Ryan Tomayko

Mac OS X SSD tweaks —

Great set of tips for eking out disk performance on MacOS X, like disabling last access time tracking. These are just as useful in non-SSD configs.

Notes on using NetBSD’s pkgsrc on Mac OS X —

I’ve dumped MacPorts for pkgsrc. This quick tutorial helped me get going and this package browser is awesome.

The Menubar Challenge —

I didn’t realize how much shit I had in my menu bar until I went through and did this:

There is a tried and true uncluttering trick for your home and office used by many professional and highly paid “Organizational Consultants”. It involves taking everything you own, save for the bare essentials, and moving it into storage. For a set period of time, retrieve items from the store when needed. Anything not accessed after said set period of time you likely do not really need and should be disposed of.

I have no idea why I ever had Sync (don’t use), TimeMachine (don’t use), Growl (useless), or Bluetooth (useless) enabled.

SmartSleep —

Interesting looking prefpane for MacOS X that tweaks some sleep settings:

“Just ‘sleep’ means that the notebook will go to sleep fast, but you loose the ability to change the battery. Just ‘sleep and hibernate’ will wake the computer fast, but sleeping will take ages as the contents of the memory are saved to disk before entering the sleep. MacOS uses ‘sleep and hibernate’ all the time by default. SmartSleep lets your notebook just ‘sleep’ while the battery has a high level. If the battery level drops below a certain point ( default is less then 20% or 20 minutes ) it will switch to ‘sleep and hibernate’. So you have the best of both worlds.”

Firefox 3 optimized builds for G5 / Intel —

Right on time.

Plainview - A full-screen web browser for Mac —

Free (as in beer). Built on WebKit. Simple. Beautiful.

LimeChat: IRC Client for OSX —

I think I may finally be able to get rid of Colloquy.

DTerm - A command line anywhere and everywhere —

Payware GUI shell thingy for MacOS. This is not a QuickSilver/Launchbar clone. It’s more like a magical bash interpreter that knows things about what’s happening in various Mac GUI applications (like Finder, Safari, etc).

NetNewsWire is now free! —

I wonder why newsgator would make this free. Seems like there was a pretty decent slate of paying users. Losing ground to Google Reader? Eventual ad placement? Just wanted to be nice? Weird.

Using a Mac…why oh why? —

“It all started with Windows Vista”

macvim - Google Code —

Absolutely beautiful new Vim port for OS X – sane GUI tabs, multiple windows, client/server mode, fonts look great. Stop building Carbon Vim from source!

Bwana —

Manual page URL handler for Safari (e.g., “man:bash”, “man:sort” in URL box). References to other man pages are hyperlinked very nicely and the pages themselves are formatted quite nicely.

Prism Prototype Now Available on Mac and Linux —

That was quick. IMO, the Mac needs this application more than other platform’s (including Windows) because of its document oriented application switching.

Shipping Means Prioritizing —

“No important software for the Mac depends on Java.”

Mac Fonts @ OSX-E —

Blatant license violation!

Open Letter to Jonathan Schwartz from NeoOffice.org —

Best Open Letter Ever. Add your signature!

Ten OS X Command Line Utilities you might not know about [osxdaily.com] —

About half of these will be well-known to the UNIX hacker but there’s a couple I’ve not seen elsewhere: lsbom, softwareupdate, screencapture, and lipo.

Exploring the Mac OS X Firewall [macdevcenter.com] —

Awesome look at using advanced features of ipfw(8) on OS X.

Using mutt on OS X [linsec.ca] —

This is pretty darn close to my configuration but I used the mutt-devel port… Oh, and my ~/.procmailrc is pretty insane also :)

Vi Input Manager Plugin —

“Essentially, this add Vi command functionality (albeit a small subset) to any (and all) text editors that use the Cocoa text system; e.g., Safari, TeXShop, XCode, etc.”

Bill Gates (clearly on crack): "Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day." —

“Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine.”

Updated vim binaries for OS X 10.3, 10.4 —

Vim 7.0.188 Universal and PPC binaries are up.

Jan. 22, 1984: Dawn of the Mac [wired.com] —

“But the company’s board of directors balked and ordered the ad withdrawn from its Super Bowl slot. Only the intervention of Steve Wozniak, who said he’d pay for the spot personally if the board refused to air it, saved the day.”

In Which I Think About Java Again, But Only For A Moment —

“… but I gave up after optimizing AWT, implementing drag and drop, and trying to make 1,200 pages of crappy APIs do the right thing on the Mac. Then I took a one-week Cocoa training course, and wrote the first prototype of iChat.”

Fully licensed —

“I hope you can wipe the screen off!” — I fell off my chair.

New Ipod!!!!! (SNL) [youtube.com] —

The original SNL / Steve Jobs skit. This is a classic as far as I’m concerned.

Steve Jobs iPhone on Weekly Update [youtube.com] —

Nails it.

Graffletopia - Stencils for OmniGraffle —

Rock on.

Vienna —

Nice looking Newsreader for Mac OS X (F/OSS with an Apache 2.0 license and public subversion repository).

SeamlessRDP —

Seamless window support for rdesktop (and perhaps Cocoa Remote Desktop). Similar to Parallel’s Coherence Mode for RDP.

Cocoa Remote Desktop —

A Cocoa port of rdesktop. Universal Binary, multiple concurrent sessions, no X11 makes it the best RDP client for Mac on paper.

Introducing the MacBook Pro —

Holy crap I can’t wait to get my hands on this.

Mac OS X Things - Disable Dashboard —

I wanted to like it but…

Apple - iTunes - Podcasting —

bout' time

The Apple Blog - Quicksilver Changes Everything —

Seriously.

Python Metadata Importer —

A Spotlight Plugin that imports and indexes Python source code. w00t!

Everything You Need to Know to Install Tiger —

Will be useful if amazon ever decides to ship my stuff.

Preparing for Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) Installation -- Avoiding issues before and after updating —

Notes on stuff that should be backed up and other tips for a smooth upgrade. The comment thread looks promising as well with everyone reporting in with problems and opinion.

Clutter by Sprote Rsrch. —

“Clutter is a small Mac OS X application that lets you put music CDs on your desktop. You can drag them anywhere. Line them up neatly or put them in piles, it’s your choice.”

Mac mini As A Home Media Server —

Some discussion on turning the new Mac Mini into a Media PC for the living room.

Mac mini —

Apple’s Mac Mini product page.

Mac Mini Porn! —

Oh, this is big. $500 Mac Mini.