BrT

Musings about technology and other neat stuff

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Faster version of “Clean downloads stack”

December 10th, 2008 · No Comments

For some time I have been using this technique (with the variation mentioned in my comment: use the application also as the stack overlay icon) to clean my Downloads stack in the OSX dock. The only problem with using an Automator app is that it is quite slow, so I have replaced it with a [...]

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Using automator to download desktop pictures (howto)

December 6th, 2008 · No Comments

I get most of my desktop background pictures from either vladstudio or the NASA Image of the Day site, both excellent sources of fantastic images. To make it easier to fetch a particular image, I have created two Automator workflows, which you can download here:
Get image from Vladstudio.zip
Get image from NASA image of the day.zip
To [...]

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Booting from an external DVD drive using Firewire Target Disk Mode

November 30th, 2008 · No Comments

This is documented by Apple but I had never realized it: if you put a Mac in Firewire Target Disk Mode, its DVD drive is also available, and it can be used to boot, for example, a machine that does not have a DVD drive (hold down Option while turning the machine on to access [...]

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How to trick an RHEL5 client install to use server RPMs

October 22nd, 2008 · No Comments

For one of my projects at work, I am using a test install of RHEL5 in “workstation” mode, but I needed to install some packages that are only available in the “server” package list. To temporarily make yum search the server repositories, just change the following line in /etc/sysconfig/rhn/up2date:
versionOverride=5Server
(normally the value [...]

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Easy video conversion in Mac OS X

October 10th, 2008 · No Comments

After a lot of searching (and trying iMovie) for how to convert an AVI video file to flash (.flv) format, I found ffmpegX, a nice tool that does all the hard work, invoking other tools in the backend as needed.
Posted by email from zzamboni’s posterous

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Synchronizing 1Password data between two local accounts (howto)

September 29th, 2008 · No Comments

I am a big fan of the incredibly useful 1Password. The latest beta release (2.8.3.BETA-11) introduces a new keychain format that, among other things, allows 1Password to detect changes made to the file by other programs and reload the changes on the fly. I am using this now to keep my 1P data synchronized between my work and [...]

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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, [...]

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Sending SMS through the Cablecom (hispeed.ch) web interface (howto)

June 14th, 2008 · 3 Comments

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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How to use Things on two accounts on the same machine

May 23rd, 2008 · No Comments

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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How to fix IImage Gallery pages after update to Wordpress 2.5

May 13th, 2008 · No Comments

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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