BrT

I wanted to be able to send SMS from the command line to my phone automatically (e.g. to get notified of certain emails). I use Cablecom, which offer the service of sending SMS through a web interface to subscribers. I found smssend (a seemingly dead package, but still available in some distributions), which has a [...]

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I am a big fan of Things, the very nice task manager from Cultured Code. I keep both personal and work-related tasks in it, and in my Mac I have two accounts, for personal and work-related use. This leads to me having to run Things on both accounts, while sharing the same database. Here’s how [...]

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In one of my private blogs, I use the excellent IImage Gallery plugin to show photographs. After the upgrade to Wordpress 2.5, all of the posts with galleries started failing by showing the message “There is no gallery in this post”. After puzzling about it for a while, I realized that this plugin uses the [...]

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Here’s a simple one-liner I came up with to remove all HFS+ extended attributes on all files and directories below the current one in Mac OS X. Useful before creating a tar file that will be shared with non-Mac users (tar in OSX will create additional “resource” files to store extended attributes, which when untared [...]

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I’m trying to track down why some of my attachments keep being downloaded to ~/Library/Mail Downloads/ even after I have set my Downloads directory in Mail.app to ~/Downloads/. I haven’t found it yet, but in the process I wrote a quick script for searching for a regular expression in .plist files, converting them to XML [...]

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This is probably old news, but I just noticed that Google Transit has coverage for Switzerland, and it is now integrated with Google maps. This could be even handier to use than the native interfaces of the local public transport systems. It has both train and bus information, although it doesn’t seem to know about [...]

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This is the best productivity tip I have received in a long time, and it is surprisingly simple:

Keep a handwritten, detailed log of your daily activities.

I have been using GTD for some time now, and my problem has always remained in the last step: actually doing the things in my actions list. I [...]

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Following DrScofield’s instructions for setting up OpenSim , I thought I’d give it a try on my OSX laptop. The process is not quite as straightforward, but it works. Here’s what I did:

Download and install the Mono package for OSX from the Mono downloads page. If you don’t have subversion, install it. [...]

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I love Quicksilver, but the latest version crashes every once in a while. It’s not so frequent as to be really annoying, but the annoying part is that to re-launch it I have to go hunting in the Applications folder, or use Spotlight, none of which is an acceptable alternative being used to Quicksilver.

It occurred [...]

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The Unix getent command does not exist in OSX. Starting from 10.5 (Leopard), the administrative databases have changed from Netinfo to DirectoryService, and the main tool for looking things in DS is dscl (see also this article at afp548.com).

For example, to query a user by UID with getent, you would run:

getent passwd <uid>

With dscl, you [...]

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