A place for brain dumps.
How come no one told me?
PBCOPY(1) PBCOPY(1)
NAME
pbcopy, pbpaste - provide copying and pasting to the pasteboard (the
Clipboard) from command line
Nothing earth shattering, but useful none the less.
I just discovered that Safari (the browser) won’t scroll the window via the space bar when the num lock key is on. So bizarre. I’m not sure why. I only figured it out because Safari was driving me nuts, then I saw the num lock light on and turned it out. Out of sheer habbit (which was annoying me moments earlier because my habbit wasn’t working) I hit space again and *bam* it scrolls.
This may be only on my MacBook Pro… I’ll have to try it with an external keyboard plugged in.
Just the other day I was wishing there was an easy way to see where my mouse is when it gets lost on my dual headed set up. Now this comes along… OmniDazzle. Nice.
And they’re even fixing the crasher that affects my MacBook Pro. 
Update: crasher fixed, I can play, too, now.
This is a helluva slick trick.
Quickfire messages with Mail.app:
“I often want to send a quick Mail.app message while I am working in another app. I can switch to Mail, start a new message and type in the recipient’s name, or I can find a faster way.Hawk Wings reader Joshua Keay emailed me his method of doing this quickly. He created a file that is a text clippiing with the “mailto:” tag at the beginning of it.”
I tried to make the same thing happen for a blank Safari window, but no such luck. I’ll have to work on it more. Worst case, a local blank HTML file will do the trick.
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Argh!
Grey screen of death again. It happens every time my 30G iPod with video gets close to full.
From panic.log:
Mon Jan 30 15:53:55 2006
panic(cpu 0 caller 0x002476F4): BlockAllocateContig: allocation overflow on "cuddlePod Two"
Latest stack backtrace for cpu 0:
Backtrace:
0x00095718 0x00095C30 0x0002683C 0x002476F4 0x002471EC 0x00246120 0x00228B88 0x000FC160
0x000F5738 0x0027D95C 0x0027D784 0x002AA304 0x000ABEB0 0x45787069
Proceeding back via exception chain:
Exception state (sv=0x33722280)
PC=0x90053AEC; MSR=0x0000D030; DAR=0x0A1423A8; DSISR=0x42000000; LR=0x90B51D20; R1=0xF071DB20; XCP=0x00000030 (0xC00 - System call)
Kernel version:
Darwin Kernel Version 8.4.0: Tue Jan 3 18:22:10 PST 2006; root:xnu-792.6.56.obj~1/RELEASE_PPC
How is it my iPod is tickling a kernel bug? WTF?
I was vaguely interested, but didn’t go out to download it until I read this in the release notes:
Camino : Release Notes : Camino 1.0 beta 2:
“Camino now has built in SVG support.”
Boo-yah! I haven’t managed to get SVG working on any of the various Mac browsers I have until this one. Once Firefox turns it on by default, I’ll be ecstatic.
(Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog.)
Hallon is terribly handy looking. It manages due dates, but in a fuzzy way… “by the end of the month”, etc. I can see this thing fitting nicely into my workflow, especially bookmarking emails to respond to and so on.
Hell yeah, I like it already. Mail.app + iCal now deal with updated meeting notices that they wouldn’t/couldn’t handle from Outlook. Boo-yah.
Cocoa-Java Integration Guide
:
“Important: Features added to Cocoa in Mac OS X versions later than 10.4 will not be added to the Cocoa-Java programming interface. Therefore, you should develop Cocoa applications using Objective-C to take advantage of existing and upcoming Cocoa features.”
(Via MacSlash.)
WTF?
I guess that answers my question about the potential of Core Data/Bindings in Java. This also explains the half-assed drunken (yes, literarily) Apple presentations at JavaOne.
I hope this was a real strategic decision, not a knee-jerk resources issue. I can see the logic, actually. Who was writing Java applications that were stuck on OSX? Probably no one. If the logic is that no one was using the OSX-specific APIs, then all is okay. They still integrate Java reasonably well into the OS, so you can still be a real OSX application in Java.
Hopefully they won’t let the existing APIs rot.
macosxhints - 10.4 Convert document formats on the command line:
“There’s a new command line (unix) utility in OS X 10.4 called textutil which will convert document formats known to the Cocoa layer. According to the man page (man textutil), the formats supported are: txt, html, rtf, rtfd, doc, wordml, or webarchive. Most usefully, you can convert rtf, doc and html documents to text format for further processing with other command line tools.”
It seems to not work terribly well on webarchive files. Just running -info on one took a while to run. 1m1.054s on my iBook, to be exact.