February 2008
6 posts
Thoughts on Making Music - Replacing the Melody
So I finally dusted off the old keyboard and plugged it into my Powerbook G4 12”. I am decidedly lo-fi. I *could* use my more powerful computer; I could use better instruments. But I’m using my tiny laptop, cheap headphones, and Garageband. Because if you can’t make good music with that, will money solve your problems? I have the “sound” and the mood in my head....
Finding the Config File for Vidalia
I’ve been playing around with Vidalia builds lately on my Mac. (For those who don’t know, Vidalia is a Tor and Privoxy bundle that basically gives you better anonymity for your Internet usage via “onion routing.”) At some point, I rolled back my build from an experimental 0.1.6 build to a stable build. Then, all of a sudden, Tor couldn’t start because of a “read...
How to Disable Dashboard - Use Onyx
Onyx is great. It’s a great maintenance tool for checking your disk, cleaning up logs and caches, running maintenance scripts. But it also lets you access other settings that you can’t (or are hard to get to) in your System Preferences. For example, I don’t use Dashboard all that much. But it still eats resources. I’d rather just ditch it. (I know it doesn’t load...
How to Sync Your iCal with Google Calendar (GCal)
It used to be one of the Holy Grails of Mac-dom: two-way syncing of your iCal with Google Calendar. Then there was Spanning Sync, but at $25/yr or $65/lifetime, it’s too pricey. Then there’s GCalDaemon—but with its complicated shell interface to a Java application, it’s not quite worth the effort. Now there’s gSync. It installs quickly and pretty intuitively. (If...
How to Uninstall Menufela
I love Menufela—it lets me hide Spotlight and even hide the entire menu bar, so I have the ultimate, clear desktop. But I’m working on slimming down my Powerbook G4 12”, which means removing everything unnecessary—including, in this case, Menufela, which is currently using 14.13 MB of RAM. Menufela doesn’t have an uninstall feature. To uninstall it, download...
Lightscoop and the Nikon D40
Let’s be real. A lot of people take pictures in their apartments/homes with pretty crappy lighting, often while sitting on their couch. Unfortunately, it’s hard to get really good pictures this way. The colors are too dark; the image is too grainy; the flash pops up and blasts away. But you can still take good pictures for cheap. You can use the Lightscoop—or just hold a...