Entries Tagged 'Mac' ↓

One of the useful thing of iTunes is the ratings. With that it will help you quickly create a smart list, or help you quickly delete the songs you never want to listen to. But the problem for me is that I never want to go back to iTunes’ interface to do this, or I want to lose focus to use a mouse to click on some interface no matter on menubar or somewhere my desktop. With the help of those quick launch apps, it is easy to do this with just a few keystrokes, and you will never lose focus of current job. With the help of Applescript, it is quite easy to do.

I list the applescripts I use to give the current playing song a rate from 1 star TO 5 stars. Because the rating system currently used in iTunes is 0-100, you will never see a star in my scripts.

Rate 1 star:

tell application "System Events"
    if (name of processes) contains "iTunes" then
        set iTunesRunning to true
    else
        set iTunesRunning to false
    end if
end tell

if iTunesRunning then
    tell application "iTunes"
        set rating of current track to 20

        next track  
    end tell
end if

Change the rating in the script to 40 for 2 stars, and so on.

No matter you use Mac or not, have any iThings or not, Steve Jobs and Apple changed the industry.

RIP Steve.

And watch Gizmodo’s tribute video and now classic Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford Commencement Address

Guardian reports. And from the report, it seems like that they want to run a tabloid. I’m not sure that is an interesting idea.

The recent version of Homebrew can’t install Mutt. After a quick check of the error info, I found that maybe due to either Tokyo-Cabinet need to be installed with sudo, or the config for Mutt on Homebrew never check whether Tokyo-Cabinet is installed, even though it claims a dependency.

To solve this, you can try both of the below steps or just edit the Mutt config file as below:

• sudo brew install tokyo-cabinet (as you do in Macports)
• brew edit mutt. Add “–with-tokyocabinet”, below line41 “–enable-hcache”, don’t forget the quotation mark and the comma.

Now install Mutt. If it still states the linking step fails, sudo it.

But it is way expensive.

Just find out that it is easy to set XeTex to work with latexmk. From TeX on Mac OS X mailing list by Herb Schulz:

Move the engine files from ~/Library/TeXShop/Engines/Inactive/Latexmk/ two directories up, to ~/Library/TeXShop/Engines/ to activate them. Once that is done restart TeXTShop.

To use the xelatexmk engine simply put the line

% !TEX TS-program = xelatexmk

at the top of the source file.

Yes, people are getting theirs before 3rd, April.

Mossberg saying:

After spending hours and hours with it, I believe this beautiful new touch-screen device from Apple has the potential to change portable computing profoundly, and to challenge the primacy of the laptop.

David Pogue saying:

Speaking of video: Apple asserts that the iPad runs 10 hours on a charge of its nonremovable battery — but we all know you can’t trust the manufacturer. And sure enough, in my own test, the iPad played movies continuously from 7:30 a.m. to 7:53 p.m. — more than 12 hours. That’s four times as long as a typical laptop or portable DVD player.

and Boingboing:

iPad is a touch of genius. But it’s the things I never knew it made possible — to be revealed or not in the coming months — that will determine whether I love it. Each app for iPad can’t be more than 2 gigs in compressed archive form (a limitation imposed by the zip compression standard at work here, not something of Apple’s own design).

I think the 2g limit might be a good thing, since I just want to buy the 16g version of iPad of the moment.

Via DaringFireball and from Boingboing

BTW, The Big Storm Picture posted an interesting comparison between CS4 and coming CS5 for image manipulation, and the difference is quite huger than I expected. You should click the link to see it.

过程简单：

1. 启动alpine，输入msla。在nickname处随便写个你要用的名称，就写gmail好了。Server处填写：imap.gmail.com/ssl/user=id@gmail.com/novalidate-cert。
2. 继续在alpine中操作，输入msc。SMTP server输入：smtp.gmail.com/submit/user=id@gmail.com/novalidate-cert
3. 使用whereis命令，找到Display Character Set和Posting Character Set，都设为UTF-8。
4. 如果不想把邮件保存在本地，则需要输入msl，然后删除那个local的文件夹设置。

This seems a common DC, but dpreview tells that this one has a wider dynamic range than normal DCs, “(i)t helps to suppress white-out and expands dynamic range by up to 1EV compared to previous models.”  And they also pointed out that the technology Ricoh uses “is in contrast to many existing dynamic range expansion technologies that limit the available ISO range (and can result in increased noise), or reduce the camera’s performance when engaged.”  And they further note that “(f)or more extreme lighting situations, there is also a built-in high-dynamic range mode. This shoots two, differently exposed, images consecutively and combines them to enable to capture of a greater dynamic range than would be possible in a single exposure.”

Finally, Ricoh “claims the CX1 will be able to capture and convey dynamic range of up to 12EV. However, Rioch stresses that its feature isn’t trying to produce the fashionable, heavily-processed ‘HDR-look.’ ‘it aims to portray the scene in as natural a way as possible.’”

This sounds very interesting, I look forward to seeing the samples made buy CX1.

This is a useful tip if you like to focus on your present task:

$ defaults write com.apple.dock single-app -bool TRUE
$ killall Dock

From Macosxhints.com