mac geekery

I started up a Blogger blog some time ago, and have been posting to it from time to time, and recently also bought a Palm.

I'm the sort of person who needs to have stuff written down to remember it, and a Palm seemed like a really good way to keep all of my contact details (I coach several sporting teams, and occasionally do some teaching too:-) and calendar stuff in line.

I wasn't really happy with the supplied Note-Taking software, and downloaded MacNoteTaker - as this program takes a cool approach to dealing with the Conduit/Transfer issue. A folder is created that is populated with sub-folders and text files. Whilst it is far from perfect (extended characters are not handled well, and neither are situations where both versions have been edited) it's better than using the standard Palm software. There's more »

Bash has, since somewhere in the middle of the 2.04 betas, supported various additions to its tab-completion feature. Mac OS X includes version 2.05b of Bash but does not include a default tab-completion setup file. There’s no official file so that’s understandable, but there is a very complete and common file used for these that can be added. It’s a very easy addition and allows for a wide range of tab-completion additions including pulling host names out of your .ssh_known_hosts file to expand when using ssh and a wide variety of others (alias, export, shell, complete, chown, chgrp, mount, umount, man, renice, kill, killall, pgrep, find, ifconfig, postfix, cvs, apt-*, chsh, ssh/scp, rsync, route, and on, and on, and on). It does cause Bash to take about 1-1.5 seconds to start up once installed, but you can easily go into the file and remove the ones you’ll never use.There's more »

Here's a nifty hack to automatically mount NFS filesystems at startup via Startup Items. (Yes, I know you can do automounts in NetInfo, but this way you can more easily recover the system if your NFS server or network goes south for the winter.) There's more »

The hard drive is the fastest common storage device we have. There’s faster, including RAIDs composed of these drives, but for the average person the hard drive is the fastest. So, why then, when you do mass-installs of computers (new companies, new computers, new labs, new schools, whatever) do people insist upon either using a dozen CDs and wasting an afternoon (or two) or using Net Install (Mac OS X Server) to load the systems? There’s a better way: use a hard drive.There's more »

Copy a clip from a web page in Safari. Paste it in iChat to send to a friend. Oh, now, what? The web designer used white text on black, but Safari didn’t copy the black? No matter, you’ve hacked iChat to support “Paste as Plain Text” haven’t you? Haven’t you?There's more »

No, this isn’t about using Disk Utility to partition it and break it, this is about partitioning it and keeping the iPod’s functionality intact. Useful for those with 40GB of iPod and 25GB of music…

It goes without saying this is not something Apple intended a music player for, so if you break your toy you’re on your own. Apple’s iPod Firmware Updater program can usually restore the iPod back to its former self but reader beware: you may kill your little friend in the process. You have been warned, and since this is merely an educational guide I will take absolutely no responsibility if this fails to work for you even if you follow the directions perfectly.There's more »