In my last post I shared tips I had learned from others and I got a new comment from Devburke telling me about the Dictionary Lookup Shortcut - Control-Command-D. Sounded terrific! Unfortunately it didn't work on my MacBook. I tried a couple of different things, including changing the shortcut key but had no luck. I did what any techie does when confronted with a problem - Google it up. I found a couple of articles, at Apple and MacKB where people experienced the same thing. It appears … [Read more...]
Mac: Learning from others
May 8, 2008 By
Lately the traffic on this blog has been picking up and with it the comments on some posts. In the last couple of days alone I've gotten some really cool little esoteric tips. Here are some that I just had to mention: Zoomerific Simon Elliot told me that Ctrl-Scroll Wheel (or Ctrl-Two Finger Track Pad) Zooms the entire screen. Once it's zoomed you can move the mouse around and it scrolls the now larger image. If I ever sit at my computer and forget my glasses I can zoom this thing so … [Read more...]
Mac: After two months of Mac, here’s why I switched
May 7, 2008 By
When I started this blog two months ago I began recording my initial thoughts on obtaining a Mac. While I am not a card carrying Mac fanboy (it does have issues like any piece of technology), I wanted to try and summarize why I like the Mac so much now that I've been using it heavily for the last two months. I have been a Windows user and software developer since 1992, and a DOS user and developer since 1984. I used to hate Macs and as recently as 9 months ago my avatar on one of my … [Read more...]
Startup 101: How to pick the right business partner
May 6, 2008 By
In the late 80s as a young man I was at a party with my wife's family. There were many very successful business people there that I had conversations with. There was one discussion in particular that I still remember to this day, 20 years later. When I told Tony that I was interested in starting my own business at some point he said: "David, whatever you do, don't get a partner. Just do it on your own." Funny how some things just stick in your head. At the time he … [Read more...]
Mac: Traveling naked
May 5, 2008 By
One of the interesting things that happened while I was on my recent trip was that I wrote about coconutWiFi and someone else mentioned that I should take a look at iStumbler. It pays to read the comments on this blog because every time I come up with something I think is cool someone says "Check this out..." and I find even more. iStumbler is great for getting more information than just which networks are in range; it gives you signal strength and quickly shows you other … [Read more...]
Mac: VHS to MP4 – digitizing the oldies
May 2, 2008 By
If you have older kids and they are anything like mine, they love watching videos of themselves when they were younger. All three of my kids have been heavily documented throughout their childhood and I have the media to prove it! The first video camera my wife and I had was a large VHS based camera. It was huge because it was an entire 1980s era VCR that you mounted on your shoulder. We had this behemoth to record the memories of our first two children and as a result have a slew of … [Read more...]
Mac: Terminal tricks while flying
May 1, 2008 By
While flying back from California today I figured I'd use some of my down time to play with my MacBook and see what I could learn. I found a couple of really cool little tricks for the terminal: You can control the opacity of a shell window, making it slightly transparent. This is really handy when you are following a series of directions on an underlying web page - no need to switch back and forth between windows. On a machine with a smaller display this is pretty … [Read more...]
VMWare Fusion and Visual Studio 2008 Express Edition
April 29, 2008 By 1 Comment
I'm traveling right now and don't have access to all of my normal development tools but since I do have my handy MacBook I figured I would try a little experiment. Here's what I have set up right now: VMWare Fusion Windows XP SP2, fully patched Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Express Edition I allocated 1GB of RAM to the VM for Windows XP and it worked great - plenty of headroom to run applications. I've said it before but it bears repeating since I know based … [Read more...]
There is a storm coming on the web…
April 28, 2008 By 2 Comments
... and Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek Software and the author of the blog Joel on Software has summed it up in a brilliant post on his blog. It's a little long but if you are a web developer or are even mildly interested in what is happening with web standards you really should read Martian Headsets. Be patient and read through his analogy because in the second half of the article he gets to the root of the problem. This issue is important to Mac users because … [Read more...]
Mac: Time for a spare battery
April 28, 2008 By
Though I live on the East coast and my parents live in Southern California we are very close and speak at least once a week. When my Mom was hospitalized over Easter weekend I figured now was a good time to cash in some frequent flyer miles and spend some time with my parents and brother. There are some serious advantages to being self employed and picking up the tent at a moment's notice and moving to a new campsite is one of them. The flight to California is a little over 5 … [Read more...]
Mac: Have you tried using the Option key?
April 25, 2008 By Leave a Comment
I'm not sure that everyone reads the comments in this blog but for those that don't sgt-phail mentioned something that I think is worth putting a quick post in about: using the Option key while performing actions with menus. It opens up a lot of different options for the same menu items in most of the native OS X apps. Try it in Finder, Safari, etc. What I like is that it's very dynamic. I can pull down (or pop up) a menu and while it's displayed hit the Option key and the menu … [Read more...]
Changing the default PDF viewer
April 24, 2008 By Leave a Comment
Last week a friend sent me a PDF that had some rich content embedded in it; a small video that Mac Preview would not let me see. I really like Preview but figured I might as well grab the free Acrobat Reader so that I could view the more advanced PDFs people were creating. Adobe Acrobat Reader is a pretty big install but after doing so I was able to see the PDF file - and its embedded video - just fine. There was a catch though; Acrobat … [Read more...]
