will not close, just Time Machine.
This is also useful if you have a slower computer and you want to cancel Time Machine while it is animating to the Space visual. You can press the close button on the window in question at any time during the animation, and it will revert back to it’s pre-Time Machine position. You don’t have to worry about the window closing.
10.5: Reduce the physical dimensions of Web Clips
Friday, November 30th, 2007If you try to make a Web Clip widget of a small item on a web page in Safari, you may be dismayed to find that Safari limits you to about 128×128 pixels. As an example, I tried making a widget of just the text on the side bar of macosxhints.com that says, “nn new Hints in the past 1 day(s),” but I found that the smallest size I could make it was quite large compared to most widgets, and had a lot of grey space.
The solution is simple, if not obvious. After creating the widget, just click on the “i” on the widget and then click on Edit. You can then resize and reframe the widget so that you only see what you want to see.
How the iPhone changed my mobile habits
Friday, November 30th, 2007Moving from a Windows Mobile smart phone to the iPhone has definitely affected how I deal with email, web browsing, and even taking photos on the go.
<!–
–>
All is not well in AT&T-Apple land
Friday, November 30th, 2007Yesterday, the whole tech media was abuzz over AT&T’s CEO, Randall Stephenson’s comments about Apple releasing a 3G iPhone in ‘08. They missed the real story, though. Everyone in the world knows that Apple is releasing the 3G iPhone in ‘08. Steve Jobs has said so many times. No story there.
<!–
–>
mDNSrResponder in iPhone suggests Bonjour synching?
Thursday, November 29th, 2007Having a look around the iPhone filesystem with James O’Brien’s new AFP hack called AFPd, I noticed a lot of references to mDNS. mDNS also goes by the name of Zeroconf or Bonjour (formerly Rendezvous) in Apple products. It is primarily used to connect computers in a network without much configuration.
<!–
–>
10.5: Add multiple spacers to the Dock
Thursday, November 29th, 2007If you’d like to break up the icons in your Dock into groups, you can insert invisible spacers, much like the blank spaces which you can put into toolbars:
To add a spacer to the applications (left) side of the Dock, run the following in the terminal:
To see your changes, restart the dock with killall Dock. To add a spacer to the documents (right) side of the Dock, run the following:
…
10.5: View iChat time stamp for any message in a chat
Thursday, November 29th, 2007It always bothered me that iChat would only periodically add time stamps to the conversation. Well now in iChat 4.0, if you hover over any message in a chat, it displays the time stamp, down to the second.
Save Safari-loaded password-protected PDFs
Thursday, November 29th, 2007When viewing a password-protected PDF from within Safari, or by selecting Open in Preview from Safari’s Contextual Menu, the option to save the PDF doesn’t exist, nor does the Print to PDF option exist within the Print Dialog box.
However, if you copy the PDF’s URL, open the Downloads window (Command-Option-L within Safari) and then paste the URL, the PDF will start to download (i.e. be saved).
[robg adds: A comment on the queue site notes no copy is required; just drag the icon next to the URL into the Downloads window. Note that this hint doesn’t defeat the password protection; it merely allows you to download the document.]
A form of ‘Advanced search’ for Mail.app
Thursday, November 29th, 2007I often find that I need more than Mail’s basic search. For example when I want to find an email from "Fred" with "Foo" in the title that has an attachment, etc. My usual method has been to create a Smart Mailbox, find the email I was looking for, then delete the Smart Mailbox.
It just occurred to me to keep the Smart Mailbox and name it "Advanced search…" Now I have an an advanced search in my Mail sidebar. To edit just double-click the mailbox icon and enter new criteria. As a bonus, my last search is always saved.
A form of ‘Advanced search’ for Mail.app
Thursday, November 29th, 2007I often find that I need more than Mail’s basic search. For example when I want to find an email from "Fred" with "Foo" in the title that has an attachment, etc. My usual method has been to create a Smart Mailbox, find the email I was looking for, then delete the Smart Mailbox.
It just occurred to me to keep the Smart Mailbox and name it "Advanced search…" Now I have an an advanced search in my Mail sidebar. To edit just double-click the mailbox icon and enter new criteria. As a bonus, my last search is always saved.