Mac

Like many before me, I was searching (unsuccessfully) for a decent twitter client. There are many, but most seem to be ad sponsored or based on a rather hefty framework like AIR (which by now, I guess, has been silently installed on my computer anyhow). Update: This project is now deprecated and Twitter has removed basic authentication. Custom apps have major implications for usability so I decided to roll my own. I wanted to try out Fluid, the Prism-like app to contain web apps in their own process/window, to see if it is possible to build a complete open source ad-free twitter client in a single web page only using javascript and HTML. ...

Via Bill de hÓra. Run this from the command line: 1 history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s ",a[i],i}}'|sort -rn|head I get: 1 108 ls 78 cd 53 sudo 29 python 13 cap 9 django-admin.py 9 ruby 8 vim 6 easy_install 3 bzr 1 ex 1 python2.5 1 ln 1 mksir 1 cat 1 cccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccc In short: I have trouble with my default python installation. I am trying Django for small project. I was hit by the Leopard keyboard repeat freeze bug. I am poor at spelling simple commands.

Thanks to Johnny Chung Lee, everyone and their mom seem to be setting up their own Wiimote whiteboards these days. I tried it too but disliked the pen-based interaction. So, I built a simple glove that allows you to pinch an object to drag and drop it somewhere. Here is what you need: IR LED in the 920 nm range (a bag of 20 cost me ) 1.5V AA battery a glove battery holder (with optional velcro to fit it to the glove) some wires a Wiimote software (I tried Uwe Schmidt’s java based Mac version). The first beta version looks like above after some soldering. ...

When people started making applications available in the browser a number of interaction challenges appeared. How do you launch a web app compared to a desktop app? How do you prevent people from navigating away from your app? The Mozilla people have been hard t work with Prism - basically a customized version of Firefox, which lets you create desktop apps pre-configured to load a certain URL at startup. The desktop app is launched like any other application. Pretty sweet as the user experience becomes more consistent. You can also customize the application icon and other parameters. ...

I often install apps to try if they work the way I like. Some stay, some I delete almost immediately. Some of them have built in functionality that alerts you when there is an update available. I find that very annoying. If you have many apps these little reminders tend to pop up all the time. So, I was looking for something to keep tiny apps up to date and found AppFresh. AppFresh will scan your programs folder when you want it to and alert you of any updates it can find. Downloading and installation is automated for most apps as well. ...

Mark Pilgrim writes about the benefits of the easy-to-use package manager in Ubuntu and then feels sorry for his Mac OS-using friends. “But Jesus H. Christ, it must suck giant wet donkey balls to be stuck on an archaic OS where you need to be dropping into the terminal and tweaking configuration files and compiling shit all the time. I hope the translucent menu bar is worth it. " I agree wholeheartedly that a good package manager really makes life a lot easier. At work the other day I was about to begin installing TWiki by following the rather lengthy installation guidelines. As I was on a clean install of Ubuntu 7.10 I fired off a apt-get install twiki and lo and behold, two minutes later the whole thing was there including mysql and a large part of the CPAN library. ...

Update: As many readers now noticed, as of 10.5.2 there is now a preferences setting for the menubar transparency. For some reason Apple decided to make the menu bar in Leopard transparent. With my background image this means that the menu bar will be in a shade of blue. It doesn’t look good and makes my computing environment less comfortable (I’m picky, I know…). Someone created a software hack to remove the transparency. There is also a system setting (thank you Johan) to trick the window manager into thinking it is in older hardware. I am not sure of the side effects so I’m not that keen on installing that. Here is the pragmatic fix: take your background image and paint a white stripe, 21 pixels high, at the top. Problem solved. My menu bar is now easy to read with black text on white background (see picture above). ...

This was going to be my summer project, but after getting the parts I couldn’t stop myself from putting it together straight away. About a year ago I read an article about a guy who put together a synthesizer controller using laser pointers, a bowl of water, a solar panel and MAX/MSP. I can’t find the link anymore but it doesn’t matter when you want to roll your own! This is what you need: ...

(Please note that this post is from 2007 and things have become much better). When you are on parental leave you have to register which days you are away fro work with the Swedish Social Insurance Agency. To access the online services of an agency you have to have an electronic ID. In Sweden this is a locally installed certificate issued by your bank or large telecom provider. In my case my identity is checked by my bank and then I am forwarded to Telia, which handles the process of generating the ceritificate and installing the appropriate software on my computer. What could have been a simple well guided procedure is instead an exercise in ambiguity and a complete lack of usability: ...

The combination of parental leave, a Sony A100 10 Mpix camera and the 80 Gb HD of my Mac mini server has resulted in a lot of zeroes and ones needing a place to live. I have realized that a lof of valuable photos are only stored on the HD. Should it fail the family will be really disappointed. Hence, the need for a backup solution. I was planning to get a small RAID solution for the home network, but they are fairly expensive, need electricity and space. So, I had a look at the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). If you haven’t heard of S3 before: ...