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Category Archives: mac

Neo and the glitch in the Matrix…

You can obtain a copy of MS Office 2007 Beta for US$1.50. That beta, I believe, is valid for a year; and it’s a beta of a program that when released, will cost hundreds of dollars. You can obtain a copy of Neo Office 2.0 Beta (NeoOffice is a Mac OS X office suite, closely […]

Command line clipboard manipulation in Mac OS X

I wanted a good utility to manipulate the system clipboard from the bash shell. Turns out OS X has this really cool ability built-in. Two commands, pbcopy (copy TO clipboard) and pbpaste (paste FROM clipboard) do the job admirably. So this post was typed in good old Vim and saved. After that, cat blog.txt | […]

fortune, growl and Mac goodness

Just realized that unix fortune goodness is available on Mac OS X quite simply by typing: fink install fortune-mod (Fink can be obtained here). And of course, it can all be combined with growl goodness to produce this: Quite neat, eh? Well it’s quite simple, all you need is growlnotify, and to write a simple […]

Spell-check in Vim 7

One of the best new features in Vim 7 is built-in spell-check (although plugins for spellcheck have been available earlier). With spell-check, I can now use Vim exclusively for editing text formatted files – latex, blog entries and the like – in addition to code. Here’s a quick look at the various spell checking features. […]

Welcome, Macbook

So it is finally here. No surprises, so I guess the excitement from my part is muted. At 13.3 inches and 1280×1024 pixels, Core Duo processor, integrated iSight, Apple remote, Front row, and DVI output with extending display capabilities, it sure beats the hell out of the iBook it replaces. The only sad part – […]

Unacceptable: Hardware region locking on Mac

I’ve always hated the whole idea of region-locked DVDs. To play DVDs on your computer then requires getting a region-free drive, hacking your DVD drive’s firmware, or using region-unlocking software. Thankfully, I’ve always been able to get around this problem, mostly by using programs like VLC which normally play your DVD regardless of region. However, […]

Thunderbird, etc.

I have been looking to a way to link Thunderbird and Growl for showing me mail notification messages for a while now. Thanks to this post, I was able to get it working today. One issue I faced that I have four mail accounts in Thunderbird and I don’t care about three of them, but […]

The Mac DDD?

I’ve never really heard of this, so I’ve decided to call it the Mac Dimmed Dialog of Death. Happened to me for the first time today since I got my Mac, 14 months ago. I was always told that Mac OS X also crashes on occasion, never believed it till now. I was working on […]

Think brilliant

Apple’s has released Boot Camp, which basically allows installation of Windows XP on any Intel-based Macintosh computer. This means that Windows XP will now run natively on any Intel Mac at no extra charge (bootcamp, unlike Virtual PC, is free). This isn’t emulation, this isn’t virtualization, this is plain old installing Windows on a machine […]

A snitch of a screensaver

They say Mac software has a personality of its own, and it’s true. Just that sometimes one has personality clashes, if you know what I mean. I was bored with the default screensavers on the Mac and decided to install BigClock, which basically displays the time and date in a huge font on the screen. […]