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Advanced readline settings for bash in Terminal – Mac OS X Hints

7/1/2010 in System Software Notes, Unix Notes by face | No comments

The bash shell used in the Terminal application can be tweaked a little for better interactive experience, by saving the following lines as .intputrc in your home directory:

via Advanced readline settings for bash in Terminal – Mac OS X Hints.

The behavior of ‘bash’ is changed by more files that .bash_profile. In particular, the ‘readline’ settings are found in .inputrc – bashed my head against the wall for a while on a system that didn’t ignore case on filename completion.

inputrc

completion-ignore-case

Send websites and docs to iBooks

6/29/2010 in System Software Notes by face | No comments

With iTunes 9.2 and iOS 4, the iBooks 1.1 app for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch can store and view PDF files, together with EPUB files. If you want to quickly add a document or a web page to your Books collection in iTunes, all you need to do is to create an alias of iTunes and drag it to ~/Library/PDF Services. Now, when youre browsing the web or viewing documents and you decide that you want to read them later on a portable Apple device just hit Print, click the PDF button on the bottom left corner of the window and choose iTunes. iTunes will launch and receive the PDF. Next, sync your device and youre ready to go.

via Send websites and docs to iBooks – Mac OS X Hints.

Different email address by group

5/20/2010 in Applications Notes by face | No comments

Fortunately Address Book lets you set a default email address to use for each contact in the group. What’s more, this is on a per-group basis, so you can use a contact’s work email for one group and their home email for another group, for example.To do all this, choose Edit > Edit Distribution List. Click a group in the left column, then go through each email address, clicking the address you want to use for each contact the selected address is in bold:

via Mac Address Book tips: 5 more handy hints — Reality Distortion: Macs, Mac OS X, and Apple stuff.

Cliclick

4/20/2010 in Utilities Notes by face | No comments

“Cliclick” is short for “Command-Line Interface Click”. It is a a tiny shell / Terminal application that will emulate mouse clicks or series of mouse clicks including doubleclicks and control-clicks at arbitrary screen coordinates.

via Cliclick – Carsten Blüm: Mac Development.

This is such a nifty little tool. Want that shell script to do something?

Of course in the words of John Lennon – “Imagine there is no right-click”

How to use Facebook Chat with iChat

2/12/2010 in Applications Notes by face | No comments

First, find your Facebook username by going to http://www.facebook.com/your_user/. Next, Open iChat, then select iChat » Preferences and click on the Accounts tab.

Click on the + (plus) sign to add a new account, with these settings:

Account Type is Jabber Account

Account name is your_user@chat.facebook.com, and enter your password

Click the drop-down arrow to reveal Server options. Enter chat.facebook.com as the server name.

Enter 5222 as the port and click Done.

Click Done again, and you are good to go.

via How to use Facebook Chat with iChat – Mac OS X Hints.

Show only exact duplicate tracks in iTunes – Mac OS X Hints

1/8/2010 in Applications Notes by face | No comments

In iTunes, a very useful feature is the File » Show Duplicates menu item. As expected by its name, you can use this feature to help weed out duplicates from your iTunes library. However, many people (myself included) have different versions of songs, remixes and such, which will show up as duplicates when using this feature.

The solution is to hold down the option key prior to selecting this menu item. When you do, Show Duplicates changes to Show Exact Duplicates. In this mode, iTunes shows only true duplicates, and not remixes or alternate versions.

via Show only exact duplicate tracks in iTunes – Mac OS X Hints:

Oh this is so nice. I can get rid of a few (bunch) tunes that are replicants in so many ways.

Resetting your Mac’s PRAM and NVRAM

12/29/2009 in Misc Notes by face | No comments

Summary

This document explains how to reset the parameter random access memory (PRAM) and nonvolatile RAM (NVRAM) on Macintosh computers.

Important: If your computer does not retain parameter RAM (PRAM) settings when it is turned off, this generally indicates that the battery needs to be changed. Refer to Macintosh Family: Batteries and Part Numbers.

via Resetting your Mac’s PRAM and NVRAM.

Prevent a given partition from mounting at boot

12/25/2009 in Unix Notes by face | No comments

There are several hints on this site for unmounting a partition at login, but a better way to make this happen can be used. You need to create an entry point in your filesystem table to tell the OS not to mount that specific volume, and this is relatively easy. In Mac OS X, and under Linux and others unix systems, the volume mounting configuration file is located in /etc/fstab. This file in Mac OS X Tiger is empty in Panther, its commented, but type man fstab in Terminal to read some important information.

via Prevent a given partition from mounting at boot – Mac OS X Hints.

quotefixformac

11/17/2009 in System Software Notes by face | No comments

QuoteFix is a plug-in for Mail.app which fixes some issues with replying to e-mail:

it removes the signature from the original message

it removes certain unnecessary empty lines

it positions the cursor below the original message, instead of above it (in other words, bottom-posting instead of top-posting)

via quotefixformac – Project Hosting on Google Code.

W00T

Display contextual menus on Dock click-and-hold

11/6/2009 in System Software Notes by face | No comments

To use the old-style contextual menus when you click-and-hold on an applications icon in the Dock i.e. how it worked in 10.5 and earlier, type the following two commands in Terminal dont type the $:

defaults write com.apple.dock show-expose-menus -bool no; killall Dock

All credit for this hint goes to Jeff Johnson of Lap Cat Software, who blogged about the solution. This hint is a significant update to this one, which pointed out you can use Control-click to get the old-style contextual menus. [robg adds: To undo this behavior, you can either change no to yes in the above command, or delete the key entirely with defaults delete com.apple.dock show-expose-menus; killall Dock.]

via 10.6: Display contextual menus on Dock click-and-hold – Mac OS X Hints.

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