Courtesy of twitter user @hotdogsladies (). Pithy, always brilliant:
via @hotdogsladies (June 3, 2009)
“Star Reviews
(ordered by typical usefulness)1. ★★★
2. ★★
3. ★★★★
4. ★★★★★
5. ★”
AppleJack wins MacWorld Editor’s Choice Award
0 Comments Published January 9th, 2009 in Reviews & NoticesA UPS delivery woman appears. There’s a big box on her shoulder.
—Please sign here, she says.
I sign. I look at the address of origin. Not even the faintest flicker of recognition. Who or what?
I open the box. Inside the box is the largest and heaviest trophy I’ve ever received. It’s a sixteen inch, bronze and gold plated statue featuring an androgynous, futuristic, vaguely human being holding aloft—what is it, a Mac SE 30? At it’s base, the words: “2008 MacWorld Editor’s Choice Awards, AppleJack 1.5, The Apotek.” Come to think of it, the statue shares some characteristics with an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences award (a.k.a. the Oscar): mute, muscular, angular, yet poised for eternal calm.
Continue reading ‘AppleJack wins MacWorld Editor’s Choice Award’
Background
I sometimes use my Treo 680 as a voice recorder to capture ideas for songs. For a long time I thought all the files were being backed up to my Mac. It wasn’t until I had to do a hard reset, that I realized they were not restored to the Voice Memo application as selectable voice memos. They were still on my Treo, but I couldn’t get to them or play them.
When I looked through my Palm user data files on my Mac I saw that they were in the backup folder as vpad.pdb files.
[ ~/Documents/Palm/Users/palm_username/Backups] $ ls -al | grep Vpad
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 5430 Jul 5 20:13 07-10-22-16-32-Vpad.pdb
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 3782 Jul 5 20:13 07-10-22-16-322-Vpad.pdb
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 188406 Jul 5 20:13 07-11-14-1-24-Vpad.pdb
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 64214 Jul 5 20:13 07-11-20-18-22-Vpad.pdb
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 11590 Jul 5 20:13 07-11-20-18-222-Vpad.pdb
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 79030 Jul 5 20:13 07-11-20-18-23-Vpad.pdb
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 84390 Jul 5 20:13 07-11-20-18-25-Vpad.pdb
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 40790 Jul 5 20:13 07-11-25-19-38-Vpad.pdb
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 60518 Jul 5 20:13 07-3-16-21-37-Vpad.pdb
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 107014 Jul 5 20:13 07-3-20-0-19-Vpad.pdb
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 28038 Jul 5 20:13 07-3-20-0-23-Vpad.pdb
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 43270 Jul 5 20:13 07-3-20-0-25-Vpad.pdb
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 425270 Jul 5 20:13 07-7-24-1-45-Vpad.pdb
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 131254 Jul 5 20:13 07-8-5-0-25-Vpad.pdb
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 317942 Jul 5 20:13 07-8-5-22-36-Vpad.pdb
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 333974 Jul 5 20:13 07-9-17-23-06-Vpad.pdb
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 278870 Jul 5 20:13 08-2-10-18-31-Vpad.pdb
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 85606 Jul 5 20:13 08-5-20-21-25-Vpad.pdb
However, there were no playable audio files where I expected to find them (/Users/username/Documents/Palm/Users/palm_username/Voice%20Memo/). That was when I realized that the hotsync conduit for Voice Memo did not work, and never had been working. There seems to be some incompatibility between the Treo 680 voice memo files and Mac OS X. I don’t see why this has not been fixed yet, but whatever the cause of this negligence on the part of the developers, I was stuck with a bunch of Vpad.pdb files that I could no longer access on my Palm or play on my Mac. Some of them were extremely important to me, containing ideas for an upcoming album.
Details of my scenario:
Palm Treo 680 running Palm OS Garnet v. 5.4.9
Voice Memo version 1.4
HotSync Voice Memo conduit version 1.0 (so that's why!!! :-) )
Mac OS X 10.4.11
Nevertheless, I felt fairly confident that embedded in these pdb files were some kind of normal audio file format. I could not imagine that Palm would have invented an entirely proprietary compressed audio format.
Continue reading ‘Recovering vpad.pdb files from a Palm Treo 680 with Mac OS X’
While BBEdit has a great tool for comparing and applying changes between files, it does not generate standard .patch files that can be used for bug reports, code fixes, and change logging.
BBDiff will compare the contents of the frontmost window to the contents of the window just behind it, and will use the diff command line tool to generate diff output which is then pasted into a new BBEdit window for saving or pasting into a Web site.
The command line called by BBDiff by default is:
diff -up newfile oldfile
You can modify this by simply changing the diffopts property at the top of the script.
Using your t-mobile Treo 680 as internet access point via Bluetooth with Mac OS X
11 Comments Published April 23rd, 2007 in TechniquesHere is the technique I used in order to be able to connect my MacBook Pro to the Internet through my t-mobile Treo 680’s internet access. Please note: You need full internet access from t-mobile, not just the $5.95/month e-mail and WAP package they sell.
This worked for me, but I make no guarantee that this will work for you. I’m posting it in the hopes it will be helpful to you, but I do not intend to offer support or advice through this posting, as there are too many factors involved for me to do it effectively without turning it into a full-time job. So, yes, you’re on your own, but at least you might get some ideas and hints here. While I will not be posting or responding to questions for help; if you have any edits or suggestions in order to make this posting clearer or otherwise better, I will certainly welcome such feedback.
Background: While reading this thread on this topic at TreoCentral <http://discussion.treocentral.com/newreply.php?do=newreply&p=1153461>, I noticed there were no instructions or hints being provided for the Mac, so I decided to see if it could be done.
Technorati Tags: bluetooth, DUN, internet access, Mac OS X, palm, t-mobile, treo 680
[QUOTE=TopTenTodd;1153461]How about for Mac?[/QUOTE]
I did the following steps using a MacBook Pro running Mac OS X 10.4.8, with the “palm Treo 680 PDA Phone (Unlocked)” (PALM) over t-mobile’s network.
Continue reading ‘Using your t-mobile Treo 680 as internet access point via Bluetooth with Mac OS X’
Convoluted title, eh? After many years of intermittently being miffed when I couldn’t just type cd /NameofAlias and have the bash shell transport me into the directory the alias pointed to, I finally decided to do something about it.
First stop: Mac OS X Hints, where I looked at these two hints:
Enable ‘cd’ into directory aliases from the Terminal
A script to reveal alias paths in the Terminal
From the insight gained there, I cobbled together my one-step solution to the problem…
Continue reading ‘Making the Mac OS X bash shell alias and symlink agnostic’
AppleJack 1.3.2 fixes a serious bug associated with File Vault use that could wipe large sections of a user’s hard drive. In addition, AppleJack has been retooled to operate much more securely while doing file deletions. An added feature in this release is an automatic check for the /tmp directory (often implicated in boot problems). If the /tmp directory is not found, it is recreated (symlink to /private/var/tmp). Enjoy.
Full change log follows…
Continue reading ‘AppleJack v. 1.3.2 released.’
AppleJack is a user friendly troubleshooting assistant for Mac OS X. AppleJack lets you troubleshoot a computer even when you can’t load the GUI, or don’t have a startup CD handy. AppleJack runs in Single User Mode and is menu-based for ease of use.
AppleJack 1.3 allows you to:
- Repair your hard drive
- Repair permissions
- Validate .plist preference files and remove them if they are damaged
- Clear out system and user cache files
- Delete obstinate swap files
all without having to remember any other command than ‘applejack’.
This is an AppleScript for quickly reporting spam to SpamCop from within Eudora. This version fixes the format of submissions to SpamCop to comply with SpamCop’s new, more strict header parsing routines.
FEATURES:
- Quickly and automatically queues a properly formatted spam report to your outbox
- Submission of multiple selected messages at one invocation.
- If message has been left on server, script can be configured to set that message to be deleted.
- Attachments to the spam are deleted automatically, with or without notification, according to user preferences.
- Script can mark the spam as read, and can optionally trash it or move it to the Junk folder.
Download & Enjoy!
Unfortunately, there aren’t adequate verbs in Eudora’s AppleScript dictionary for a robust implementation of the Junk mail feature. Moving an e-mail to the Junk folder does assign a score of 100 to it (though it takes a while to see that), but I’m not sure if it properly updates the Bayesian filters the way the Junk command does. Consider it a workaround implementation until we either get native verbs for it, or until keystroke programming becomes standard in Mac OS X.
* This script is intended for Mac OS X v 10.2.x and up, and Eudora 6.x, but might also work with Eudora 5.2, though obviously without the Junk mail functionality.
Continue reading ‘Eudora to SpamCop v 1.2. Fixes submission format’
XJanitor-PL: Surefire Periodic Maintenance for Mac OS X (Now with a controller)
Closed Published December 5th, 2003 in ToolsThis updated version of XJanitor.pl includes an AppleScript controlled system whereby which you can turn maintenance off for discreet periods of time (when giving a presentation, or if you’re working on a video editing project and don’t want any heavy disk usage by any other processes). Also, the script has been improved, and has much better console output than before. Lastly, if you change the way the script is called by Chron, you can make sure maintenance won’t run when your laptop is running off the battery.
Since a lot of Macs aren’t used as 24-hour servers, and are often sleeping or simply shut down, using Cron the old fashioned way doesn’t really hold up for regular UNIX maintenance to be performed.
I have written a Perl script that simply checks to see how long it’s been since a particular task has been performed, compares the time with how often that task should be performed, and if necessary, executes the task. The script is extensible to any maintenance tasks that output to a log file (and any task can be made to do so). The script also includes the option to send you an e-mail (but only if the task(s) have been executed) including full script output.
Please note: You must have administrative privileges on your Mac in order to install and run this script.
Continue reading ‘XJanitor-PL: Surefire Periodic Maintenance for Mac OS X (Now with a controller)’
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