As the day when my book ships grows ever closer (just over a week now) I thought I’d better clean up this site a bit by creating a new theme. Initially I was just going to replace WordPress with TextPattern (which seems much more flexible in both design and content organization), but I didn’t want to break any existing links or deal with that associated migration chaos. (This switch however is not be out of the question.) So anyway I’ve activated the new theme, however, at this moment it’s not quite polished so for the moment you may find some visual glitches as I work everything out (the new theme is quite a bit different from the old one). If you notice something a bit off or have suggestions feel free to send a message my way. My goal is to have everything looking and working well by the ship date (12/17).
You can add a very useful stack to your dock that can display a variety of you recent or favorite items. Do do this simply enter the following commands in the terminal:
defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-others -array-add '{ "tile-data" = { "list-type" = 1; }; "tile-type" = "recents-tile"; }'
killall Dock
You can then select what items you want this item to display from the stacks contextual menu.
Personally I like to leave it on “Favorite Items” which correspond to the user selectable locations under “PLACES” in the Finders side bar.
Poking around the stuff installed by the latest Leopard 10.5.1 update, I noticed something exciting I hadn’t seen before: pkgutil. This command line tool apparently allows you to finally manage installed packages using a package database (a SQLite database located in /Library/Receipts/db/). At the moment this tool is far from perfect, I’ve noticed some strange data here (inaccurate install paths), plus it seems that the package must be designed to write data to the database, so it currently doesn’t track all packages. One important thing to note: it appears that this tool could be potentially damaging to your system. According to the man page, will allow to remove the files installed by any package without any dependancy checking, so you could really screw yourself with this. (I actually haven’t tried to remove anything myself, so I’m trusting the docs here). Still the existence of this tool is an extremely hopeful sign of real package management on OS X. Check it out with man pkgutil, but use caution.
Today Apple whisked out the first update for Leopard: 10.5.1. This seems to fix a host of bugs in the initial release, some minor, some a bit more serious. I used the System Update tool and installed it with no problems. A list of some of the things fixed can be found here.
Another way to launch Time Machine Manually (expanding on this post) is a nice new Time Machine Launcher Dashboard Widget. This will allow you to manually launch Time Machine without having the Time Machine icon taking up space in your dock.
Ok, [cmd]+[space] (by default) opens the spotlight search field. But [opt]+[cmd]+[space] will go beyond that and open up a Spotlight Window listing all the contents of your mac listed in by the time they were last opened. This list includes Applications, files, safari history, and more. This shortcut it listed under the Spotlight section of Keyboard Shortcuts tab in the Keyboard & Mouse System Preferences pane as “Show Spotlight Window” so it can be remapped. It sort of makes the whole “Recent Items” item the Apple menu seem somewhat inadequate.
from Amazon, or check out the