Aug 12
From Terminal.app
defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool NO
That’s all folks!
Aug 08
The “General” PreferencePane in Lion’s ‘System Preferences’ windows contains a “Restore windows when quitting and re-opening apps” item. However, sometimes this behaviour does’t make sense – after a reboot I found, for example, that the OS X Installer had re-launched and was asking for a package to install!
Aug 04
Even though I’ve never owned a webOS-based device, over time I’ve followed with interest the various Mobile OS options out there – and webOS certainly seems to have some great ideas. In many ways, webOS is significantly more functional than Apple’s iOS – but is the HP TouchPad good enough as a consumer product to carry through this advantage?
I’m lucky enough to have been allowed to borrow a new TouchPad (model HSTNH-129C), and these are my thoughts after an afternoon’s usage.
Jul 23
I’ve been promising myself for some time now that – as my current MacBook Pro has started to fall to pieces after three year’s perfect service – I would upgrade to a lighter, much more portable MacBook Air as soon as they received a Sandy Bridge processor update.
There is a nice overview of the available options at TechonoBuffalo, whilst MacWorld and Bare Feats are the first places I’ve seen with useful(*) benchmarks. Furthermore, the ever-reliable Storage Review has an interesting set of figures for the (excellent) performance of the new Blade SSDs.
However, what I’ve been unable to find elsewhere (and even wikipedia isn’t overly useful, in this case) is any quantitative comparison of the two MacBook Air processor options: For the 128GB 11″ model, the Core i7 processor is a £150 (~15%) extra for – on the face of it, a 200MHz (a fifth of an iPhone 4 or iPad, or 12.5%) speed increase.
There must be more of an advantage, surely?
As it turns out, the answer is yes and no…
Apr 25
On Friday 8th April, ShairPort was released. Containing the private key from a reverse-engineered Apple AirPort Express, this allows unlicensed/homebrew devices to act as AirPlay target speakers – e.g. allows iTunes, iPods, iPads, and iPhones to use them as an output device.
Immediately, the obvious thought is to add AirPlay support to Logitech/Slim Devices’ Squeezebox Server software so that the excellent Squeezebox devices can be used as remote speakers.
(As an aside, I’ve had my 3rd generation Squeezeboxsince they were introduced in 2005, and it is without the highest quality and most used gadget I have, still going strong and as useful as ever more than five years later!)
After a few false-starts trying to configure ALSA to record the digital output of the host’s soundcard, the latest release of ShairPort provides a perfect solution to lossless audio reproduction, without even needing a soundcard.
Apr 24
It may have taken way too many hours, and may have descended into a maze of twisty little passages, all alike, but after fighting various permissions issues and procmail‘s general intransigence (I still can’t work out what determines whether procmail will perform variable-interpolation on shell commands, or why it doesn’t like even multi-escaped square brackets in shell invocations…) here it is in all it’s glory: A procmail-based auto-reply system.
Apr 05
Sometimes, it’s the simple things which can be the most handy. Here’s a quick category on NSString to allow all characters within a set (NSCharacterSet *illegalCharacterSet or NSCharacterSet *symbolCharacterSet, say) to be easily and efficiently removed. This fills a gap in between the stringByTrimmingCharactersInSet: and stringByReplacingCharactersInRange: withString: & stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString: withString: methods, which only act upon the ends of the receiver or require a continuous range or fixed string respectively.
Feb 18
I’ve recently been looking to purchase a piece of equipment online which is not available from big-name suppliers, only from a limited number lesser-known websites. Having no reputation on which to base a purchasing decision, I decided that a viable method to choose between a reliable site and a potentially bad site would be to see how well their terms and conditions comply with the legal requirements of the UK Distance Selling regulations – legal requirements which either seem to be frequently misunderstood by legitimate sellers, or frequently mis-quoted by sellers who seemingly wish to shirk their legal responsibilities and force unlawful terms and conditions upon (potentially) ill-informed customers.
For reference, the Office of Fair Trading‘s guide on distance selling is available in this PDF document.
Please note that these regulations only apply when goods are purchased remotely, without having viewed the goods prior to purchase. They in fact give consumers many more rights when making purchases via the internet than if they purchased from a shop – to the point where it in many cases no longer makes sense to purchase big-ticket items from a bricks-and-mortar shop at all!
Feb 17
Has someone worked out how to reliably game Akismet? I’ve just had to clear out 45 spam posts all within a few minutes around 6:30pm, then a few every 10 minutes to half an hour or so, until another bunch appeared around 11:15pm.
Quite how desperate for praise and/or attention to these spammers think bloggers are?!
Oh, wait…
Jan 29
The ALIX 2c3 system board the forms my traffic-shaper has one irksome weakness: it lacks an on-board CMOS/RTC battery to maintain the time when the system is shutdown.
This is a more significant problem than it sounds since, for starters, the fsck tools for the ext2 filesystem, by default, treat a timestamp in the future as a failure – and disk checks have to be performed almost immediately on system start, so there is no opportunity to raise networking and start an NTP dæmon.