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?”
via
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’
I’d looked at Handbrake a while back but the GUI was far too confusing for a simpleton like me. It seems like it’s been cleaned up quite a bit now and looks rather useful! (The little video giving an overview of how to work things helps too!)
Handbrake is one of those applications that we adore here at TUAW HQ. It makes converting DVDs into a variety of digital files a snap (though only use it with DVDs you own. Don’t be pirates, kids). Chris Breen, of Macworld fame (and an amateur astronomer it would seem) shows us how to use HandBrake like a pro. Breen goes a step beyond ‘use the presets’ and delves into what many of the options HandBrake offers up actually do, and how they impact your files.
via
I’m a fan of the Tails plugin for Firefox… Now Safari (on Leopard) gets its own Microformats Plugin! 
Of course, in order to take advantage of Microformats and perhaps bring the information they offer onto your system, you need a browser that will read them - there’s Firefox plugins, and NetNewsWire 3.0’s built-in browser reads them. But what about Safari? Thanks to SIMBL, there’s a small array of Safari plugins available and from the maker of Safari Tidy comes Safari Microformats. Whenever visiting a site with Microformats, an icon appears in the right of the address bar (not unlike the RSS icon). Clicking it brings up a menu of available hCards and hCalendars you can add to Address Book and iCal.
via
At the moment I’m a very happy user of Google calendar and Spanning Sync for all my scheduling needs. But the geek in me fancies playing about with things so I’m thinking about setting up a CalDav server (when time permits) so Cat and I can organise our lives accordingly.
Here’s some pages I’ve been reading whilst doing my research.
Will possibly post more as and when I get a chance to play about with things…
This is yet another example of why I want to upgrade to Leopard…
Quick Look is a beautiful thing, and in my view practically itself worth the cost of admission to Leopard. Unfortunately, the more you get used to it, the more annoying it is when you get to a file format that Quick Look doesn’t support. Fortunately, Apple was smart enough to design Quick Look with an open architecture that allows developers to write their own plugins and support more file formats, which Japanese developer Taiyo used to write two excellent plugins.
The first addresses a serious annoyance with the default Quick Look implementation on folders. If you invoke Quick Look with a folder selected in the Finder you’ll get…a picture of the folder icon. Frankly, that’s pretty stupid. Taiyo’s Folder Quick Look Plugin fixes this by displaying the folder’s contents, which is how it should have been done in the first place. Likewise, Taiyo’s Zip Quick Look Plugin displays the contents of zip files.
via
IconGrabber is a useful little application for getting an OS X applications icon for use on the web. It’s also available as a Quicksilver plugin.
It couldn’t be easier. Just drop the file or folder that you want the icon from onto IconGrabber, and choose a place to save it. The extension you choose determines the format, otherwise it defaults to tiff. That’s it!
via
I love Quicksilver, it’s one of those applications that makes working on the Mac really really great. Lifehacker has a quick rundown on 10 of the best plugins to help improve your Quicksilver experience:
Open source Mac utility Quicksilver isn’t just an application launcher—it’s a comprehensive keyboard interface. Launching applications and documents is just Quicksilver’s gateway drug: The more you get used to doing things with Quicksilver, the more things you want to do with it. Out of the box Quicksilver comes with the barest essentials, but once you add the right plug-ins that interact with menus, apps, documents, and settings, you can accomplish more and more complex tasks from that familiar three-paned prompt. After the jump, check out top 10 favorite Quicksilver plug-ins, and how to set them up.
read more
This is a great idea to improve the appearance (and usability) of stacks in Leopard.
Stacks is pretty much Leopard’s only non-eyecandy change to the dock, and it had the potential to be pretty handy, but the fact that the icon representing the stack is whatever the top file in the folder happens to be really ruins it (for me at least). However, if you haven’t yet given up on stacks and thrown them off your dock, there is a solution: overlaying stacks icons.
In essence, these are just small-ish semi-transparent icons that are permanently our top icon. This picture explain it best (before & after):
read more
