Mac at Work (was FreeBSD on Dell C400, and other stuff)

I don't know about the rest of you, but the Finder on Snow Leopard is extremely slow for me. I was seriously considering downgrading to Leopard, but the exchange support keeps me on Snow Leopard. As I was browsing the forums, I found a post that mentioned Path Finder . I had forgotten about Path Finder. I tried it back when I was using Tiger, but it seemed overkill for my needs. My frustrations with the current Finder led me to give it another try. Oh my goodness! Finally, quick, efficient file browsing! Even network shares are extremely fast. For anyone suffering with Snow Leopard's Finder, give Path Finder from CocoaTech a try. It makes my Mac a joy to use again. For all the KDE users out there, all the nifty utilities and features of Path Finder make me think of the konqueror file browser. It includes dual-pane browsing, tabs, a terminal drawer that opens to the current directory, recent folders/documents list, and more. Check it out if you have time. Once nice

For anyone who has a lot of photos to scan, the idea of scanning multiple photos and looking through each file to cut and paste the photos into individual photos can be real turn off if not much time is available. I know I certainly don't want to have to crop each photo out. Shouldn't there be some way for the computer to automatically pick out each individual photo? Luckily, there is. Below I present a script, that coupled with some intelligent scanning methods, automates the process of splitting the scan file into individual files of single photos. The ImageMagick package is a set of command line tools that can do all kinds of things with images, including extracting regions of photos. If I know the size of page, the size of the photos, their position on the page, and the scan density (dpi), then I can use a script to extract each photo from the aggregate scan. I made and printed a template that contains boxes slightly bigger than the photos at known positions on the pa

A screenshot of me doing real engineering work on my Macbook Pro. I am writing up some calculations. You can MacVim with some LaTeX code. The code on the right corresponds to the equation in the PDF file shown below the MacVim window.

Here comes the obiligatory screenshot:

It seems that tiling window managers suit me as I am back to Xmonad with GNOME. This time I added xcompmgr to the mix and got a nice config that fades all non-focused windows (except rdesktop for some reason. Perhaps because it is on the other screen). I also have some window shadows which are nice for floating dialog boxes. See the screenshot below:

Here my latest desktop in Ubuntu 9.04. Here my latest desktop in Ubuntu 9.04.

Finally, I have found the ideal way to migrate contacts from the OS X Address Book to linux Evolution! The most obvious way is to export the address book as a vcard and then import it into Evolution, but you lose the notes you may have entered about people. After trying all kinds of things, the best solution I found is this: Sync your address book with a yahoo account in OS X. Then log into your yahoo account and export the contacts as a vcard single file. You can then import that vcard file into evolution and everything comes over like it is supposed to, including the notes. I have been searching for this for a long time. I remembered that the mac was syncing with Yahoo (you have to do this to sync with Google), and I decided just to try it. I picked the right option the first time. w00t!

So here is a screenshot of my current setup doing real work. I am running Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope on a Lenovo thinkpad T60 with a 2 GHz Intel Core Duo and 2 GB RAM. The window behind the browser and under the irc session is a RDP session to a windows box running Microstation CAD.

For heath and productivity reasons, I like to work standing up. My employer is rather slow at providing such accommodations, so I using the following setup made from printer paper: Then, someone raised a concern that in a minor earthquake, the monitor might fall onto my neighbor or out the window and requested I take down my setup. So I did, but then I found a solution to that problem by moving it over a bit on my desk.

Colloquy screen shot using keynote theme:

I was on the phone when I looked out my office window and saw this beautiful rainbow.

No more beard or hair:

Check out the view from my office: