Jul 29, 2012
Mountain Lion's New Archive Folder —
Earlier today I was unable to find one of my IMAP folders. I immediately felt a flush of panic as this folder was entitled Archive, and is where I keep a large number of important emails (site registration details, software license keys, etc). I have a backup, of course, but it’s still a little bit alarming to think that a folder has just disappeared.
The panic was short-lived as I soon noticed that under MAILBOXES section in Mail.…
Jul 29, 2012
php-mcrypt on Mountain Lion —
I was having a few PHP problems post-Mountain Lion upgrade. Specifically I couldn’t get any sites working that utilised mcrypt with PHP.
Executing php at the command line told me the following:
PHP Warning: PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library ‘/usr/local/Cellar/php53-mcrypt/5.3.13/mcrypt.so’ - dlopen(/usr/local/Cellar/php53-mcrypt/5.3.13/mcrypt.so, 9): Library not loaded: /usr/lib/libltdl.7.dylib Referenced from: /usr/local/Cellar/php53-mcrypt/5.3.13/mcrypt.so Reason: image not found in Unknown on line 0
I decided to reinstall Jose Gonzalez' convenient php53-mcrypt formula.…
Jul 17, 2012
You *Do* Need The Xcode Command Line Tools —
Oliver Drobnik over at Cocoanetics wrote a very detailed guide on how to get by without the Xcode Command Line Tools package, and how to remove them if you want to save a bit of space. He makes some compelling arguments as to why you don’t need them around (tl;dr - they all live inside the Xcode.app package and you can access most of them using the xcrun command) but he also missed a very good reason to keep them installed on your system.…
Jul 2, 2012
Naming and Shaming: Boss/Roland US —
I’m fed up with receiving spam. I generally don’t get much of it because I tend not to publish my email address in too many places, and I use unique email addresses with every online store or service that I sign up to. This allows me to shut down an address when it starts receiving spam.
The other advantage of this system is that it allows me to see at a glance where the email address was obtained from.…
May 27, 2012
Geekbench Results —
It’s always “fun” to compare the performance of machines across product lines and generations. I decided to run Geekbench across two machines that I use a fair bit these days:
I was impressed at the performance provided by the 17" MacBook Pro. Despite having only 4 physical cores compared to the 8 in the Mac Pro, it was still running fairly close. Granted the Mac Pro is 2 and a half years older, but I still expected a dual quad-core Xeon desktop workstation to seriously outperform a portable machine.…
May 21, 2012
Nobody Panic! Mac App Store Upgrades Solved —
Today it looks like the question over how to handle major software updates via the Mac App Store has been answered.
Mac (and iOS) developers Panic have just announced the details on the release of Coda 2, their fantastic Web editor, the current version of which (1.7.5) currently sells in the Mac App Store for $99.99. Coda is a non-trivial app, one that has taken a lot of developer time and effort to produce.…
Apr 19, 2012
TextWrangler 4.0 —
There’s been a lot of talk recently about the venerable BBEdit from Bare Bones reaching it’s 20th birthday. It may have been easy to overlook the fact that it’s younger, freer sibling TextWrangler has just rolled over to version 4.0.
I’m a BBEdit user, but if I’m going to be working on someone else’s Mac for whatever reason I’ll quickly grab a copy of TextWrangler to ensure that I’m in a somewhat familiar editing environment.…
Apr 17, 2012
"Up to" charges for "Up to" services —
I’m not sure who these wispa folks are, but they raise a similar point to one that I’ve been making lately to whoever will listen:
If your supermarket charged you full price for ‘upto’ a Kg of sugar, or the service station charged you full price for ‘upto’ a gallon of petrol they would be prosecuted.
(via The Register)
We pay for an “up to 16Mbps” service. Unfortunately my ISP - BT Total Broadband - and the underlying wholesale provider Openreach have not seen fit to install ADSL2 hardware in our local exchange.…
Apr 14, 2012
(Mac) App Store Upgrades —
There’s been a bit of discussion on the 5by5 Network recently about the lack of upgrades on the Mac App Store sparked by a recent blog post on the subject by Wil Shipley.
I see this from both sides. As a consumer I naturally want software to be as cheap as possible, and I can’t deny that the concept of “free upgrades for life” is not appealing. Yet, on the flip side I write software for a living, and the idea of getting paid once and having no upgrade revenue stream is not a nice one.…
Apr 14, 2012
Being a Dad Changes Everything —
Simon Wolf wrote:
Finally I bought a new helmet. I’m not a huge fan of them but I like my daughter to wear one and I need to set a good example for her.
For me this sums up everything that there is to being a dad. When the subject of bicycle helmets came up in the past, I always swore that I’d never wear one. I trotted out the old fallback position of “I never needed one when I was a kid, I don’t need one now, and my kids will never need one either.…