I’d long been a user of BareBones’ BBEdit, a product that’s served me well for a number of years. But upgrading from version 8.5 to 9 is a paid deal, and after spending 15 days with the demo of BBEdit 9, I decided I wanted to look around a little bit. My friend Matt switched [...]
January 13, 2009
Looking Back At Mac Hardware Performance
I recently replaced the Mac Mini I use to host my web development with a PowerMac G4. (Story: the Mini was mine, a personal purchase I made to support my work on Scriblio and other WordPress-related projects, but recent changes in our network and firewall policy made the machine inaccessible from off-campus without using the [...]
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 [...]
August 5, 2008
Macintosh Antivirus Software
June 17, 2008
Dear Steve
I’m really glad to see the news about the iPhone 3g. I’m interested in how the new mobile me service takes a small step toward cloud-based storage services that I’ve wanted for a while. And the news that Max OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” will focus on speed and stability, rather than features is good, [...]
January 29, 2008
Forget Time Capsule, I want a Space Ship
Apple’s Time Capsule is great. Seriously. When has backup been easier? But I need more. The MacBook Air‘s small storage highlights a problem I’ve been suffering for some time: there’s never enough storage. The slower processor and limited RAM expansion are sufferable, but storage isn’t. The 120GB drive in my MacBook Pro now is stuffed [...]
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 [...]
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 21, 2007
My Personal Crisis of Digital Preservation
January 10, 2007
Apache 2.2.x on Mac OS X
September 7, 2006
NewerTech FireWire 2 Go PCMCIA/CardBus Card Target Disk Mode?
All my searching seems to confirm my hazy memory that my olf NewerTech FireWire 2 Go card does indeed support target disk mode, but the old “hold T while booting” trick doesn’t seem to be working. Another shady part of my memory is that the key command was different, but what is it? Either Google [...]
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 [...]
December 8, 2005
Recently Commented