Cussedness
The natural cussedness of things in general.
-
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…)
-
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…)
-
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…)
-
Y-Cam Black Wireless Night-vision IP Camera Review
In response to a previously related incident involving the security of our postal delivery arrangements, I recently invested in a Y-Cam Black. I have had suspicions regarding the moral integrity of some of the regular users of the footpath that runs past our house for a while now, but the theft of sixteen Chuck Ds worth of train tickets confirmed them. In an effort to thwart any further attempts at stealing my possessions via this particular method, I moved our postbox inside our front porch, and affixed the Y-Cam Black in a suitable position to monitor both the box and any parcels placed on the floor inside. Triggered by the motion activation feature built into the camera, it uploads still pictures to an FTP server whenever anyone enters the porch. This arrangement allows me to see any activity related to postal deliveries to my property, and, potentially, any criminal efforts on the part of the mentally subnormal, mail-bothering yokels that frequent our lane.
(more…) -
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…)
-
“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.
(more…) -
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.
(more…) -
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.
(more…) -
Mac mini
I finally cracked and bought something I’ve been secretly coveting since it was introduced: a Mac mini. So far I’m very pleased with it, and whilst it is not perfect, it is a massive improvement on the big old Windows box that it has replaced in the front room.
(more…) -
12″ MacBook Pro Rumour
If this rumour is true, I might actually switch. I’ve been coveting OS X for a while, and I’m a sucker for dinky laptops; a 12″ version with a decent spec would probably swing it for me.
