Archive for the “Mac” category

Installing Rails on Leopard

by jpreardon on March 8, 2008

Leopard comes with Rails, but I prefer to roll my own in an effort to keep my environment stable. As always Hivelogic has the goods: Installing Ruby, Rubygems, Rails, and Mongrel on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) Special bonus: Why (…)

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OSX 10.5.2 and Weird Birthdays in iCal

by jpreardon on February 13, 2008

I upgraded my Mac Book to 10.5.2 today. Everything went swimmingly, but I noticed that everyone I know had suddenly moved their birthday to Wednesday the 13th at 15:00 EST–according to my calendar anyway. My fix for this was to (…)

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NetNewsWire Goes Free

by jpreardon on January 9, 2008

NetNewsWire and NewsGator’s other client products are now free. Well, almost free. You’ll have to give up some attention data, but that’s not so bad is it? I had a minor hiccup upgrading to the 3.1 version. This was because (…)

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Wacky Weather Widget

by jpreardon on December 13, 2007

The more miserable the weather, the more extreme the current-weather graphics seem to get on Apple’s weather widget. It’s sleeting here now. Check out the graphic below, it’s so much more exciting than the partly-cloudy image. Update: Here’s a nice (…)

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Leopard Spaces Tip: Moving Windows

by jpreardon on November 30, 2007

Recently, I discovered that one can hold a window while switching Spaces in Leopard. The window can then be dropped onto any other space. This, of course, isn’t the only way to move a window to another space. But, I (…)

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Installing MySQL on Leopard

by jpreardon on November 24, 2007

Dan Benjamin at Hivelogic has some excellent guides for setting up all sorts of things on a Mac that relate to Rails development. His guide to installing MySQL on OSX is no exception. It takes you through the steps of (…)

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Favorite Mac Applications

by jpreardon on October 29, 2007

Now that Leopard has been released, I’m going to order a new Macbook. Sorry PowerBook G4, you’ve served me well for many years, but its time for an upgrade. As part of the upgrade, I took a quick inventory of (…)

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Leopard Day

by jpreardon on October 26, 2007

So it’s Leopard Day. The official release is at 18:00 EDT, but mail order copies of Leopard have started arriving on desks around the world. There will be a sharp drop in productivity today as Mac fans upgrade their operating (…)

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Quicksilver: Keeping Hands on Keyboards

by jpreardon on July 5, 2007

The mouse and other pointing devices are great innovations for personal computing. Excessive use, however, can really slow you down. Since I’m not a fan of deceleration, I’ve been loving Quicksilver lately. Other Quicksilver users I’ve talked to share the (…)

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Make Your Mac Quake in Your Presence

by jpreardon on March 20, 2007

Well, it might not quake, but it can certainly do other things, providing you have some form of bluetooth device on you. Jesse David Hollington describes how to set up bluetooth proximity detection on a Mac. This allows one to (…)

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