(Serious) Writing on the iPad

Mark Crump’s excellent thoughts. I agree with every word,

staff:

The Tumblr Backup app is ready for beta testing!

• Download (Mac OS X, requires 10.5 or higher)

Unlike other publishing sites’ approach to backups, our goal was to create a useful copy of your blog’s content that can be viewed on any computer, burned to a CD, or hosted as an archive of static HTML files.

Wherever possible, we use simple file formats. Our backup structure is optimized for Mac OS X’s Spotlight for searching and Quick Look for browsing, and we’ll try to use the same structure and achieve the same benefits on other platforms.

Release notes:

• Sorry, there’s no Windows version yet.
• The output is minimally styled in a plain theme to ensure complete backups, zero external requirements, and a consistent data structure. Custom theme code is included in the backup as a separate file.
• To view the backup in a browser, open the index.html file.
• Photosets are not yet fully downloaded.
• The following are not backed up:
  • Private tumblelogs
  • Submissions
  • Notes
  • Feed-imported posts
  • Audio files from reblogged posts
• You can launch the app every few days and re-run the backup in the same place, and it effectively performs an incremental media backup: image and audio files are only re-downloaded if they don’t already exist in the target folder. Text content and post data are re-downloaded in full every time.
• If you have private posts, be careful if you make the backup publicly available. Private posts are included in a private folder, and their images or audio files are included in the standard images and audio folders.
• Are you a programmer? Each post’s XML data, as specified by our API, is embedded inside an easily-parsed-out HTML comment in each post’s HTML file, in case you want to do anything cool with it.

(via marco)

IRC Limechat, Hello

I think that I remember downloading Limechat when I was first testing out IRC clients for the Mac, but that could just be wishful thinking on my part to try to cover up the fact that I have missed this great tool for so long. One window management, no irritating extra notification windows, a clean and simple interface, and most importantly tab completion. I have dowloaded it to all teh Macs, and am confident I will be switching permanently.

onethingwell:

Cog is a simple, lightweight music player for OS X.

Neat Little OSX Trick

One thing that I do frequently on OSX is hide applications. You can do this easily from the keyboard, with command-h. To get a visual reminder from the dock about which applications you have running, but are hidden enter the following into the command prompt: 

defaults write com.apple.Dock showhidden -bool YES 

and follow that up by restarting the dock:

killall Dock

That will restart your dock, and when it does, hidden programs will have transparent icons in the dock! Neat!

Not a minute to soon

I didn’t move onto tumblr a minute to soon, since my trusty old Linux server went kaputs today. Ouch. After all this time, where is the love? I don’t know when I will be able to perform surgery, I have many very busy days ahead of me, so, wow.

I will eventually get the machine back up, or at the least I will get my information off it, and move it to the new blog, but until then… we are left with tumblr, and the most recent blog posts. Good thing I like tumblr!

Old Blog?

If you are looking for my old blog, I have moved to tumblr for a bit so that I can get my feet under me while I evaluate my Wordpress 3 upgrade/install. Not that I am particularly worried about being able to upgrade, but I am evaluating the usefulness of the blog, and whether I want to continue with it, or simply use tumblr. The old blog is still running, and I may link to it here, whenever I get the A-Record names straight. Regardless, enjoy the new look of the pleb, the technology curated version of my thoughts. You can always view the non curated version of my thoughts here. Good luck with that.

OpenBSD, bad sectors

Had some fun on the command line this morning, just wanted to drop a note say how glad I am for command line kung fu. The hiccup started when I plugged in one of my Soekris OpenBSD firewalls that I needed to change the hostname on. It gave me a disk error on bootup. Fortunately, I was viewing it over the console, instead of SSH’ing in. The actual message said.

One or more disk properties is wrong! Help!

That was certainly encouraging. It asked for the path to the shell or enter for default. Fortunately, I know where bash was located, having made a point to install it (not that I hate ksh or anything).

/bin/bash

If I had dropped to the default sh, I would not have been able to run:

fsck

Which checked my disk, found the errors and auto suggested the actual values. How excellent is that? I just had to hit ‘y’ a few times and reboot. Of course, fsck is a powerful tool that can do a number of things, but in this case, I just had to know that it does error checking on my disk. Didn’t even need to run any options! How is that for a fun morning?

jitouch, MagicMouse Unlocked

Found this awesome little app called jitouch the other day, finally decided that I like it more than BetterTouchTool, which I still highly recommend. Both programs unlock the potential of the Magic Mouse in a big way. I found that I liked the jitouch implementation enough to spend $5 on it, and keep it for my main tool. There is an amazing Safari tab changer built in, this makes it indispensable to me. I am already addicted to it. Also, it was apparently a runner up for the Ars Design Awards.

BetterTouchTool is donationware, and certainly worthy of your attention, it may even be a little more flexible than jitouch; if you can imagine it, you can do it with BetterTouchTool.

NTFS on your Mac

Macs can read most thumbdrives fine. FAT32, which is what ships on most thumbdrives, is read natively. Occasionally, however, you may find occasion to want to read and write NTFS formatted drives. I know that I had that situation when I had saved a backup of an older computer to an external drive, then reformatted the computer. When I plugged the drive into my Mac to retrieve the files, I found that it was formatted NTFS! Dang!

This is what you need to do; it is actually quite simple. Download MacFUSE and install it. It installs as a preference pane. Then grab Tuxera NTFS and install that. It is technically experimental, but it gave me no problems whatsoever. Good luck on your journey from Windows into happiness (OSX).

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