nutMac

You cannot begin to understand my frustration with Rogers and there recent tactics for hijacking “Server not found or DNS error” response pages (see here and here). I got so furious that I called Rogers and demanded a workaround to their little “solution”. And to my surprise, the technical representative JUMPED at the opportunity to show me how! So here’s to you Rogers and all that you mean to me:

• find the Internet Settings on your computer or router (there are plenty of web article to help you for Windows or Mac)
• Change the “DNS server(s)” to something public, like, for instance, 4.2.2.2 and 4.2.2.1 (a US based public DNS server, not likely to ever go down)
• Boom! Buh-bye Rogers/Yahoo! search page

You see, by default, Rogers (or any other ISP) has you using their DNS server (your computer will automatically use your ISP’s DNS server unless told to do otherwise) and therefor they can track what you are doing or see what’s being served to you. So in the event that you call for a site that doesn’t exist, they can cheerily offer up a Rogers/Yahoo! search page laden with advertising and paid-for links instead of actually telling you that that server or site you actually requested might not exist or might have an error.

Here is where Rogers FAILS! Umm Rogers? People who actually know how to use a computer and who aren’t using Internet Explorer 6 actually use the address bar as a search field and not strictly a place to resolve URL and DNS calls. For instance, my local Mac reseller is Carbon Computing and I wanted to call them today. I thought I would get their phone number from their web site so into my address bar I entered “carbonation” and pressed enter, which, prior to Rogers meddling, would normally resolve to “http://www.carbonation.com“. If the search term were something unresolvable, like “jingle butt pants on fire” then my browser would inform me that “http://jingle%20butt%20pants%20on%20fire/” cannot be found and probably ask me if I wanted to search for the term “jingle butt pants on fire” in Google (or which ever search engine I have set as a default).

Rogers figures they are doing you a solid by removing this extra step, they’ll just perform the search for you. But in a case like mine I don’t want to SEARCH for “carbonation”, I want to RESOLVE it by slapping a .com on the end of it. And by circumventing the default server error message, don’t you think they are causing more mayhem than good?

To the bonehead at Rogers that thought this was all a good idea… you are the biggest boob of all the boobs at Rogers. And that is a fair feat my friend.

So it’s been a bit. Many mac stories have come and gone and had I not been overwhelmed with work at those moments I would most certainty add my two cents to the stream of consciousness. The same can be said right now too but I just had to free my brain from the coding and scripting matrix that has become my life. So today I bring you a quick and dirty little tip, another one of those little known or long forgotten OS tricks that will save you a ton of misery.

I would like to believe that this one is long forgotten versus little known since the latter would imply that Apple is not the best at getting word of it’s most basic features out there (FYI: Apple is doing a bang up job of teaching you little tips at http://www.apple.com/business/theater/). Everyone like the drag-n-dropiness of Mac OS X right? It’s great for moving things right? Well it’s also great for copying things too! You can copy items from one place to another by simply holding the option key while you move your item. This will leave a copy in it’s original place while making a new copy to add to the location you finally decide on.

This isn’t just for moving items from folder to folder, the same is true when working within documents. Highlight a word or phrase, click and hold on it then press and hold the option key to make a copy of that word or phrase, ready to be positioned wherever your heart desires.

Here is a quick little tip that surprisingly few mac people know about, switchers and veterans alike. I’m sure Windows users and most Mac users will be familiar with the alt-tab(windows)/cmd-tab(mac) method of app switching, if not, just try it. You’ll see a heads up display of your running apps which you can tab to or mouse to in order to select a running app to bring to the front.

But what many people aren’t aware of is the fact that you can use this method as a quick way to quit a bunch of apps. On a Mac, simply cmd-tab to the app you want to quit and while still holding the cmd key, press the “q” key and that app will quit right then and there. Keep depressing the cmd key to quit other apps as you go. It’s that simple.

I want to preface this by saying that I might be totally ass backwards in doing this but I had a need and I answered it. So before you try what I am about to tell you, be warned, if this totally obliterates your computer, project, or anything at all… it’s not my fault!

Ok, here is my needs, part 1; I run MAMP on my system to develop web projects locally. I use MAMP because it has more up to date versions of Apache, PHP and MySQL and I can update any of those on the fly at any time. It’s great that OS X has all of this pre installed (save for the MySQL), but it just isn’t very fast and I’ve always felt that by banging on the these system services I can potentially harm my system as a whole. With MAMP, I can bang on the innards of it’s services all I want and only worry about breaking that which resides in the MAMP folder.

My needs, part 2; I am a heavy, heavy TextMate user and as it happens, TextMate is a brilliant SQL editor which allows for complex queries to be written in a comfortable editor (as opposed to the very linear Terminal.app) and executed in a sexy little browser. The problem with is that TextMate presumes you will compile your MySQL server in the standard location and configuration (/usr/local/mysql/), where as MAMP puts it all in it’s own folder located in the Applications folder (/Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/).

What I have found is that TextMate want’s to access the socket (mysql.sock) in the /tmp/ folder (buried in the /private/ folder on the hard drive), but I know the MAMP socket is located at /Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/. So I thought I would try making an alias of this socket in the /tmp/ folder for TextMate to find. And it worked.

WARNING: IF THE TERMINAL SCARES YOU THEN LOOK NO FURTHER

First, open terminal, then type in the following line to create the link (this is based on the assumption that you already have a /tmp/ folder which you should):

sudo ln -s /Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.sock /tmp/mysql.sock

Next, you want to change the owner:

sudo chown _mysql /tmp/mysql.sock

And lastly the permissions:

sudo chmod 777 /tmp/mysql.sock

Now from the SQL bundle preferences in TextMate, add your server and database info (assuming you have already created a database). Remember that by default, MAMP MySQL administration is set to user: root, password: root (yikes, you might want to change that). It would look something like this:

That’s it! Now you can freely execute SQL queries from TextMate using your MAMP MySQL engine.

Technorati Tags: TextMate, MAMP, MySQL, SQL, PHP, Apache

I’m always on the hunt for quick way to go from here to there. One thing I especially dislike is redundancy, repetition, extraneous steps, movements and keystrokes. That’s why I love Quicksilver. Every day I am able to tap the wonder app for more and more time saving tricks.

One aspect of my job in web design and theme design is having to look up web sites and online resources constantly. So here are a three tricks I’ve dug up, which was not easy since Quicksilver documentation is few and far between.

1. Select, Grab and Search

• For this one you need to set a few obscure and not so well documented features.
  • First of you’ll need to activate the “Services Menu Module” in Quicksilver > Plug-ins > All Plug-ins > System. This allows for the “Search With Google - A service of Safari.app” action,
  • Next you need to add some extra function to Quicksilver by “Enabling advanced features”,
  • Another useful setting will be “Pull selection from front application instead of Finder” from Quicksilver > Preferences > Extras,
  • For Path Finder users, you’ll also need to enable the Path Finder module (Quicksilver > Plug-ins > All Plug-ins > Applications) and then make Path Finder you default file browser (Quicksilver > Preferences > Handlers > File System Browser > Path Finder).
  • relaunch Quicksilver.
• Once you’ve managed this much, you only need to:
  • select any text from anywhere text is selectable,
  • invoke Quicksilver (^space for most),
  • press “⌘g”,
  • tab to the action panel,
  • type “sw” (which should result in “Search With Google” or will after one or two uses) and hit return.
• You’re selected text now turns up as a google query in Safari.

2. Select and search

• To take the above idea one step farther (and this comes courtesy of one commenter on my last Quicksilver post), we can make a trigger that invokes Quicksilver, grabs the selection in the command window and tabs over to the action window all in one hot-key:
  • first you need to enable the “Command With Selection” trigger in Quicksilver > Triggers > Quicksilver,
  • select the trigger and tap the “i” button and the bottom of the window
  • edit the hot key and enter “⌘esc” (or a hot-key of your choice)
• Now you can selecting anything selectable, tap “⌘esc” and immediately type “sw” to bring up “Search With Google” and press return and… well you know what happens.
• Incidentally, this hot-key can be used to grab a selection to be modified in any manner; select an image, “⌘esc”, type “ow” (Open With), tab, type “pr” (Preview.app). Or select a URL, “⌘esc”, hit return to open that URL, and so on… here are some other examples.

3. Type and search

• What if you could just type from anywhere and have Google look it up for you? Well here is a cool trigger for doing just that. If you haven’t done so already:
  • activate the Web Search Module (Quicksilver > Plug-ins > All Plug-ins > Web)
  • activate the “Web Searches (from docs.blacktree.com)” catalog (Quicksilver > Catalog > Modules)
  • Hit the refresh button at the bottom of that window
• Create a web search trigger:
  • invoke Quicksilver and type “ws”, it should yield “Web Search” (if not, arrow over and down until you see it). The default service is “http://www.google.com/search?q=***” and this is the one you want,
  • tab to the action panel, it should default to “Search For…” but if not type “sf”,
  • tab to the target or 3rd panel and enter some text,
  • now tap “⌘’” to bring up Quicksilver > Triggers
  • click the “+” button at the bottom of the window
  • your command, action and target should already be propagated but there will be text in the target panel. Get rid of that text by selecting it and typing “⌘x”
  • click “save”
  • then select the “i” button near the bottom and edit the hot-key by entering “⌘2″ (my personal preference because of the relationship to the @ symbol).
• To use this trigger, simply tap “⌘2″ from anywhere, in any app and Quicksilver will prompt you with a text field. Type your query in and press return. Safari will pop up and serve the google results for the term you just typed into Quicksilver.

I hope this little how-to was useful to you. Bookmark it, Digg it or do whatever it takes to keep track of this permalink because you never know when you’ll need it.

Technorati Tags: Quicksilver, mac, app, how-to, Quicksilver web search

Being a web designer I like to think that I live on two sides of each certain file; the viewing side and the editing side. What ends up happening to many web designers is they have more than one app that they typically use to open, view or edit a file, depending on the task they need to perform at the moment.

There is often a problem with that. Double clicking or command+O on a file opens it in it’s default app. Right+clicking or control+clicking the file to open the contextual menu then “open with” can be a pain (and slow) depending on the number of apps you run on your system. Opening the app and then browsing through the “Open file” function is too much like work. And finally, dragging the app onto a desktop icon is open useful if you keep everything you ever use in you dock at all times (which I don’t).

So in my ever lasting pursuit of the fastest way around these little hold-ups, I have come to rely on QuickSilver to, once again, saves the day. I use quicksilver to quickly and painlessly open any file with any app I choose and it all takes a few keystrokes and a few seconds:

1. Find the file you want to open, like an image (which, for me, opens with Photoshop by default),
2. Invoke QuickSilver (command+space in most cases, command+esc for me),
3. Start typing the name of the app you want to open your file with, like Preview.app for instance,
4. Once you app pops up in the first panel (with 2 or 3 keystrokes), simply drag your file onto the pane (like you would onto a dock icon),
5. POOF! The file opens in the app you want and not the files default app.

Technorati Tags: QuickSilver, apps

One of my favorite features of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is the screen sharing built right into the Finder (the only thing I’ve come to find the Finder useful for). What used to require an expensive seat of Remote Desktop For Mac, or a slightly hackish Chicken-of-the-VNC setup, is now accomplished with the built in screen-sharing goodness of Leopard.

At the home office this is great; it adds an additional level of sophistication to my complete and total laziness that only cool technology can afford. My wife and I share a common space in our home where our computers exist no more than 6 feet apart from each other. We tend to share a lot of files and tend to want to show each other things on the others computer. As you can imagine, before Leopard came along, we used to physically get up and down from our office chairs, walk the 6 long feet and peer over each others shoulder to have our common viewing experience. It was a dizzying, trying time, but we somehow managed.

Now we simply share each others screen with the click of a button. But what if my wife’s computer is asleep? Then what? Do you really expect me to get out of my chair, walk 3 paces of wake it? Hell no. That’s what God created WakeOnLan.app for. Simply put, WakeOnLan is the greatest lazy mans invention. I can wake and sleep my wifes computer at will, even while she’s in the middle of doing something, making for hours of completely impractical, totally irrational, yet entirely enjoyable fun… until she discovered the same app herself.

Some of you might remember my little article on the best and quickest way to convert icons into other usable formats (I should hope you remember, it’s one of the most searched articles on this site). While this is still relevant and very usable, it also costs you the license of Path Finder (which I insist you buy anyhow) which is about $49 or so. Some of you might want a cheaper alternative and so today I give you a sweet option that I was brought to my attention from David Chartier’s Jaiku feed.

It’s called iconGrabber and it’s a Quicksilver plugin (another app that I insist you use) and just makes the process of extracting usable image files from any icon sooooooooooo easy. All you do is invoke Quicksilver (usually ctrl+space or cmd+esc in my case), then drag and drop the icon or object onto the command panel, tab to the action panel, start typing “save”, select “Save Icon As” or “Save Icon To”, tab to the object panel and right arrow over, arrow down to select you format and press return to execute.

Seriously, the whole process takes about 5 seconds. Invoke Quicksilver again and your newly created image is the first to appear. Select return to open the new image in your default image editor.

Technorati Tags: Quicksilver, icons, icns, converter, plugin

If you know anything about me by now it’s that I use keyboard shortcuts; lots of them. I try to make full use of the keyboard any chance I get. I find mouse movements too slow despite my extreme mouse acceleration (courtesy of SteerMouse) and I find using the keyboard save wear and tear on my mousing shoulder. Even the fastest mouse can’t get from one corner of a 23″ screen to another without some major motor function taking place in the shoulder.

Even when I do mouse a lot I still tend to have my left hand poised at the ready to strike hot keys with lighting speed; cmd+esc (QuickSilver), cmd+F1 (Radial menu), cmd+tab (app switcher), alt+tab (witch), cmd+space (spotlight), cmd+q/w/a/s/z/x/c/v/b/i/n… (you know what these do), and the list goes on.

So you can argue that there is a critical flaw in my keyboardian idealogy; what do I do when I am presented with a dialog box with buttons? For instance, “Do you want to save the changes you made in the document “untitled”?” Well there is a little known feature (from what I can tell) in OS X that you can turn on in the keyboard settings. It’s called “Full keyboard access - All controls”. By selecting this option you will be visually cued to whichever button is hot and whichever button are active. Hot button in solid blue is the one that responds when you hit enter or return and the “active” button is the one that will now have a little blue halo around it. Hit tab (or shift+tab depending on the direction you wish to go) and you will notice that halo jumps about from button to button. Here is the best part; hit the space bar and the active button is selected hence performing that action. So enter or return selects the hot button, and the space bar selects the active button. Once you get used to this you will never use your mouse on such panels again. You’ll notice this blue halo in everything you do now, not just on controls. You’ll notice it in your web browsers where it can be particularly useful. Play around with it and see what else is you can accomplish

Technorati Tags: OS X, keyboard, shortcuts, hot-keys

Don’t get discouraged when I tell you this; if you are using your mac to make a living then you are repeating the same tasks over and over again. Sounds like you are stuck in a rut right? Don’t think of it that way. Think of it as an opportunity to streamline a very short list of processes, operations and procedures.

Let’s take me for example. I am a web designer and web content contributer extraordinaire… well maybe I made up that last point, but you get the idea. I am constantly designing for and filling up the web. When I am using my mac for work, what processes do I actually involve myself in on a daily basis? I could get geeked out and start watching my console.app to really get behind what I actually do in a day, but I am not getting that deep about the meaning of my life. I just mean what apps do I use most, what apps do I work with and for what reasons and is there a way to change the way I do things for the better?

In most cases there is. I use RapidWeaver, TextMate, CSSEdit, Photoshop and Captain FTP nearly every minute of every workday. For the most part I have mastered each of the narrow facets that I might use for each of these apps but that doesn’t necessarily mean I am using each one effectively or to it’s fullest potential. The latter is not necessarily ever going to be a time saver since many apps are built with far more features than most will ever need and sometimes those features pail in comparison to an app that specializes in that area. However, the former, using an app effectively, is a crucial ingredient to increasing your productivity.

To be more effective using your apps in production you need to learn more about them. I don’t mean sitting down and reading the manual from start to finish (though this wouldn’t hurt), but rather keeping your eyes open and looking for solutions to new problems as they confront you. Resources such as the help manual and readme files can be great for this, but in some smaller apps, documentation is feeble at best. You need to take a proactive approach and join (or at least read) the related forums, read the developer blogs, read the tips and tricks (often part of the aforementioned forums or blogs) and communicate with other avid users of those apps and learn how others have overcome issues or addressed their own productivity concerns. When it gets most interesting is when you find tricks that the app developer never intended and through awareness of such approaches, soon becomes such a widespread technique that the developers end up building it into their app, or at least bringing it more to the forefront.

When you can’t find faster ways of doing repetitive tasks with your apps, look for helpers or apps that make these tasks simpler for you. Apps like Quicksilver and Launchbar are two such apps that make finding, launching and thinking so much faster once you get them under your productivity skin. For me, Quicksilver is an indispensable tool. From spelling to app launching to script running to note taking to blog posting to finding everything… Quicksilver does everything I think about doing. In conjunction with Exposé, a tuned mouse setup and Witch, my screen is a blur with action to the uninitiated over-the-shoulder observer.

Another way of getting things done quickly is to make use of Automator. With folder actions and finder actions you can get things done with a contextual menu selection or a drag-and-drop. For me, this is image uploading. I save myself the time and effort of opening an FTP client, selecting an address, selecting a folder and uploading an image. Instead, I right click on an image, go to actions, select my appropriate upload action (upload to nutMac.com for instance), and I am done. There are many pre-made actions to be found at the Apple download area. With apps like Automator and Quicksilver, you circumvent the need to actually open the apps in question and instead make use of the services they hook into.

The bottom line is, never stop looking for ways to improve your workflow. Never stop learning new things about what you do and what you use. Never stop questioning the reasons for the ways you do things in your day-to-day processes Stay ever aware of how you get things done and you always stay on top of your productivity.