DiggUpdate from http://www.dbachrach.com/opensoft/ It will update Digg’s top stories. You can filter which categories to show up on this app.
MenuCalendarClock from http://www.objectpark.net/ This menubar app will give you a monthly calendar with just a click. It will also show your todos and events!
MenuMeter from http://www.ragingmenace.com/ I only activate the network profile, so I will know if the conenction is on or off.
Flip4Mac from http://flip4mac.com & Perian from http://perian.org/ This will give you the capabilities to watch Windows Media video or others with your Quicktime
Geektools from http://projects.tynsoe.org/en/geektool/ Great tools to show any information on your desktop. I use it to display my GCal, Twitter timeline, date and server monitoring.
If you have a mobile device, such a MacBook, you’d better password protect it. When your device got stolen, at least they’ll have a hard time to see your private information.
What if you’ve just left the device somewhere, then someone found it and wanted to inform you? They can’t, because there is no information about you, and they can’t log into the system.
Here is how you can put more information on the login panel:
Go to: /Library/Preferences
Double click on: com.apple.loginwindow.plist, the Property List Editor.app will be launched.
Click on ‘Add Child’
Enter the following information: Key:LoginwindowTextType:StringValue: If found, please contact…. yourmail@mail.com, your phone.
Save it. Make sure you have enabled ‘Disable automatic login’ in System Preferences > Security
Since I can’t find any built in shortcuts on my Mac OS X to do the select text and go surfing, so I decided to write a little AppleScript to do that. This trick saves me from selecting url (which is not clickable of course), copying to the clipboard, opening the Safari, pasting the clipboard to the address bar and pressing the enter button.
You can assign the using Quicksilver. (If you find a way to trigger Applescript using the built in Mac OS X features, please let me know.)
I assigned my trigger to Option + Shift + S, you can do whatever you want. The script has been tested on MacBook Pro 2.4Ghz with Snow Leopard. If you have a very old machine, you migh want to adjust the delay setting. Double click on the script to adjust the delay setting to a longer time.
Grab it here, and drag it to your ~/Library/Scrips or ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions or anywhere you want.
Here is a short demonstration how to use it
Select any URL on any application. (In this demo, I select appledoes.com from terminal.app)
Trigger the script. (By pressing my keystroke Opt + Shift + S) That’s it.
Enjoy
Updated: The script can now handle the email address as well, so it will open your Mail.app and insert the recipient address automatically.
If you like the script, donation is always accepted
Here is how you can shorten URL using Quicksilver. Jason Snell has made a handy Applescript and I’ve modified it a bit so it can handle a long weird URL as well and you can grab it here then put the script under /Applications/ folder.
The script will grab any URL of Safari’s frontmost page and send it to TinyURL to be shorten and it’s automatically recorded in your clipboard.
Just watch the video so you will have a better understanding.
Today, we have a customer who have installed the ZTE Modem 626 on her brand new Macbook.
The thing is, when she installed it, everything went smooth and no problem found. But, after you reboot it, you’ll find the spinning gear forever.
This is due to, a poor driver collecion by ZTE, which replaces the original /usr/lib/libcurl.4.dylib with it’s version which has no 64 bit version in it.
So, if you want to install the ZTE,
1. first backup the /usr/lib/libcurl.4.dylib file,
2. do the ZTE installation
3. before you restart, replace the /usr/lib/libcurl.4.dylib with your backup.
If you have installed it, and you can’t boot the Snow Leopard, here is what to do,
I always impress my buddies by showing off the Quicksilver way of doing things instead of the regular way, the drag and drop way.
For example, if you want to send bunch of photos to your friends, but first they need to be resized and compressed,
1. you can simply select them all (the files),
2. trigger the ‘Quicksilver’s Command Window with selection’ tool. All the files are selected and ready for the next action, so now we want to resize them to 800 pixel width, so we type:
3. sca then hit tab to enter the size. You can enter 800×600 or 80% or something like ’800 as high progressive jpeg’ then hit enter. The resized files are already selected for your next action
4. Now we want to compress them using tgz, so we hit the tab and type compre, tab and type tg and press enter
5. Now the compressed file is selected and you could do anything with it, like move, copy, alias, rename, etc. In this case, wa want to email it to someone, so you tab and type send, hit tab again to select your contact from address book.
While B57 is out for Snow Leopard, This B54 is still the best built for Snow Leopard in terms of performance issues.
Finally, the Quicksilver is back in my Snow Leopard faster than ever! I’m disabling Google Quick Search Box for now. B56a7 will work on your Snow Leopard machine, but most of the features won’t play well on it or slow.
Here is the tricks.
First you have to download 2 versions from http://blacktree.com/, the B54 and B56a7
If you have previous installation, I recommend to delete them all:
Install the B56a7. It will crash when you open in, don’t worry. Just go to
Quicksilver.app > Show Package Content > Content > QSDefaults.plist (double click it, it will open the Property List Editor app)
Look for Use effect at the bottom, and uncheck (disable), save and close the Property List Editor app.
Now, open the Quicksilver.app, and you should see the welcome screen. Edit the preferences, this is very important, since you won’t see this preferences screen next time.
After everything is setup, close Quicksilver, and replace the Quicksilver.app with version B54 and say yes to use this version when the system asks.
Now, you have a working Quicksilver. You can edit Catalogs, Trigers, Plug-ins using this version (B54), but not the preference.
If in any case you want to edit the preferences, you need to move the Quicksilver.app to different place, and put the B56a7 inside /Applications folder and edit the preference using this version, after that, you need to put back (replace) the B56a7 with B54 again.
Here is the plug-ins that works for me:
When the plug-in causes you a crash, just go to: ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/PlugIns/ and delete that plugin.
Well, when you delete files in your USB flash drive using Commad + Delete or drag them to the Trash, the file is actually not being deleted, but instead it is being hidden. Wow, but that’s true. So from now on, if you really want to erase data from the USB flash drive, make sure you empty the Trash as well, or someone can see your hidden files when they plug it in to a PC.
Or for the paranoids (and it is recommended once in a while), go to Disk Utility (Press Command + Spacebar and type disk utility + enter). Select the USB flash drive on the left side of the panel, and click on the Erase tab and choose ‘Erase Free Space…” You can select which method to erase (reclaim) the “empty space”.
Remember that the ‘Erase’ button on your Disk Utility window is a whole different kind of story, so do not press that one, unless you want to reformat and erase the whole data.
And remember that your Volume Format will probably be MS-DOS (FAT) file system which is fine since you might bring this thing into a friend’s PC . So my suggestion is that don’t use this ‘Erase’ button if you don’t know what you’re doing. (I learned the hard way, I reformatted the USB flash drive to MS-DOS (FAT) using my Mac on the other day, and now the PC won’t recognize it and it needs to be reformatted under PC )
If you find a bit disturbing by a bounching icon when it’s starting up, go to menu > Dock > Dock Preferences… In the Dock Preferences uncheck ‘Animate Opening Application’.
Now you have a pulse spot underneath the icon as the application opens.
You can hide the application that is running by clicking Command + h. This is very handy when for example the iTunes application. You can still listen to the music and hide the iTunes out of your desktop.
But what about if you just want to see only 1 application that you’re working on, while you want to hide all others in second? Some application will have the ‘Hide others’ feature. Right click the icon on the dock and press Option, you’ll see the ‘Hide’ menu will change to ‘Hide Others’.
And when you want to go to other application and keep the desktop clean, just press Option + click the icon on the Dock Now you have a very clean desktop.
In Leopard, stack will come in handy for managing files. When you set the stack as a grid or a fan, you can drag the file out of the stack directly.
Just click the icon in Stack and select the file and drag it to any folder, Mail.app, desktop, etc.
As a bonus while you are at stack, click the stack icon and press Command + a to highlight the application beginning with an A, Command + s for file beginning with S, and so on. You can also move around the stack by the arrow keys and press Return/Enter to open it.
When you empty the trash, the trash icon surely looks like it is empty. Is it really gone? Well, not really. By using an application that is specially design to recover the deleted files from a hard drive, it can be restored.
That notion is not accepted by a certain group of people especially the paranoid or the FBI, CIA, etc. But thanks to Mac OS X to include the feature to erase those files out of your machine forever. So when you absolutely, positively 100% sure that you want to erase these files forever, just go to Finder menu > Secure Empty Trash…
Thi process will take a little bit longer than usual, though
If you have a mobile device, such a MacBook, you’d better password protect it. When your device got stolen, at least they’ll have a hard time to see your private information.
You can assign the using Quicksilver. (If you find a way to trigger Applescript using the built in Mac OS X features, please let me know.)
This is due to, a poor driver collecion by ZTE, which replaces the original /usr/lib/libcurl.4.dylib with it’s version which has no 64 bit version in it.
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