OmegaDelta » os x

Finder Tip

Will — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 07:30:24 +0000

File browsing on OS X, is not always the most easy experience, but I have found some optimisations recently. I tend to find I have a Finder window open, a Bash shell open and at times need to locate files in an open-file app dialog. The first two (Finder & Bash) can be linked quite nicely with a simple script. And it turns out Finder and the Open File dialog can also be linked very conveniently. Here’s how:

When the file dialog is open, alt-tab to Finder. Then click & drag the folder or file you wish to select in the file dialog, and then alt-tab back & drop that on the bottom gray bar of the dialog. It will then be selected in the open file dialog, allowing you to select it, or deselect and pick a file around it. Neat!

The area where you can drop files from finder to select them

When the thumbnail resize bar doesn’t work in OS X Lion

Will — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 02:57:50 +0000

I’ve encountered this bug for many years now and it shits me to tears.

OS X has this great little thumbnail resize bar at the bottom right of Finder’s status bar that lets you change the size of photos you are viewing in Finder. It’s a great way to explore your travel photos, without any 3rd party software. However, inexplicably about half the time it seems to just not work.

Well it is a glorius day as I found the solution. You can fix this by toggling the status bar off & on. The easiest way to do this is via the shortcut (twice) ⌘/

Thanks to Tony T1 for the tip.

Macbook exhaust fans spinning up at night? Check your screensaver!

Will — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 03:08:41 +0000

I often leave my Mac running overnight, and I sleep in the same room.

I kept noticing something that annoyed me which was the fans would often start whirring at full pelt just as I was going to sleep. The strange thing is that my MacBook (especially the new one) rarely makes a sound during the day. After a while they would spin down.

Last night the penny dropped – it’s the screen saver. The fancy, 3D hardware using screensaver. The moment I woke up the computer, the fan RRP started to reduce. So I promptly set my ‘Display Sleep’ time to 1min, and went to sleep soundly. Before, it was set to 15min – so it would eventually spin down (hence my previous observation as well).

Moral of the story: if you want your computer to stay quit right when you need it to be, use the ‘Display Sleep’ feature without screensavers (as attractive as they may be).

wow, OS X

Will — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 12:16:20 +0000

OS X really makes setting up a LAMP service dead easy. I need to do some offline dev (and lets face it, I’m very sick of uploading over slow connections).

Apache and PHP are installed out of the box. Yep – installed *by default* on everyone’s OS X install, not just developers. This is used for the web-sharing feature.

But you have to change one line in Apache to enable the PHP module. This doc was useful (I used vi for everything though, of course). Or the apple docs which make it look harder than it actually is.

Installing MySQL is as simple as downloading the DMG from MySQL.com and running the installer.

And that is is. No ./configure, no make, no make install. Just tweak some settings, and run an installer.

Love it!