Turns out you can invoke Sublime Text 2 to write your git commit messages, if you so desire.
mkdir -p ~/bin
ln -s "/Applications/Sublime Text 2.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/subl" ~/bin/subl
git config --global core.editor "subl -w"Try using git commit -a on a dirty repo. If you hit an error, open your ~/.bash_profile and add:
PATH=$PATH:~/bin
export PATHOpen a fresh shell and try again.
Useful? Maybe, for some. An interesting exercise none the less.
Prior to 10.7 Lion I was able to reliably use my MacBook Pro with an external monitor as it’s only enabled display by simply closing the lid, attaching the display and pressing an input key on an external keyboard. When heat was a concern, I could reopen the lid after this and the internal display would remain off.
Lion changed this behavior so that now, whenever the lid on the MBP is closed, the machine will always go to sleep. Likewise if the lid is up, the internal display will always be on. There does not appear to be any power setting to change this behavior, much to my displeasure.
Here’s a quick Terminal hack that will force Lion to behave like it’s predecessors:
sudo nvram boot-args="iog=0x0"Reboot and you’re done. Why Apple changed this without a option to toggle it back is beyond me. If you ever want to revert the change, just reset your NVRAM.
As this topic comes up pretty frequently in discussions, I’m posting this information here for quick linkage/reference in the future. If you’re experiencing bizarre behavior in Chrome, especially slow downs, crashes or unresponsive tabs, resetting your user profile for Chrome often helps resolve the issues.
Chrome supports multiple user profiles to allow multiple OS users or, by using some about:flags magic, hot swapping between profiles in the same session. Keep in mind that deleting these profiles will wipe out any bookmarks, cookies, etc. attached to that profile. If you’re using Chrome Sync, there’s no need to back up anything as it will all be restored for you the next time you start Chrome and login to the Sync system.
To reset your user profile, shut down Chrome and then open the following directory path:
On Windows XP: C:\Documents and Settings\Your User Name\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\User Data\
On Windows Vista, 7 or 8: C:\Users\Your User Name\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\
On Mac OS X: ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/
On Linux: ~/.config/google-chrome/
Delete the profile you believe is damaged. Most users will simply have a “Default” user profile, which is what you’ll want to delete. Restart Chrome and optionally login to Sync to restore your bookmarks and other goodies.
I live in a strange platform limbo. One foot in the Mac world, the other in Windows’. It is at times frustrating as I am forced to realize and adapt to each of the platform’s exceptional strengths, and weaknesses. I could write many posts on the matter, but let’s filter it down to one topic of the interests of this post: the choice of Twitter clients.
On the Mac we have a plethora of native clients to chose from, including the official client, Weet, Twitterific and Echofon. In the Windows world, we aren’t so lucky. There are plenty of choices, but frankly none of them are very good. Sure, if you don’t mind AIR you can run TweetDeck, and if you don’t mind the bulky chrome of Seesmic Desktop there’s oodles of functionality there. However, most of the Windows client marketplace is made up of awful WPF-based prototypes and abandoned amateurish attempts.
This leaves Windows users usually relying on the Twitter web experience which, to me, has never been particularly great. The new facelift certainly made it prettier, but did little to improve the experience for me. It continues to feel disorganized, and at times strangely confusing. I don’t speak strictly of the stream, but the whole. All of the statistics, trends, follower icons that pollute the sidebar, and the under-balanced body of tweets on the left that distort the weight of the page. I’m a minimalist, and Twitter is not.
Twitter is a simple concept, and it should have an equally elegant interface to match. Of course it is Twitter’s goal is ultimately to achieve this, but in the mean time, other’s have taken stabs at it by releasing userscripts, userstyles, extensions and add-ons. So many, in fact, that is frustrating trying to sort out the good from the bad.
Ultimately, in my personal endeavor to find the solution right for me, I came across three extensions that have helped me come much closer to tweet zen. I should note that I am a Chrome user, and these are extensions for that browser. You may be able to find alternatives for your browser of choice, however.
Feather – A collection of UI tweaks, it greatly streamlines the experience. It removes all images from the sidebar, cleans up the header, and overhauls the “reply” interface. I don’t think I could without this extension at this point.
Proxlet – Proxlet is an incredibly useful utility for blocking tweets sent from apps (like Instagram or Foursquare), muting users for periods of time, and filtering out unwanted hashtags. Aside from the Chrome extension, you can set it up to work with several clients including TweetDeck and Seesmic for Android.
Embed.ly’s Parrotfish – Extends the sidebar preview pane to support an outrageous amount of web services and sites. It’s greatly reduced the number of click-throughs I do in a day to view images, watch videos or preview articles.
These addons have made my Twitter life a lot more enjoyable and, if you use Chrome, I do recommend you give them a try. This sort of thing is very much a matter of personal taste, and some of these may or may not work to your preference, but they have helped me get a lot more out of Twitter.
What is your interface of choice for Twitter? What are your tools of the tweet?
I’m what you might call a browser vagabond. I switch web browsers every few months, sampling the latest releases and trying to find that perfect fit for what I want and need out of the single most important piece of software on my desktop. I think I may have found the closest thing to perfect with Opera 10.
For the last 6 months or so I’ve been using Google Chrome, and really enjoying it. It’s blazingly fast, has a tremendously elegant user interface, uses my favorite rendering engine (WebKit), is open source, and is updated very frequently (I run off the dev builds.) But it was far from perfect, especially in comparison to what I had left behind with Firefox. Namely, it lacks extensions, a robust web developer toolset (the Inspector is broken and falls way behind tools like Firebug) and suffers from a lack of customization options.
The last time I had tried Opera was with the release of v9. I had tracked the improvements the company had made to browser for many years, and tried each major release. Although I had always found it’s performance to be top notch, the user experience really bugged me. The interface was… bizarre, in my opinion. Although it could be customized I never managed to come up with a layout that rivaled the simplicity of Firefox.
Like many, I was intrigued when I heard about Opera’s “Unite” system. If you aren’t familiar with it, it’s an experiment (of sorts) in expanding upon the concept of the browser from just a viewer of the Internet into a participant; it embeds functionality (exposed as modular “services”) that transform it into a server. There are a variety of services, from a file browser and web server to a streaming media player and social note sharing hub. Heck, it can even serve as a personal OpenID provider. The concept is pretty exciting, and I’m already in love with the file sharing and media playing functionality, but after playing with the beta I realized that Unite isn’t really the big seller for me: the browser itself is.
In one release, Opera managed to fix everything that bugged me about the browser. The tabs, the navigation controls, the panels/sidebar; they repackaged the chrome in a way that is minimal (which I love), flexible/customizable (important for many) and easily transitioned to from other browsers. With the user interface problem resolved, I was able to sample the features old and new that Opera has to offer;
If you haven’t given Opera a try lately, please do. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised with what you find. The latest beta version can be found here, the Unite-enabled beta builds can be found here, and the general release version is available from their homepage.
Google dropped the bomb late last night;
Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.
People are going to pull this news in a lot of different directions. Some will call it a genius, overdue step; others will tweet dazed and confused, pondering what the point is. Here’s the low down: It’s a Linux OS. It’s lightweight and will likely run on dirt cheap hardware, and is directly targeting the netbook market. It’s designed with a focus on the web browser. They aren’t the first to do it, nor will they be the last.
Chrome OS’s target audience will in all likelihood be less tech savvy individuals who use their browser for everything (my parents would be a perfect fit here; they do everything out of the browser these days), developing countries with old hardware (but Internet access, obviously) and schools. I could see Libraries seeing this as a nice fit too, assuming there are content control capabilities in there somewhere.
I think it’s a step in the right direction in a lot of ways, and I really applaud Google for pushing things as they are right now. Chrome, Android and now Chrome OS. Keep on pushing those boundaries, 1.0 x 10100.
Decided to throw together a quick video review and demo of MediaMall PlayOn, a software packaging for media streaming to the PS3, Xbox and other products compatible with the protocol. It supports a wide variety of local file formats, and streams video from sites like Hulu, CNN, CBS, YouTube and more. The plugin architecture allows developers to add support for additional services, and there’s plenty available for sites like Adult Swim and Gametrailers.
Aside from the handy streaming support for Internet video sites, they recently introduced beta support for local file sharing. Unlike TVersity, it worked with every file format I threw at it including the ever-frustrating MKV. The only issue I have is that embedded subtitles don’t appear to be working yet.
Rating:
I few days ago I noticed that my Logitech G15 suddenly stopped controlling the volume on my Windows 7 x64 installation on my desktop. After a little research, I realized that the service responsible for media control functionality on keyboards had magically set itself to “Manual” instead of “Automatic” startup. Here’s how to fix the issue if you encounter it:
Hope that helps someone out there. It was driving me nuts.
“What do you use to do this?” or “What application do you recommend for that?” I get asked these kinds of questions a lot, as do most folks in my line of work. What surprises a lot of people is that much of the time, I respond with a free or open source solution. I’m not against commercial applications by any means… I use Photoshop over Gimp and TextPad over Notepad++. But sometimes you discover applications that are so robust, and so well done that they blow the socks off anything you can buy… these are a few of those apps.
There are more, of course, but these are the favorites that come to mind. If you have any recommendations or alternatives, please share!
If you’ve been running the Firefox 3.1 beta for the last few days like I have, you’re probably beginning to miss all those fun extensions you took for granted in 3.0. Sure, you could install nightly tool addons to disable version checking for you, but I feel dirty having a hack like that running all the time in the browser. Instead, I discovered a far more elegant solution: just edit the XPI.
First, grab 7zip. It’s a free archive manager like WinZIP or WinRAR, but it plays nice with the XPI format. Now, go to the Mozilla Addons site and find the extension you’re looking to install. The “Install” option will be disabled, but no worries, just scroll down and hit the “All Versions” link. Now you’ll have one or more versions listed with enabled Install buttons, but using those won’t work: they’re marked internally as working with Firefox versions up to 3.0.*. This is what we’ll need to change.
Right click the Install link for the most recent plugin version, and save the XPI file to your desktop. Now, load 7zip and open that XPI file in it. Find the “install.rdf” file, right click and pick Edit. There’s a lot of nonsense in these files, but all we’re worried about is one string:
em:maxVersion="3.0.*"
Once you locate this line, change it to read:
em:maxVersion="3.1.*"
Save the file, allow 7zip to update the archive, then close 7zip. Now, in Firefox, go to the Addons window from the Tool menu and switch to the extensions tab. Drag the XPI from your desktop into your addons list. Firefox will install the addon for you without complaint. Restart Firefox and you’re done!
This hack will work for most extensions as there has been very few changes to the core functionality of Firefox in 3.1; most of the changes are to the Gecko rendering and JavaScript engines. I’ve successfully installed all my essentials in 3.1 without any problems, but if you do end up running into an addon incompatibility issue you can always start Firefox in Safe Mode from the Mozilla Firefox group in the Start menu.
Hope this helps!
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