Cussedness
The natural cussedness of things in general.
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1080p Mac Mini Mayhem
I have caved in: after over three years of voluntary exile from normality, I have dragged myself back up to the technological heights of the twentieth century, and bought myself a television. Indeed, I’ve gone further that that, and splashed out on a shiny, 32″ Full-HD LCD job, because I think if you’re going to do something, you may as well buy nice gadgets with which to do it. Naturally, the universe being the contrary and complicated place that it is, my new telly didn’t actually work as desired, and I was required to perform varied rituals in order to appease the gods of consumer electronics so that it would play nicely with my Mac mini. For the sake of other lost souls like myself, those doomed to a lifetime making things that should Just Work actually work, I record below the various problems encountered and the solutions I used to overcome them. (more…)
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Securing MAMP
MAMP is a really easy way of running recent versions of Apache, PHP and MySQL on your Mac for development purposes, something that can take quite a lot of effort if you attempt to set things up on your own. There is one major drawback, however: the default install is really rather insecure, with Apache serving pages up to all and sundry, including the configuration sections of the install, meaning that anyone who happens to spot that port 80 is open can do things like drop databases at will, which would be somewhat irritating to say the least. This tutorial from Eric Keil covers some techniques for securing everything, but I went about it a little differently. (more…)
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Automatically launch eMusic .emp files from Safari
I use eMusic’s download manager to handle album downloads from that website, and on one of my computers I haven’t bothered to install Firefox, and instead use Safari. Safari 3.x on OS X Leopard (10.5.x) restricts automatic opening of files downloaded from the internet, which is a bit annoying if you want an application to do its thing without a lot of irritating clicking about. Automatic opening is restricted to “safe” files by default, a setting that can be overridden in Safari preferences, although removing this restriction seems to simply prevent any files from opening automatically at all, which is even more useless. There is a way to work around Safari’s overbearing nannying, though. (more…)
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Applescript String Manipulation
Because I am the sort of person who alphabetises his collections of things for fun, I’ve been using Applescript to help tidy up my iTunes library recently. It’s actually an efficient tool for the job, and not too horrible to work with either once you get used to the syntax; for someone used to C-based languages, a typical statement seems at first glance to have a load of extraneous words and far too little punctuation, but you soon get the hang of it. Thanks to the integration provided by the iTunes dictionary you can assign genres by artist name, split compilation album track names into correct artist and title settings, sort video files as TV shows, and so on, all with a single click (and a few hours reading the docs and writing the code, of course). It’s one of those gratifyingly useless, boring pastimes that dorks like me prefer to the crucially important, fascinating things that normal people do, like playing golf and watching telly and talking about cars and shopping. A normal person would probably just put up with having all their songs in some sort of soul-revolting, multiple-artist-spelling, TV-shows-in-the-movies-section multiple metadata pile-up, but I am not normal, and I will not tolerate such carnage on my own computers. Nor am I willing to spend days typing all that stuff in manually: I’m a geek, not a lunatic. (more…)
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Macbook Meh, &c.
This is my obligatory Apple fanboy Macworld opinion post. Deluded advocates of other, lesser computer and consumer electronics manufacturers should avert their gaze now. (more…)
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Cussedness Awards 2007
- Literary event of the year: Kittenwar: The Book. The launch party was brilliant fun, thanks to everyone who turned up.
- Best book about cats not written by me and Fraser: Cat Getting Out of a Bag by Jeffrey Brown. This is a smashing little book, endearing and beautifully observed. Chronicle are clearly the quality cat-book publisher.
- Best book not about cats and not written by me and Fraser: Oystercatchers, by my mate Sue, read it now.
- Album of the year: We Can Create by Maps. Lovely.
- Most overrated album of the year: Neon Bible by Arcade Fire. Am I the only person in the world who thinks this is a load of whiny rubbish? And I liked Funeral, too. Deeply disappointing.
- Best animated feature, and about time too: Futurama - Bender’s Big Score.
- Best computer I have owned to date: 15″ Apple MacBook Pro. Not quite perfect, and Leopard is a bit crashy still, but much nicer than using Windows on some shonky PC.
- Depressing non-event of the year: our house sale. The current state of this almost eight-month long transaction is so fragile that I’m wary of discussing it in public for fear of the remote possibility that our buyers might read what I think of them and take offence, so I’m going to leave it until the sale has fallen through entirely or (unlikely, this) completed before relating the full saga. It’s a cracking story though; the whole experience has led me to believe that English property law needs serious reform, perhaps involving the statutory deployment of stocks and public floggings as deterrent measures for recalcitrant parties.
- Scary number of the year: 30.
That’s about it, see you next year.
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“I love stealing, I love taking things!”
Good news everyone: Futurama is back!
Well, sort of. It’s only back if you’re American, so yet again I have had to resort to (ahem) unofficial distribution channels in order to obtain a copy of a movie that doesn’t even have a UK release date yet. I hasten to add that once Fox remember that there are a load of Futurama fans beyond the borders of the United States, I will gladly, gleefully even, cough up for a legal copy: it’s really good.
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Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard
If you want a proper review of Leopard you’re in the wrong place. I’m not qualified enough or enthusiastic enough to bash out thousands of words about the latest version of OS X, so instead I’m just going to list a few of my initial impressions.
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MacBook Pro @ and ” Key Remapping in Parallels
I recently treated myself to a new MacBook Pro, and one of the first things I did (after fitting a ridiculous amount of RAM) was to install Parallels. This splendid piece of software allows OS X to run other operating systems in a virtual machine, which means I can do boring Windows-based day-job work on my shiny new Apple laptop.
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14.1″ G4 iBook Hard Disk Replacement
Let’s consider the following situation: someone has dropped their beloved iBook G4, and has failed to mention this fact to their designated household geek, preferring instead to continue working on said laptop. This they are able to do for a surprisingly long time, until the machine tries to swap some of its memory out to disk, and encounters an area of the drive’s platters which was scratched in the impact, at which point it crashes horribly and thereafter refuses to boot despite numerous threats and coaxings. What happens next?
The household geek gets to take apart an Apple laptop! Hooray!
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