(apple)mac geek

Spotlight is the great tool which every Tiger user loves. Except when it doesn’t work. Or it doesn’t find things it should. * sigh * So I’ve had to re-index my drive. Luckily, this is quite simple. Open Terminal and type:

sudo mdutil -E /

sudo mdutil -i on /

And Spotlight will reindex your drive (around 5 hours for me… * sigh *).

But in the meantime, I’m still using Locator which is a cocoa frontend to the unix “locate” command. You’ll still need to build a “locate” database from scratch but it takes muuuuch quicker than 5 hours. Try 7 minutes!

MacWorld has some great tips for how to get even more out of Spotlight, like adding non-default folders to the Spotlight index.

Technorati Tags: spotlight, tiger, OS X, locator

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Come on, decide to camp with me for the opening of the first Apple Store in South Africa on September 30th (ok, so we already have Cool Apple Buddies in Sandton and 2 proper stores in Cape Town, but to have the chance to sleep overnight waiting for the opening of an Apple Store? AND with the change to win an iMac?! Hooray! Bring on the camping gear! Bring on the bacon and eggs! And the gas canister!). And I’m tagging Sean to do this with me – especially because the 29th is his birthday. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that if I win the iMac, I’ll give it to him as a birthday present – now isn’t that nice?! Wait, hang on a sec – the 1st of October is my birthday…which means we’re equidistant from the opening…hmm…maybe I’ll make this my birthday party…wonder who’ll come?!

Technorati Tags: Apple

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Am downloading “Way of the Mantis” – a 6-minute-long quicktime movie put together as an animation for Joseph Daniels and Jedidiah Mitchell’s thesis.

“It is the story of an impetuous Chinese monk who finds he has a thing or two to learn from an unlikely source. The animation is rendered in a brushpainted style reminiscient of old Te Wei films.”

Their blogs are here and here.

Technorati Tags: Way of the Mantis

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Finally – the feature I’ve been moaning about since music could be played digitally has been added – gapless music playback. It’s especially irritating when listening to trance (oops, that’s a public confession!) that it “skips” between tracks. The only way for it to not skip is to play it back on cd. How much sense does that make?! So finally, Apple has fixed this, both on (the new) iTunes (7.0) and updated iPods. Hooray!

Technorati Tags: iPod, Apple, iTunes

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Jacques has asked me to find him some good looking Blogger templates. There are plenty of free ones available, but most of them suck. Luckily, I found this site – http://www.geckoandfly.com/blogspot-templates/

Technorati Tags: blogger, templates

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If you have a Mac you might want to kill the Dashboard. There’s no easy big button to click to turn it off, but here’s 43folders to the rescue!

Technorati Tags: apple, dashboard

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BarCamp was great! My head was spinning so much afterwards but it was worth it – thanks, guys (and D) for the crazy weekend, and thanks Anton for the mopani worms.

And thanks Diricia for the bondage lesson! Danie was the lucky guy who got to enjoy this demo in a very personal way!

Mike has recorded his summary of events in his succint way. Here’s everything else I haven’t yet recorded:

Technorati Tags: BarCamp, BarCampJozi

(Read the article)

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GTD – giving yourself tasks to avoid procrastination. Pete is talking about this – and put his presentation here.

Technorati Tags: BarCamp, BarCampJozi, gtd, Getting Things Done

(Read the article)

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Great presentation on the Torque game engine which costs $100 for an Indie license. Game development looks fun! The trend now seems to be the same as in the Hollywood animation scene: more focus on script – just like the games 10-15 years ago. Thanks to Danie for directing me to the open source StarCon2 download – hooray! That’s probably my favourite game ever – thanks for the link

Technorati Tags: BarCamp, BarCampJozi, torque

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Richard from Tectonic is talking about putting a full page spread into the Mail & Guardian raising awareness about Telkom’s inefficiency and calling Neotel to the greater good. They’ve set up a site and have already exceeded the R50,000 required. You can count me in, Richard!

Technorati Tags: BarCamp, BarCampJozi, Telecoms Action Group, Telkom

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