BrT

Musings about technology and other neat stuff

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PocketModMac: MacOSX PocketMod Generator Via Print Dialog – A cool way of printing in PocketMod format from any MacOSX application (tags: pocketmod macosx tools productivity printing )
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Big Nerd Ranch Weblog PagePacker makes pocket-sized books – Little gem of an app to put anything into PocketMod format. Despite the warnings in the page, the downloadable version is not expired, and it works fine in Leopard. (tags: pocketmod productivity macosx tools howto )
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Call Me Fishmeal.: iPhone App Store: Let the Market Decide – Nice article about the Apple App Store, censorship of applications, and how Apple could solve most problems without resorting to censorship. (tags: apple interesting osx iphone appstore )
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El Tramo » Building Fancy DMG Images on Mac OS X – How to build fancy disk images (with background images ,etc.) on Mac OS X, plus some ways to automate the process from the command line (tags: macosx dmg image howto reference )
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Tim Dysinger Installing GIT on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard – Instructions for building git from source, a link to the pre-built git installer package, and (most valuable for me) a list of interesting configuration settings for git. (tags: git howto tutorial macosx tips programming )
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Complete the Cure: Watch Videos and Raise Money for Research to Cure Childhood Cancer – A simple way to contribute to childhood cancer research. Each video lasts ~30 seconds. (tags: none)
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John McCain Gets BarackRoll'd – Really well done video. (tags: none)
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Fabiola Aimée

September 8th, 2008 · 2 Comments   

Fabiola at birthFabiola at 2.5 months old Two and a half months ago, on June 26th, 2008, my second daughter, Fabiola Aimée, was born! She was born healthy and weighing 3,160g. I am only now getting to post about her (I tweeted about her birth, although I was so tired I posted the wrong name), but it has been an amazing time since then. If having our first daughter was the best thing that ever happened to me, having a second one has made it even better, and makes our little family feel more complete. She is now a big smiling baby, laughs all the time with her big sister Karina, and keeps both mom and dad busy all day long. It has been great to relive all the moments of holding that tiny little person in your arms, to look at her and how she starts to discover the world. I always thought parents were being corny when they said having kids was the best thing that ever happened to them, but that’s exactly how it feels!

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Adding growl notification to Raymond Page’s bash prompt code

September 8th, 2008 · No Comments   

Update (2008/09/10): Giles Orr kindly pointed out that he is not the author of the bash prompt package I use, I have updated to give proper credit to the author, Raymond Page.

For some time I have used Raymond Page’s bash prompt code (heavily based on the work by Giles Orr in the Bash Prompt HOWTO, you can get it at http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_Prompt_Magic or http://code.google.com/p/homenix/source/browse/, you need to get .prompt, .prompt_functions and .prompt_config from the trunk/ directory), which I like very much because it is highly customizable, and although a lot of the functions are Linux-specific, it can easily be made to work on Mac OS X. It features context-dependent prompt colorization (e.g. based on whether the current directory is writable and on the machine load), automatic shortening of the prompt based on window width, and many other features.

More recently, I came across this hint for producing Growl notifications for shell commands that run for more than a predefined length of time, which I find extremely useful for knowing when those commands have finished.

Because both rely on some of the same mechanisms in bash, merging them is not completely straightforward. Here’s what I did:

  1. Download and install .preexec.bash as instructed in the hint.
  2. Add the preexec() function and preexec_install call to your .bashrc or .bash_login file (as instructed)
  3. Add the code from the precmd() function in the hint to the preexisting precmd() function in the .prompt file. I added it at the end. This is the main difference from what is described in the hint. I added it at the very end of the function.

That’s it – a nice bash prompt with growl notifications for long-running commands.

Posted by email from zzamboni’s posterous

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Updated script for defining a new wallet item in 1Password

September 8th, 2008 · No Comments   

If you have been using my method for defining new wallet items in 1Password, you may have noticed that in recent versions the display of those new items has been broken. I have updated the instructions and the script to work with the recent changes, you can get it from the same page.

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