BrT

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 am easily [...]

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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. I personally like the [...]

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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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To use the new Wordpress 2.3 tags system with ecto, so you can set tags using the ecto side panel, the ecto configuration has to be changed from the default. The instructions are found in the ecto support forum (these instructions apply only to ecto3 – I don’t know how to do it for ecto2, [...]

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Update 1: I have modified the perl script to include Damon’s modification (see the comments) to make it work properly with the UTF-encoded Localizable.strings file used in recent 1Password versions.
Update 2: Somewhere around version 2.8.3 of 1Password there were some changes that make the original script not work anymore. I have updated the instructions and [...]

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It seems surprisingly difficult to map a keystroke to lock the screen in OSX – you can map a hot-corner to it, but if you prefer to use the keyboard, there is no official way to do it.
If you use QuickSilver (and why wouldn’t you?), you can set up a trigger (see also this tutorial) [...]

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