Confessions of a cat

Especially when you’re in public spaces or at home, late into the night and do not want to disturb people around you with a stupid chirpy chime sound - the “startup sound preference pane” comes very handy, since there is no option in OS X (at least in tiger and leopard) to turn off the startup sound.

Hearing the windows xp / vista startup sound is also annoying but at least there is a way to turn them off in the GUI in windows. Lots of people do not do that of course. Now that I am sitting in the drupalcon conference in Szeged, Hungary I see that most geeks use Apple laptops (macbook and macbook pro 15″ are the most used). However if you forget to turn down or mute completely the system volume when you switch it on, lots of people will be distracted around you. You do not want anyone to be aware of you in most cases, especially when you are just turning on your laptop. Who the hell (should) care(s)? So be kind and grab and install the below system preference pane, and use the ‘mute’ option in it. Pleeeeeeeease…!

http://www5e.biglobe.ne.jp/~arcana/software.en.html

mirror on rapidshare

mirror on filefactory

Screenshots:

On Windows and OSX you still have a pretty basic clipboard by default which only allows you to store one item at a time. However if you’re editing text / code there are moments when you’d be happy if the clipboard could store multiple items (for instance you are rearranging a long function and copying from different places of it to the beginning of it). Switching / scrolling back and forth multiple times just to edit your shit is kind of annoying. So what could be done?

Get jumpcut. Install it. It will install a menubar item and while it is running all clipboard copies / cuts (CTRL+C / CTRL+X) will be saved in jumpcut as well. And by default it sets up a new shortcut (CTRL+ALT + V), which allows you to choose from the multiple items sitting in its clipboard. Once you pop it up with the shortcut, hold your fingers on CTRL+ALT and use the arrow keys to pick the item from the clipboard you want. It is wonderful.

Enjoy and save some time.

I already have written about opening and viewing windows compiled html help format files (.chm) on osx before. They are nice and useful because they contain html files, all compressed into one easily transferrable file. Unfortunately despite this format being quite popular in the windows world, OS X has its own help file format. OS X also prefers pdf files. However me being a coder guy, I have several ebooks in this file format, and sometimes I make my own chm files - e.g. downloading a complete website and compressing it into this file format. 

For instance, I am dealing with drupal as well, and I do not like to always pop up a web browser to look for api docs. The guy at hiveminds.co.uk has compiled API docs for drupal 5 / 6 here: v5, v6. Have a look at it, if interested.

My previous best chm viewer was chimp. It was working OK, but there was no universal binary (intel) version of it. So it had PPC code only, and thus run quite slowly on my core2 duo machine. Too bad. Now almost a year has passed, and somehow I felt the need to look for an other viewer (before starting to code one myself ;D). So it happened that I have found iChm. This is the best chm file viewer available for OS X. It requires OS X 10.5 at least, so if you have not yet updated your Tiger install - please do it now.

Again, the URL for this very nice and fine app is here:

http://www.robinlu.com/blog/ichm/

Here’s the feature list lifted from his site:

Features

• Fully built with Cocoa. No ugly window and slow rendering.
• Tab browsing
• Search. Result sorted by relevance.
• Text encoding detecting/switching
• Find in the page
• Tag powered bookmark
• Back/Forward
• Text zoom
• Locate current document in table of content