Mac Geekery

Would you believe I forgot my password? Yeah, didn’t think so.

MacGeekery isn’t dead, it’s just, sadly, not a priority of mine at the moment. The day job is taking up increasingly more of my time and my wife and I are expecting our first child in the next couple of weeks (which means I’ve been playing proto-daddy for the past nine months). In short: I ran out of time.

I haven’t run out of information, though. I’ve had to make Mac OS X do a fair share of crazy stuff in the past year or so that I need to write up and document (which is, actually, how I started this site many years ago). Hopefully life will work with me rather than against me here.

If you have something you’d like to contribute, we’d love to have it and put it up. Remember that if you have an AdSense code that you get a portion of the ad shows for anything you post on your account that’s accepted (add your code in your profile page). So it’s not just to keep the site going, it’s a nice way to get some additional hits on your account as well.

I do expect well-written pieces, though. I’ve rejected quite a few for being too short, too obvious, or too poorly-written to really fit in here. Read some back tips and see if you can get a feel for it.

Meanwhile, I’ll be shooting for one tip a week. I can’t promise unique tips (I’ve been out of it for almost a year) but I can promise a unique write-up and perspective. There's more »

I was at WWDC this last year and went to a lot of sessions that were interesting, but didn’t really grab me and tell me that I absolutely had to learn the technology and use it. It was all interesting, of course, but … eh.

Then I went to a session on using Xray (now Instruments) and DTrace to debug things. Yes, things. It’s not just for developers and their programs, but also for sysadmins and their systems. After I saw what it could do, well, let’s just say I had a domain name registered and a site up before the next session (I love Drupal). That site is DTrace Scripts. There's more »

I’ve been on vacation, sick, and working for the past month, so I’ve been kind of lax in posting here. Thankfully, some users have helped out a little (thanks!).

I changed some things today here:

• IE for Windows shows the content again. It didn’t like a “position: relative” that I had thrown in there to keep the Digg box in place.
• I’ve removed the AJAXy Digg box. I see no reason to support them over other sites in the way it was. It will be in with a list of other social sites at the foot of stories and blog entries.
• I turned off anonymous comments. I came back from a week of vacation and found 300 spam comments and two valid ones. No. Just … no. Register.

I’ll try to ramp up some fun things here soon (I have at least one thing I’m proud I did today) and hopefully get back into full swing. It’s hard to maintain, so if you have any ideas on things to write or share, please do.

This site’s finally been updated to Drupal 5.1 from some old version of 4.7.

I chose to convert the theme from a raw theme to a template-based one and had to redo a bit of how the site works, but it does 95% of what it used to, if a little differently in places. If you spot a problem, please let us know so we can fix it.

What’s new? Not a lot, at the moment, but this will let us do some fun things in the near future, so stay tuned.

Update: As a part of the upgrade, I’ve turned on anonymous commenting. All comments go to a queue for now as the Bayesian spam filter is trained. Hopefully in a month or so it’ll be nice enough to default to posting and have it queue the questionable items. So, post comments.

As of today, if you write a good hack or tip for Mac Geekery and have an AdSense account, you can have 75% of the revenue from the article.

Which is to say: you can make money by posting good, popular tips here. There's more »

Mac Geekery turns two years old today so I thought it fitting to talk about why this place exists in the first place.

Like a lot of other Mac sites, we started this site because we saw a void that needed filling and felt we could do our share to fill it (by we, I mean JC and myself). However, the void we wanted to fill wasn’t one of another Mac tips site, those exist in droves. The void we were attacking was the one where the site was willing to not care if people couldn’t follow the tip and actually just got to the meat of it and did some crazy stuff. This is an important distinction, because a good number of Mac users these days come from other platforms, many of them Unix-based, attracted to the Unixy goodness of Mac OS X, but without the ugly of X11¹. Having a ton of sites dumbed-down for the average Joe with the occasional insane bit is great for Joe, but not for me and those like me that really want to tear into the machine. There's more »

We’re at WWDC this week, so we’ll liklely be a little slow to answer questions, if at all.

However, we (and others) are reading the mg-support mailing list, so if you have technical support questions, post them there. Tips still get posted here.

We’ll probably write about the results of the conference keynote on codepoetry and ungenius so stay tuned to our personal blogs for that kind of stuff.

Oh, and while I’m plugging, try out Switchblade, the first application from Barton Springs Software. It’s a really neat application switcher that learns which programs you use more often and makes them more available over time. There's more »

We updated the CMS last night and one of the modules (specifically the one that emails you on new content) went a little haywire. Ignore any emails you received as they were sent erroneously to a larger group of people than subscribed. We’re looking into it at the moment.

I’m going to try something, and I’m probably going to regret it, but I’d like to see what happens when I do it.

I’m going to tell the CMS to put everyone’s blog posts on the front page of Mac Geekery. This does a few things that I think work out great for the site in the long run: There's more »

1. It moves the site squarely in the face of the community. If you have a good tip, trick, hack, or insightful article you can just post it and get the Mac Geekery audience right there reading.
2. It does what I really wanted to do in the first place, and that’s bring MG up to be a higher-end tips site with tips from other folks. Right now, and historically, anyone could post a tip to their blog on the site and someone would get around to promoting it. Now someone posts and an admin will get around to nixing the crap.

So JC’s recent expansion into a sibling site made me think about something else. What do you do, after Apple? It’s a great community of people, and there are people going in and out all of the time. How do you keep in touch?

There’s a site for an alumni group, but after repeated attempts at getting a human, I have no response. So, I created After Apple to address that.

It’s just starting out and every member has a blog and access to the forums. More than that, really, is that it’s a place to register and keep in touch with each other. The target is for current and former Apple employees, and accounts will have read access until I can review them (which is within the day, usually). I only request that the topics center around the Bay Area, the Austin area, and Apple as a company rather than as Yet Another Mac Site. There's more »