The Yonderist

All those who wander are not lost.

Tag: mac

Mac OS X Services Come of Age

2009-08-29

work

Snow Leopard has only been out for a day or two, but I already feel somewhat “behind the times” among the technorati who appear to have placed advanced orders through Apple and Amazon so that they could get their hands on 10.6 the very second it came out. I’d probably join them, but I have too much to do at present: two essays are due now as well as an NEH grant.

Nevertheless, some of my Mac geekness cannot help but surface when I hear that services are finally getting their due:

Mac OS X Services Come of Age

The image is copied from the coverage by [Mac OS X Automation’s coverage][1] which is linked above. Check out their article for complete coverage of the fact that services now appear both in the Services Menu (1) and in a variety of contextual menus (2-4).

For the more curious, and ambitious, Mac OS X Automation also has a terrific list of free services you can download and install.

Speeding Up or Getting Around iDisk’s Sloth

2009-07-15

work

Now that we are a two iPhone household, it is time to upgrade Yung to a full-fledged MobileMe account so that she can keep her contacts, calendars, etc. all in sync. And, hey, whaddaya know, there’s also this way to keep your files in sync, if, of course, it doesn’t fail every time you use it. (To be honest, it appears to be working okay for Yung, who has smaller, and usually fewer, files than I do — can I help it if I’m the media member of our household?) To be fair, I was added 1.4GB to my local iDisk and told it to sync overnight, which I figured it would take given our narrow “pipe” on our low-budget AT&T DSL connection. (Come on, LUS, bring us our FttH connection soon.)

Here’s what greeted me this morning:

Last Sync Failed

Last sync failed

Here’s Apple’s advice:

5. Disable iDisk Sync (click the Stop button in the iDisk pane of MobileMe preferences, in System Preferences), restart your computer, and connect directly to your iDisk. (From the Go menu, choose iDisk, then My iDisk.) If you are able to connect to your iDisk, turn iDisk Sync on again.

6. If the issue persists, reset iDisk syncing on your computer:

Turn off iDisk Sync (click the Stop button in the iDisk pane of MobileMe preferences, in System Preferences).
Restart your computer.
From the Go menu, choose Home.
Open the Library folder.
For Mac OS X 10.5: Remove the FileSync folder
Restart your computer.
Re-enable iDisk Sync.

But I am also searching out workarounds — without going to a workaround that works entirely around iDisk, like DropBox. We’ve paid good money for iDisk; it should work. It should work out of the box, but barring that, it should work with some elbow grease applied to it.

One possibility is to use an alternate WebDAV client than the one built into the Finder, e.g. CyberDuck, which I already own (or donated to):

Server: idisk.mac.com
User Name: <your dot-mac account name>
Password:<your dot-mac password>
Initial Path: (unnecessary)
Port: 80 (default for protocol)
Protocol: WebDAV

It looks like another alternative is to connect directly to the iDisk using ChronoSync.

Pragmatic Programmers now have “Pragmatic Life”

2009-05-01

work

I own several of the Pragmatic Programmers books: TextMate, How to Program, and Version Control with Git among them. I like that I can purchase paired print and PDF copies of the books and that the PDF copies are always getting refreshed. I also like that I can keep e-versions of the books not only on my Macs but also on my iPhone. Well, the prag progs now have a new series, The Pragmatic Life. The blog for the series is here.

No Hidden .Spotlight Folder, Please

2009-04-30

work

To get rid of the hidden .spotlight folder on removable volumes like flash drives, cd to the volume and then:

touch .metadata_never_index

This tip compliments of Cro Magnon on the Ars technica Mac forum, and Mac OS X Hints, from whence it came.

A Personal Public Web Server?

2009-03-15

work

Sometimes when doing development work, or for some other particular workflows, I like to be able to set up web pages/sites/whatever in the Sitesfolder on my Mac. Accessing that material becomes as easy as typing http://localhost/whatever/ into my browser. Making material in the ~/Sites viewable is as easy as navigating to System Preferences and turning on Web Sharing, which starts up apached. But what if you don’t want everyone to share your web? Here’s the file I created in /etc/apache2/users as userhome.conf:

<Directory "/Users/userhome/Sites/">
Options Indexes MultiViews
AllowOverride None
# Order allow,deny
# Allow from all
Allow from 10.0.1.195
</Directory>

Obviously userhome is the short name that you use that is also the name of your home directory — often called $HOME by better geeks than me, but I was afraid if I typed that above, someone would actually use it.

A tip of the cap to Apple for making it so easy to do by following this knowledge base article.

AppleScript Resources

2009-02-16

work

I spent part of my time with the flu trying to figure out how to convert a collection of old Word documents into Markdown-fomatted plain text files. I determined that textutil is close to useless in this regard because it does not maintain headings, instead preferring to collapse headings into a styled paragraph. To get to HTML, then, I will need to use Word itself, which means AppleScript or Automator. I need to first open a document, then save it as HTML.

Microsoft’s Site for Mac Developers is here.

UPDATE: It looks like Microsoft does have an Automator Workflow that does what I want, but the bundle of workflows does not come with the Student and Teacher Edition. Thanks, MBU!

Here’s a guy who’s written a book and released some podcasts on automating Office.

Pinching in iPhoto’s Map View

2009-01-30

work

Pinching in iPhoto’s Map View can be enabled by opening a Terminal window and typing the following:

defaults write com.apple.iphoto MapScrollWheel -bool YES

© John Laudun