I don’t give many presentations these days, but this is a great tip:
If you give many presentations on the Mac, chances are you’re using Apple’s Keynote presentation software. One cool feature in Keynote is the ability to demo something on your Mac without giving away your next slide or notes. When you’re in the middle of a presentation, just hit the “h” key on your keyboard. This will hide the entire Keynote application and show your desktop.
When you press the h key, the Keynote icon in the dock will change and include a play button. When you want to resume your presentation, just click the Keynote icon in the dock.
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Check out the SitePoint CSS Reference - useful for anyone writing CSS.
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Finally, a common sense response to all of these MacBook Air bashing articles. I admit - I don’t want one, i’d rather have a ‘regular’ MacBook or a MacBook Pro, but there are people out there that would want something like this…
Direct from the Canadian Ministry of Silly Punditry we learn that the MacBook Air may increase risk of laptop loss (tip o’ the antlers to Colin Morton).
Indeed. The only way to ensure your laptop won’t get stolen is to buy big fat honkin’ ugly ones.
But, clearly, neither of those beats this gem from PC World’s Mike Barton:
MacBook Air Amiss: Time to License Mac OS X?
Good question! Like “I Have Stubbed My Toe And Find It Painful: Time to Commit Suicide?”
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I watched a presentation on this about 18 months ago at a conference and it looked pretty interesting - some good potential applications in the scientific field. Glad to see things are progressing.
“The W3C just gave SPARQL the stamp of approval. SPARQL is a query language for the Semantic Web, and differs from other query languages in that is usable across different data sources. There are already 14 implementations of the spec available. Most of them are free software. There are also billions of relations out there that are query-able, thanks to the Linking Open Data project. The structured data of Wikipedia is now query-able at DBpedia. Also, have a look at Ivan Herman’s presentations on this topic.”
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Found this in my feeds today - genius way of making very stylish headings without resorting to image replacement.
Do you want to create fancy headings without rendering each heading with Photoshop? Here is a simple CSS trick to show you how to create gradient text effect with a PNG image (pure CSS, no Javascript or Flash). All you need is an empty <span> tag in the heading and apply the background image overlay using the CSS position:absolute property. This trick has been tested on most browsers: Firefox, Safari, Opera, and even Internet Explorer 6. Continue to read this article to find out how.
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Although I do have to admit to liking MS Office (and indeed MS Office 2007 is good), I have to agree with this recommendation. There is pretty much nothing MS Office could do that OpenOffice could not do for you in a school setting - so why shell out all that money for Office licenses and force the kids parents to as well (or resort to dodgy copies) when free software is good enough. And as for Vista… Linux has my vote for schools every time.
Britain Advises Against Vista, Office 2007 for Schools: “An anonymous reader writes ‘The British government’s educational IT authority has issued a report advising schools in the country not to upgrade their classroom or office systems to Windows Vista or Office 2007. According to this InformationWeek story, the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency says costs for Vista and Office 2007 ‘are significant and the benefits remain unclear.’ Instead, Becta is advising British schools to take a long look at Linux and open source suites like OpenOffice.org.”
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This is great news - NetNewsWire, the best news reader on the Mac is now completely free! Not just the ‘Lite’ version anymore, but the full product! This is my default (and only) news reader on the Mac.
There’s a FAQ that explains a bunch of things—I’m not going to repeat it all here.
But I will say that, for me personally, this is a dream come true. Every developer wants to be able to work on the software they love, make a living at it, and give it to the world for free.
Usually you get to pick two out of three—if you’re lucky. Me, I get all three.
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SSH is a great tool for remotely accessing another machine, but entering your password every time you log into a remote box can be a pain if you would like to set-up some background scripts to connect to a server and do something (i.e. a backup script running as a cron job). Here’s how I set-up my Mac to be able to log into my server without the need for a password to be entered each time - the instructions should be good for any variant of Unix/Linux, but you need to take into account path names etc. on your machine.
Continue reading ‘SSH Shared-Key Setup - SSH Logins Without Passwords’
I’m a bit of a command-line freak and like to spend a fair amount of time with the terminal open… As such I like to spend a small amount of time getting the terminal set-up nicely. Other than changing the default colour scheme and font, one (slightly) more drastic change is to replace the standard implementation of ls for one that is slightly more configurable.
The default ls on OS X comes from BSD and compared to the GNU/Linux alternative is slightly lacking when it comes to comes to changing how things look - so what I like to do is replace it with the GNU ls available in MacPorts - this allows me to get a terminal setup like below:
Continue reading ‘A Better Ls for Mac OS X’
