from the desk of stinkpot

to fix the following fink error: “Package description too new to be handled by this fink,” you’ll need to upgrade the package manager. if fink doesn’t want to upgrade its package monitor, however, you’ll need to directly download the fink source and install by running: > ./inject.pl

it’s non-obvious how to password-protect a file in mac os x. one strategy i’ve come across is to password-protect a disk image using disk utility and then store sensitive files inside of that image. here’s how to go about doing that. first, open disk utility: next, click on “new image.” give your new disk image [...]

although omnigraffle doesn’t have any built-in tools to make circular or curved lines, constructing such objects is easy to do. simply make orthogonal lines in roughly the shape you’d like your curved lines to be in.  then, in the styles formatting pane go to the lines and shapes tab.  set the corner radius to 10000 [...]

i found this over on hawk wings and it worked like a charm; my folders in apple mail now open about 50% faster than they did prior to this extremely straightforward hint: 1. Quit Mail. 2. Open Terminal. 3. Type the following: cd ~/Library/Mail sqlite3 Envelope\ Index An sqlite> prompt will appear. At that prompt, [...]

this may not work for most mac applications, but it certainly works with launchbar. if you’ve got a mac program that you’d like to be running, but not have its icon show up in the dock, go over to the applications folder, right-click on the chosen application, and click “show contents.”  once inside, edit the [...]

it’s easy to rotate photos in 90 degree increments using iphoto.  but what do you do if you just want to slightly nudge a photo left or right by a couple of degrees? i struggled with google for a good half-hour, wondering if apple could have omitted a feature this simple in its photo editor. [...]

omnigraffle is a wonderful, but occasionally un-intuitive program; it took me an inordinate amount of time to find the background color settings. learn from my missteps. to change the omnigraffle background color. first, click the “utilities” button on the upper-left of the window.  next, click the “canvas tab” on the utility pane.  finally, click on [...]

i can now rm with impunity, thanks to the code snippet i’ve inserted into my ~/.profile: alias rm=’safe_rm.sh’ where ‘safe_rm’ refers to this wonderful piece of code i found on the interwebs some months ago [download safe_rm if too lazy to copy+paste; don't forget to rename safe_rm.sh]: #!/bin/sh for file in $*; do if [ [...]

i’m terrible at managing my time when on the computer. i always end up wasting time surfing the web when i should be studying or writing code. which is why i was really excited to hear about blossom today. blossom is a suggested program for the mac, which’ll tell you how long you’ve spend on [...]

sure sftp is more secure than ftp, but the default client has got some terrible usability problems. for instance, it always really bugged me that i couldn’t tab-auto-complete in sftp.  it’s crazy!  how else do you enter long filenames?! thankfully, i’ve finally found a command-line sftp client that does handle auto-completion: yafc (yet another ftp [...]