Category Archives: Mac

Fixing Microsoft Office Mac 2011 font woes

This post may be of use to people experiencing the same problem I had. When I opened PowerPoint slides sent by a coworker, I was getting blank slides. Attempting to switch to outline view would crash PowerPoint. A search for … Continue reading

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Solving Mac freezes due to ocspd crashes

A public service announcement for anyone experiencing the same problem and who may google for a solution. A couple of days ago my work iMac started experiencing intermittent freezing, and very slow searches in Mail.app. Rebuilding my Spotlight index overnight … Continue reading

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Clearing custom crop aspect ratios in Lightroom

Lightroom’s crop tool allows you to constrain the aspect ratio to a proportion of your choice, e.g. to 4:3, defaulting to the same aspect ratio as the original. The last 5 or so custom crop aspect ratios are saved, but … Continue reading

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A waiter for a server

I had to monitor a long-running process on a Solaris server tonight, but didn’t want to stay glued at a computer monitor. A neat trick: ssh myserver.example.com “pwait 17601″; say “batch done” You would replace 17601 with the process ID … Continue reading

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Doing my bit for the Internet

My first IPv6 connectivity, courtesy of Hurricane Electric’s Tunnel Broker. It only took me three years…

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Hey Apple…

Some improvements you should consider: Sync iPods, iPhones and iPads over WiFi. Cables are so twentieth century. Palm had bluetooth sync working ten years ago, and 802.11n has the same real-world speed as USB. You could then simply extend this to … Continue reading

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Dear Parallels

Since you keep hitting me with these spammy popups no matter how many times I click on “Do not show again”, you leave me no choice but to switch to VirtualBox (much better software in any case, and less Windows … Continue reading

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Will Adobe ever learn?

In a triumph of hope over experience, I recently “upgraded” from Adobe CS3 Design Standard to CS5 Design Standard. I hardly ever use Photoshop any more since I started using Aperture and Lightroom (originally a Macromedia product, no matter what … Continue reading

Posted in IT, Mac, Soapbox | 2 Comments

Organizing with Delicious Library

Delicious Library is one of the slickest apps on the Mac, and won countless design accolades. Essentially, it is a database for your books, CDs and DVDs (version 2 added gadgets), and it looks glorious on a large monitor like … Continue reading

Posted in Mac, Stuff | 2 Comments

Incensed at Mozilla

One of the greatest features in the Webkit-based browsers (Apple’s Safari and Google Chrome) is WebSQLdatabase, the ability for a web site to store information in a SQLite database on your browser accessible via JavaScript. This allows web developers to … Continue reading

Posted in IT, Mac, Soapbox, Web | 4 Comments