• 1Password has had the most impact in terms of daily use. Fix your password habits. Seriously.
• To stay focused, I've been using using a combination of SpritedAway and Isolator - the former hides apps I'm not currently using, while the latter let's me focus on a single app (usually writing a document).
• I've been keeping an eye on noisy fans and run-away processes with iStat menus (hat tip: @jjeff).
• Mail is probably my biggest area of tinkering... I'll try to write up my current setup in more detail, but MailActOn 2 and DockStar are working well for me.

Probably my biggest change recently, is to switch back to much heavier use of emacs... more on that later ;-)

How about you? What are you using to make your (computer) life a little bit better?

As shown in the video, I think the best use for this new feature is in conjunction with iPhone sites. In the video, Tod shows creating an app for http://i.brightkite.com/. I've been using this to check-in on BrightKite. It's nice, unobtrusive and easy in lieu of BrightKite's own, native desktop apps.

My other favorite (pictured) is http://i.rememberthemilk.com/. Remember the Milk's iPhone app has a nice feature that the "Today" tasks list also shows overdue tasks (which I haven't figured out how to do in the standard web app).

More and more of my webapp usage is moving to fluid these days. I can't say enough good things about this app. And google gears support is coming!!

However, I found this tip and can now initiate skype-to-skype calls directly from quicksilver:

Here's what I did:

1. In quicksilver's preferences - I enabled the "Services Menu Module" plug-in
2. In Address Book, I added a 'custom' phone field with the label 'skype' where I can keep skype contact names (It would be really awesome if Skype did this for me...
3. Now, I can do the following: invoke quicksilver, type a contact's name, hit '/', find their skype name (down arrow), hit tab, type 'sk' (to get the 'Skype/Call' action) and hit Enter. Skype will then make the call to that user.

Ok... so typing quicksilver commands doesn't *look* pretty... but it's one less thing I need to switch my right hand to the mouse for, and I like that. :-)

(I should probably post more tricks like this)

I have two web apps that have become an absolute core staple of my daily routine: Remember the Milk (for TODO management) and Google Reader (for RSS feeds). Both of these are pretty "heavy" web apps (containing lots of JS/AJAX/etc) and I had been running Firefox extensions for both which ultimately weighed down my main browser (which is where I do primary development, etc). Having them as separate applications lets me keep Firefox running (a little) leaner, and I also get pretty icons and the ability to "cmd-tab" between them.

The coolest part, however, is that Fluid has implemented icon updating on a few sites (google reader being one of them) to show the number of unread items. Check it:

Now, if I can just get Google Gears for Webkit working (for offline support for google reader & RTM) I'll be one happy camper.

The desktop / web app convergence continues...

I've been playing around with a little project to set up sandbox drupal sites on a mac mini (more details on that later) ... that's easy stuff, but the annoying part is: I'd like to share directories via Samba which needs system accounts. The trick is, I want to add all of this via a simple little shell script. No problem right? Simple one line call to useradd... right?! Noooooooooo. Not in OS X. No, in OS X this is how you add user accounts from the commandline (which, of course, is under "Porting unix/linux applications"):

# dscl / -create /Users/portingunix
# dscl / -create /Users/portingunix UserShell /bin/bash
# dscl / -create /Users/portingunix RealName "Porting Unix 
# dscl / -create /Users/portingunix UniqueID 503
# dscl / -create /Users/portingunix PrimaryGroupID 1000
# dscl / -create /Users/portingunix NFSHomeDirectory /Local/Users/portingunix
# passwd portingunix

I dunno... I think that's just annoying. Perhaps NetInfo has some beauty that I'm just don't understand, but, couldn't Apple at least ship with some standard useradd wrappers or something?

Plaxo is currently successfully keeping my Mac OS X address book (for subsequent syncing to my phone), iCal, Thunderbird and Google Calendar in sync! I have to say, the Thunderbird support is pretty huge... Thunderbird LDAP support has never been what I would like, so this is a great intermediary.

However, the news that pushed me to blog about my Plaxo usage is this: (as of it looks like yesterday) Plaxo is OpenID enabled!! Awesome! Nice addition to Basecamp and Blinksale in services that I actually use heavily that are OpenID enabled.

Thumbs up for Plaxo. Now... if I could just figure out how to get it to sync my address book pictures...

First impressions? Um, this thing is fast. So much faster than anything I've owned so far. Wow.

So, like any self-respecting geek.. I belaboured the machine naming process and finally settled on "mingus" (yes after the Jazz great). Let the games begin!

• Install everything from source: most control, biggest hassle
• Install things from various binary packages: least control, hassle monitoring updates & upgrades from different sources. Packages like MAMP lessen some of this burden, but I still need other tools like subversion, etc.
• Fink : installs a debian-like apt-get system
• MacPorts (formerly DarwinPorts): uses a freebsd-like ports system for managing packages.

Traditionally, I've used Fink - as I generally use Debian on servers, so I'm very familiar with apt-get, dpkg, etc. However, fink, perhaps like debian proper, seems to lag with packages in stable, and you typically have to use the ports-like fink command anyway.

This time around, too, I noticed that MacPorts is now hosted by Mac OS Forge: making it a (semi-)official Apple project. This probably bodes well for it's future and longevity. There's a port for php5, apache2 and mysql5... so I've decided to give it a whirl.

What are others using?

• On my powerbook (the growl "client"), I checked "Listen for incoming notifications"
• On my mini (the growl "server"), I checked "Forward notifications to other computers"

That's it. It is that easy. The part that had me stuck was I was expecting the "Add computer" button to do something on my mini. Not true. It's all automatically discovered via bonjour. I was warned that it can be buggy and you can create infinite loops if you try to do two-way notification, but otherwise it's pretty cool if you ask me.

It looks like these Address Book Phone Plugins from Nova Media claim to fix the problem. However, they want my hard earned money before I can even try to see if it works with my phone. Can anyone confirm that they work with the n91? Or should I just wing it? Are there other options?

Spanning Sync is currently my favourite and what motivated me to blog this - and timely as today they released v1.0. I've been playing with it for the last few beta releases. It's worked really well and is *exactly* what I want. The downfall is a $25/year subscription fee (or $65 one time). However, I like it enough that I might just bite the bullet for this one.

Address book X LDAP automatically sync's your OS X address book to an LDAP server - built to work with OpenLDAP (yay!). I haven't tried this one yet - it's also not free- but I've used AddressBook4LDAP (from the same author) in the past, so I have high hopes for this.

Both of these are OS X only tools (both using the iSync framework), but until I take action on my moving back to regular linux desktop usage - perhaps I should stop making such a big deal out of that fact.

Now, really, it would be nice if iCal and AddressBook (or maybe some elegant replacements from the mozilla community or elsewhere) worked like this out of the box. Sort of like how Mail.app and IMAP work together. I want a server that stores my data (ideally that has a web-based interface for the off time I don't have my own computer handy) with an offline mode. We have LDAP and CalDAV for server technologies... Dear Apple, I say pretty please. Am I the only one? What are other folks using?

however, here I am 10 days and 7 point releases later, and I have to say, I now have a netnewswire license that's not getting a whole heck of a lot of use. in general, I'm a big fan of adriaan's work (this post brought to you by ecto of course). he always manages to cram in one or two features ahead of everyone else, and has always been incredibly responsive to bug reports and feature requests.

some of my favourite endo features include:

• completely mouse-free, rapid reading. endo features adriaan's awesome "graphical shell" for switching groups just by typing a few letters. using that coupled with the good, natural key-bindings for moving between articles, and i never touch my mouse (which is a good thing).
• per-feed notification (i.e. if something work related comes in, find out right away vs. during regular feed reading).
• built-in bittorrent support. (ok, i haven't actually used this yet, but it's an awesome idea!)
• support for xCal and hCal - to automagically add events to iCal! (try it out with upcoming.org feeds!).
• attention.xml based sync'ing. I don't love this because i necessarily think attention.xml is an awesome format... but it is a public format, which means it's something other aggregators (like, say drupal's built in aggregator) can sync against it. plus it seems to work much better than NNW's FTP sync ever has for me.

now, i have to admit, the workflow is slightly different - if you're used to the "mail" style reading of a NNW... and there are a couple things I'm not crazy about in the default endo installation... although lots of things have been fixed or changed already (in a mere 10 days!). However, here are a few small tips that made endo my new feed reader:

• turn off the colour backgrounds for articles (in the left pane). the easiest way to do this is to set them in the subscription window (hint: if you change the color for the group, it applies to all feeds in that group). frankly, i find the colours distracting - and make it harder to tell which articles are read (for me anyway).
• get a style that lists the feed name - which the default doesn't. i'm currently using UnifiedAqua. (otherwise it's hard to tell the source of the current article)
• use group icons
• make use of cmd-9

go now. give it a whirl.

for a long time I was using what Tim refers to as the "Use the Source, Luke!" option... I must say I find --enable-carbon-app to be quite satisfactory. i should probably qualify that I'm not necessarily interested in emacs working like a "mac app". in fact, i use emacs everywhere because I want it to work like emacs.

my reason for posting, though, is to give a quick nod to the carbon emacs package which I've been using on my macs for a few months now. it is bascically the source build, without the build time.. plus some included extensions for convenience. give it a shot.

but WAIT! front row is apparently *only* available with a new iMac. WHAT?? that doesn't make any sense. As far as I can tell, the remote is bluetooth (which my mini supports) and the software is just software, no? Dear apple, I'd buy this today if I saw it on apple.com!

it appears i'm not the only one who thinks so. in fact, there's even an online petition - which i signed. please tell me there is a good reason for this besides pushing imac sales?

UPDATE: apparently, according to this page the remote, while available is IR *not* Bluetooth. *sigh*

(cue flashback music...)

i was in stuttgart, germany again (if you missed that it's a good indication of how sporadically I post here) - just finishing what turned out to be an intensely grueling 10 day sprint. my powerbook had essentially been running hard 18-20 hours a day for the 10 days, but it was the final day. i was happily working along (well, groggily at best), when it locked for the first time. odd i thought, but i rebooted and tried to continue. it locked up several more times, and i started getting the "4 language screen". eventually they became so frequent that I had to finish out the day standing at the rack in the (very well-cooled) server room to finish my tasks.

too tired to really try and diagnose it, i packed and flew home (spending most of the 8 hour flight completely comatose).

luckily, i was able to not really miss a step thanks to my little mac mini and my diligent use of version control and/or rsync. finally, on friday I took the time to look a bit deeper into the issues. after much googling, i finally decided to try running "the apple hardware test" - since all signs pointed towards a hardware failure. I had also been keeping panic.log output (which if you don't know is located in /Library/Logs/panic.log). The panic.log looked like my video card might be to blame:

Unresolved kernel trap(cpu 0): 0x300 - Data access ...
Latest crash info for cpu 0:
   Exception state (sv=0x3C191500)
      PC=0x00A31B24; MSR=0x00009030; DAR=0x3D38134E; ...
      Backtrace:
0x00A31C20 0x00A187DC 0x00A32AB8 0x00A132C8 0x005C04FC 0x005BB9AC 
         0x005BBE6C 0x005BBD14 0x0003C738 0x000A9694 
      Kernel loadable modules in backtrace (with dependencies):
         com.apple.GeForce(4.0.6)@0xa12000

note the "com.apple.GeForce" reference. so, sure enough, I run the hardware test and i get a failure in the video ram with the following error code:

2NVD/1/4:2069

(i actually typed that code from memory). feeling that I was armed with enough information to address an apple tech - and knowing that my laptop was outside the standard warranty period - I called my local apple service shop. The guy on the phone said he wasn't a tech and had no idea what was involved to fix that error - and that the service department was a week behind. *sigh*

so, i called apple's 800 service number. the guy on the phone was fairly helpful - he seemed to appreciate that I'd at least done my homework - and he suggested that apple had a flat rate service fee of $300-something dollars (US) and that in a roughly 2 week period they could return a working laptop. i thought to myself, "that's nice, but I'd really like to have my laptop sooner". so i asked the guy if the apple store yorkdale would be able to do the repair - for the same rate. he said "yes".

on saturday sandi and I headed to the mall, waited in line at the "genius bar" and - armed with my error code - i pulled out my powerbook and explained the situation. after some digging, the "genius" made a nasty looking face... *apparently* on the powerbook errors in the video ram (which he confirmed this was) - are treated as a logic board replacement. essentially, to repair it they would replace the entire logic board and charge me $1400 CAD (plus tax)!!!! AND it was going to take them a week to get the part in!

i mentioned the flat rate fee - and the "genius" responded that they do in fact offer that, but basically when the powerbook got to the apple techs in california, I would have received a notice that there were going to be additional charges. can't argue with a genius, right?

now here i am - with a basically unusable machine. and while i don't seem to have a clear answer as to exactly how much money and how long a fix would take, all signs point to "ouch".

i've spent some time sobbing ... i've also been trying to get my brother's old dell inspiron 2650 in a workable state (more on that later). it looks like my best bet will be to eventually replace my powerbook - but i need to do some saving and decide what exactly i want to do next...

please if you have suggestions / recommendations / condolences - leave a comment. free beer to anyone who knows a simple/cheap fix that I've been unable to dig up :)

I've got to say, I actually don't care either way. I hate to say it - I'm not sure I'm that desperate for one. As many of you likely know, I'm not a huge phone guy - and while I do love gadgets, I'm not sure an iPod phone is really going to get my money. I'm much more interested these days in having things like wifi & bluetooth, etc. It doesn't help either that my previous motorola phone was awful.

of course, I can say this because a) I already have an iPod and b) nobody knows yet how easy it might be to use one in Canada. If I read that they're available on eBay and completely unlocked - I'll reconsider. Until then, I'll likely hold out for the nokia n91.

But, now i use two machines very regularly...

Wait! they're both macs, right? yes, my powerbook and my new mini. so, why not just sign up for .Mac and be done with it? well, that's not my style. i've spent *plenty* of money with apple over the past couple years, that wouldn't help with windows or linux, and besides: i'm a geek

so, here's what i really want/need:

• My email in both places. check: long ago i switched all my mail to be served via IMAP from my own server.
• My contacts available everywhere - this sort of works, if you have entered all of your contacts already - because, yes, address book will access your LDAP directory read only.
• My calendar and (more importantly!) my todos everywhere. here is where the frustration really starts. i really like apple's iCal, and you can very nicely publish and subscribe to calendars not only on your .Mac account, but on any WebDAV server. Or so you would think. wrong you can publish or subscribe. ARGH! are you kidding me? even the alpha-ish mozilla sunbird will 'sync' remote calendars.

Sure, there are other things such as syncing my documents and configuration - but I already use CVS (or svn) for some of that, and don't compose many "documents" per se, so those are lesser issues.

my big complaint is that, i really like the mac tools: but apple (and I know you're listening) why are they crippled? are .Mac sales *that* important to you? why no publish and subscribe for iCal on WebDAV? Why can address book search my LDAP directory, but not edit entries in it? Why doesn't LDAP have any way to store "Instant messaging" contact information ? (and yes, i google'd all around about this supposed "IMHandle" in my apple.schema, but I can't make it work)

i'm even talking about homogenous platforms here... I haven't gotten into cross-platform issues (yet).

i want a world in which my "digital life" is ubiquitous. across any platform, or machine, i need "my stuff" - and yes marc, i'm talkin' Digital Lifestyle Aggregation.

So Apple : I like your apps, and I really like your hardware. You could make me a fan for life if you'd just let people own multiple macs, but use *existing* technologies to let them all work together. You know, something like google talk allowing any jabber client to play.

needless to say, i'm right in tune with the ideas of a googleOS/webOS.

MacRumors confirms that iTunes 4.9 includes messages such as "Phone Preferences", "Configure Phone", and "iPod Phone Prefs".

iTunes 4.9 is currently downloading to my powerbook... and I think I have a new birthday wish (if only it gets released on time...)

for those that haven't tasted this particular kool-aid: growl provides a framework so that applications (on Mac OS X) can create little popups when "things happen". so, some examples are : when the song changes in iTunes, new mail arrives, or someone says something in iChat or Adium.

the interesting thing is that human brains are *really* good at recognizing patterns, and determining (almost instantly) relative importance. so, without really looking up from the code, email or blog entry i'm currently writing, i can stay on top of other things going on - without having to switch applications, etc.

for example: i'm currently writing a blog post, and without changing apps (or even pausing) i can see that iTunes just changed - to "About A Girl" by Nirvana, and that Adrian wants to get a sony psp, eventually.

some people might find it distracting, but it's amazing how quickly your mind and eyes become trained to find the important things. that's where growl's ability to re-style messages on a per-application basis comes in handy. i use the "music video" style for iTunes changes (which shows track information along the bottom) vs. new mail notification using the "bezel" style. so - without even reading anything, i know based on where a notification appeared whether it's low importance (song change) or worth glancing at (new mail).

just one of those things that makes me more productive... i suppose at some point i should do a more complete post on my "essential" apps... another time.

tags: growl, osx, essential