February 24, 2011

Saving Backup Space With Time Machine and iPhoto

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Three things that, when mixed, can consume a surprising amount of disk space: Backup automatically with Time Machine Use iPhoto and take a lot of photos Sync photos to one or more iOS devices like iPhones and iPads I do all three, and on top of that I have three current computers backing up to [...]

November 1, 2010

Better XML/JSON Display In Safari

I’m one of the few people who loves Safari, but I was happy to admit that it didn’t display XML or JSON very well. Marc Liyanage’s XML View Plugin fixes that.

January 19, 2010

I think it’s worth it!

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November 30, 2009

Put An SSD In Your ExpressCard Slot?

I spied the Wintec FileMate 48GB Ultra ExpressCard and began to wonder how it works as a boot drive for Mac OS X in a late 2008 MacBook Pro (the model just before Apple replaced the ExpressCard slot with an SD slot). But I didn’t have to wonder too much, as a post to this [...]

January 11, 2009

Play FLV in QuickTime Player Using Perian

Perian: “The swiss-army knife of QuickTime components” File formats: AVI, DIVX, FLV, MKV, GVI, VP6, and VFW Video types: MS-MPEG4 v1 & v2, DivX, 3ivx, H.264, Sorenson H.263, FLV/Sorenson Spark, FSV1, VP6, H263i, VP3, HuffYUV, FFVHuff, MPEG1 & MPEG2 Video, Fraps, Snow, NuppelVideo, Techsmith Screen Capture, DosBox Capture The LGPL-licensed QuickTime plugin installs easily on Mac [...]

October 1, 2008

Solaris’ CacheFS Could Be The Space Ship I’ve Been Looking For

Joerg Moellenkamp‘s post explaining CacheFS has me excited: Long ago, admins didn’t want to manage dozens of operating system installations. Instead of this they wanted to store all this data on a central fileserver (you know, the network is the computer). Thus netbooting Solaris and SunOS was invented. But there was a problem: All the [...]

August 5, 2008

Macintosh Antivirus Software

Setting aside questions about the usefulness of antivirus software for Macs, it appears VirusBarrier (commercial) and ClamXav (open source) are the best options. There are others, of course. Added: Avast offers a free version for MacOS X as well.

January 24, 2008

Apache, MySQL, and PHP on MacOS X

p0ps Harlow tweeted something about trying to get an AMP environment running on his Mac. Conversation followed, and eventually I sent along an email that look sorta like this: If you’re running 10.4 (I doubt it, but it’s worth mentioning because I’m most familiar with it), here’s how I’ve setup dozens of machines for web [...]

November 24, 2007

Tabbed Chatting In iChat

Among the missing features I hear the most complaints about regarding iChat is the lack of tabbed chatting. Today I discovered it’s part of Leopard. Simply go to the iChat prefs, click on the messages pane, and selected “Collect chats into a single window” and you’re set.

October 17, 2007

Screencasting On Mac

I’m as annoyed as the next guy about how hard it is to find a decent screencast app for Mac. The forthcoming Mac OS 10.5′s new iChat Theater (and the built-in screen sharing/control features) should create some new opportunities for developers, but right now it’s hard to know what works or is worth trying. Further, [...]

August 16, 2007

Mac + Cell Phone + Bluetooth + SMS

Old instructions that connect the Mac OS X Address Book app to a phone via Bluetooth from O’Reilly and SillyDog. Once paired, the Address Book can initiate dialing, notify the user of incoming calls, and send SMS texts. Bluetooth Texter SMS Widget, message2net, and BluePhoneElite all offer further tools to interact with your Bluetooth-connected mobile [...]

May 8, 2007

Leopard Beta To Be Released At WWDC

Those of us hoping for an early release of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard might be disappointed to learn that Apple will just be getting around to giving out a “feature complete” beta at WWDC in mid-June. If you really must have it, conference badges are $1,295. The Leopard beta. Available first at WWDC. At [...]

April 26, 2007

How To: Zip Files on Mac OS X

It couldn’t be much easier. I’d previously posted command line instructions, but it turns out that there’s a huge number of people who don’t know the easy way: just CTRL-click on the file and select “Create Archive…” You’ll also find the option in the File menu. Either way, you’ll end up with both the original [...]

March 5, 2007

Waiting For Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard

With rumors of a March release of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, swirling, Zach asked what was promised that he should be excited about, so I went looking to jog my memory. The announced features include Time Machine automatic backup of all your stuff (with integration to make finding and restoring stuff in applications easy [...]

January 10, 2007

Apache 2.2.x on Mac OS X

I’m lazy, that’s all I can say to explain why I hadn’t put any serious thought into upgrading from the 1.3.x version of Apache that ships with Mac OS X to the much more feature rich 2.0.x or 2.2.x. But today I found reason enough to switch my development to 2.2.3, and I went looking [...]

September 6, 2006

Mac OS X VNC, Built-In

  Sure it’s old news, but I am pretty happy that Mac OS X 10.4 has a built-in VNC server. You’ll still need a client, like Chicken of the VNC, but it couldn’t be much simpler to make work. Though, you could run a separate server app (even several instances of it) and work up [...]