Simen's Tech Blog

Remove duplicate entries in Finders Open With menu

2010-09-23T19:58:00.000+02:00

After seeing my list of entries in the Finder's "Open With" menu grow and containing an increasing number of duplicate entries, I figured it was time to try and fix this. Googling the matter revealed a number of outdated solutions. The problem was that the utility used had moved to another location on the disk.

The correct way of doing this on Snow Leopard is to use the following command:


/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user

This will regenerate the list, and for me, all the extra entries disappeared.

While Waiting for the Kindle to Arrive

2010-08-28T05:04:00.003+02:00

A few week a go, my lovely wife bought me an Kindle (version 3) as a birthday gift. The word has now come that the Kindle is shipped, and I am eagerly awaiting its arrival, scheduled for Tuesday, here are a few links that I have found concerning the new Kindle 3. Some are reviews, some are other peaces, but they all talk about the Kindle. Enjoy.

And P.S. If you have any links not in my list, please share them in the comments.

Amazon Kindle review (2010) - Reveiw from Engadget
Video review: New Kindle is the best yet, despite some minor flaws - Consumer Report Review
WANTED: Amazon Kindle, 3rd Generation | Fast Company - Fast Company
Kindle 3 is smaller, but a big deal e-reader - :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES, Andy Ihnatko
Yfrog Video : yfrog.com/mzffbz - Uploaded by kevinrose
State of the Art - New Kindle Leaves Rivals Farther Behind - NYTimes.com
E-books, Piracy Peril or Promotional Possibilities? - TorrentFreak
The new Kindle is here and unboxed - Houston Chronicle
Amazone News Release - Amazone.com
Amazon Kindle (3G + Wi-Fi) Review & Rating - PCMag.com
Amazon Kindle (3G/Wi-Fi, graphite) E-Book reader reviews - CNET Reviews - CNET.com
Hands-on review of the Kindle 3 - Crave - CNET
Kindle Outselling iBooks 60 To 1 -TheNextWeb.com
Kindle Post US: What the Kindle Team Is Reading, Part 1

Search Amazon.com for kindle

Using URLs as references with LaTeX and BibTex

2010-07-09T16:07:00.000+02:00

Recently, while writing a paper using LaTeX, I needed to reference some URLs. Sometimes footnotes might be used for this, but here I felt it would be better to put it in the list of references using BibTeX. There are, however, no obvious way of referencing URLs with BibTeX. After searching a little and playing with the results, the the following seems to be a good way to write up URL references in BibTeX.

@misc{example_com,
    Howpublished = {\url{http://www.example.com/}},
    Key = {example},
    Title = {The example.com Web Site},
    month = jul,
    year = {2010}

}

Howpublished is where you put the URL that should be displayed in the list of references. I also use the URL-package to make sure that the URL is formated properly. It is possible to use the hyperref-package to make the URLs clickable. Month and year are used to denote when the site was last visited.

When the list of references is created, this should create a reasonably nice display of the URL. An even better approach would probably be to use biber or BibLatex, but that was not really an option in this case.

Inserting todays date in Apple Keynote

2010-06-08T12:43:00.001+02:00

Inserting today's date in Apple's Keynote application should be as easy as selecting "Insert date" from the insert menu. It is, however, not an available option. This always surprises me, but I have not been able to find this seemingly obvious feature anywhere.

Luckily, there is a way to do it. It involves inserting a table, and putting a formula into the table cell. Start by inserting a table (press the "table" button on the button bar, or select table from the insert menu). Select the table inspector, and set both body rows and body columns to 1 (one).

You should now have a fairly large square on your slide. This is OK for now. Select this square and type "=TODAY()" or "=NOW()" into the square. The text will be shown in a small pop-up window for typing in formulas. The first command (today) will display today's date only, and the second (now) will display both the date and the current time.

Depending on your use, it might be a good idea to customize the visual appearance of the table, for instance remove the table border by selecting "none" in the cell border drop down box in the inspector. You should be able to change the colors and fonts using the normal keynote manipulation techniques.

Using alt (meta) in bash on OS X

2010-03-20T09:47:00.002+01:00

The bash shell has a few very useful commands that, at first glance, do not work on OS X. Commands like Alt-D (delete word) and Alt-B (backwards one word) does not work. This has annoyed me for a while, so I finally set out to do something about it. The solution turned out to be fairly simple.

Terminal.app has a setting that turns the option key as the meta key. Just open Terminal.app preferences and select the settings tab, and select "use option as meta" check box. You are now good to go for using the Alt-B, Alt-D (and similar) keyboard shortcuts.

24-hour clock in iCal

2010-02-26T10:54:00.001+01:00

Living in Norway, I am used to working with a 24-hour clock. I never liked this am/pm thing. I do, however, like my operating system language to be English. By default, iCal will use the settings for the current selected language for deciding what type of time it will display (12-hour or 24-hour).

The way to change how iCal display its time, go to System Preferences, and select Language & Text. One of the tabs showing in this preference pane is Formats. Press the "Customize..." button, and change the format to whatever you would like it to be by dragging and dropping elements into the different boxes. Delete elements by selecting it and typing the back-space button.

That is it. You will have to restart iCal for the changes to take affect.

Restoring hidden files with Time HMachine

2010-01-18T14:05:00.006+01:00

I recently, after a 4 month wait for my company to get the discs, upgraded to Snow Leopard. I trusted Time Machine for my backup of the Leopard install, and did a wipe and install. I like to start with a clean system whenever I can.

After having installed Snow Leopard, I needed to restore some files, including my .profile. The only trouble is that, as far as I was able to figure out, there is no way of displaying hidden files when you are in Time Machine mode, and as a consequence, no way of restoring them unless you restore the whole directory.

There is a way of displaying hidden files in Finder when not in Time Machine, and it turns out that if this mode is enabled when you start Time Machine, hidden files are displayed also within Time Machine.

You need to do the following two commands in order to turn on the display of hidden files

$ defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
$ killall Finder

You may now restore your files. When you have restored the files and want to turn off display of hidden files (they clutter things up in the display), just do the same two commands again, but replace "TRUE" in the first command with "FALSE"

Adding a dictionary not included with Snow Leopard

2010-01-15T15:58:00.002+01:00

As a native Norwegain speaking, I have had to install cocoAspell in order to have Norwegian spell checking. This has worked fairly well, but now it is possible to have spell checking in any language, as Snow Leopard comes preinstalled with Hunspell, an open solution for spell checking. Hunspell is used by a number of products, including OpenOffice.org, and as OpenOffice include spell checking for most languages, Snow Leopard is able to use those dictionaries for spell checking. In order to add spell checking for a language that is not already included in Snow Leopard is to go to

http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/dictionary

and download the dictionary for the language in question. Extract the zip-file copy or move all files with .dic and .aff endings to either ~/Library/Spelling (or only your user) or /Library/Spelling (for all users on that system).

For the changes to take effect, restart the programs you want to use with the new dictionary, or log out and back in.

Generate Passwords

2010-01-10T11:21:00.003+01:00

Ahh, just what I need. An app that lets me access he built in password generator for OS X. No need to open Key Chaing or create a new user account. At CodePoetry, you can download this application for free.Very handy for all the times you need a new password.

iPhone 3GS

2009-11-12T16:17:00.002+01:00

After quite a wait, I have finally managed to get hold of an iPhone 3GS. As this is equipment I use in my work, I thought it would be just fair that work paid for the phone. This has been a long process (almost 6 months), but the phone has finally arrived. Only trouble is that the phone is now waiting for me at work, and I am unable to get hold of it for a few days. Oh, the horror... I can not wait...

I will post more when I finally are able to actually hold the phone in my hands...

Using the command line for looking up wikipedia entriesLi

2009-09-02T20:21:00.003+02:00

Lifehacker had a tip of how to look up an entry in Wikipedia using the command line. It uses the dig command line, and the syntax is as follows:

dig +short txt .wp.dg.cx

Just replace with what you want to look up. That will give you the Wikipedia summary back. Quite cool.

Which XCode files should be under SCM?

2009-08-23T20:40:00.004+02:00

I am using XCode for some of my programming projects, and I would like to minimize the number of files in my SCM repository. The question is, which files are necessary for XCode to compile the project and which can be ignored?

You will of course need to add all your .h and .m files. The .xib (.nib) files should also be included. From what I have been able to figure out, you could put the following into your ignore-file (.gitignore if you are using git, as I am at the moment).

# XCode files that can be ignored
build/*
*.pbxuser
*.mode1v3

Also, it could be a good idea to add the following into your .gitattributes-file, in order to treat the project file as a binary file. This will make things easier if you get conflicts.

*.pbxproj -crlf -diff -merge

OS X Terminal Software Update

2009-07-19T00:24:00.003+02:00

As I manage a couple of computers running Mac OS X (not all mine), keeping them up to date with the latest security and software updates can be a bit tiresome. This is especially true for machines I have to use remote control on in order to update. With slow Internet connections, the VNC-protocol can be a bit slow, in particular when the machine is also downloading huge security updates.

To help with this, I just found out that is possible to update the machine remotely (or locally) using the terminal. All you have to do is fire up the terminal, optionally ssh to the remote machine, and type in the command

sudo softwareupdate -i -a

This will download and install all available Apple updates. If you just want to see what updates are available, try

softwareupdate -l

Using the command line to get the external IP

2009-04-28T22:13:00.003+02:00

Lifehacker hints on how to get your external IP-address from the command line. You can use either curl or wget, using either of the following commands:

curl -s myip.dk |grep '"Box"' | egrep -o '[0-9.]+'

wget -O - -q myip.dk |grep '"Box"' | egrep -o '[0-9.]+'

OS X do not come with wget preinstalled (it can be installed through e.g. Fink or MacPort), the curl version might be the most useful for OS X users.

Use 'ls' to only show directories

2009-04-08T15:05:00.003+02:00

Lifehaker has a great tip on how to use 'ls' to only show the subdirectories at the command prompt. When you know about it, it is kind of obvious (if you know some simple regexp), but a it is still very handy.

So, what you do is to type

ls -l | grep ^d

at the command prompt. This will only list your subdirectories.

Line numbers in LaTeX

2009-04-04T00:49:00.003+02:00

As I am doing a bit of writing, I suddenly had the need to have line numbers in my LaTeX document. There is a really nice package called lineno that takes care of this very nicely. All you have to do is include the package, and put the command \linenumbers somewhere in your document. I placed the following two lines in my preamble:

\usepackage{lineno}
\linenumbers

You will find the documentation for lineno at ctan.

Printing with Quicksilver

2009-02-28T14:20:00.001+01:00

I find that I use Quicksilver for many things. I came over a post explaining how to print a file that is selected in the finder without opening preview or other programs. Quite handy.

Clear Growl Notifications

2009-02-21T10:38:00.001+01:00

Just as this article over at Macworld describes, I sometimes get a lot of Growl messages on my screen. Removing them is very tedious, but by pressing option as you press close on one of the messages, all messages are removed. Very handy.

Turn off the screen from the keybard

2009-02-18T22:14:00.000+01:00

At Mac OS X Hints, they have a tip for sleeping the display of your mac from your keyboard. By pressing the keyboard shortcut Shift-Control-Eject, the screen goes to sleep. Very handy for sleeping your display when your laptop is on battery.

Fun with date

2009-02-09T16:33:00.002+01:00

On Sat Feb 14 00:31:30 CET 2009 (Norwegian time) the epoch timer in unix-systems will reach the magical number 1234567890. If you are on a unix-like system (e.g. a Linux system), you can check when this will happen for you by typing in this command:

date -d @1234567890

You can also se a count-d own at http://coolepochcountdown.com/.

I think this is kind of cool :-).

Connecting an iPod without syncing

2009-01-12T16:02:00.005+01:00

I am often connecting my iPod to my work computer, either to charge or to listen to or watch something on the iPod. It always bugs my, however, that the iPod always wants to sync with the iTunes Library on the work machine. I sync at home, and do not want to sync with the machine at work.

Lifehacker has an article on a cable with a switch that can be used to turn on or off syncing the iPod with iTunes. At almost $25, I think that is a bit pricy. It turns out that you can hold down command-option (cmd-alt) when you insert your iPod, and hold them down until the iPod shows up in your iTunes source list. It will not sync.

For windows users I think the key combination is control-shift, but it should work the same way.

Toast does not work on my late 2008 MacBook Pro

2008-12-18T14:15:00.004+01:00

I recently got a new MacBook Pro. (late 2008 edition) I went all the way maxing out both harddisk and CPU. So far I am mostly very happy with it. It is fast (really fast), has a very nice screen (I really like the new glossy screens), and the keyboard is also very nice.

There is, however, a little problem. I am unable to write to DVD-R(W) with Toast. Toast works with DVD+R(W), and I am able to write -R(W) from Disk Utility. It seems as the problem is with Toast. It is very annoying, as it adds another step to my workflow. I do hope they will fix it soon, but for now I guess I can live with doing the final burn in Disk Utility.

Booting with non-verbose mode

2008-12-03T13:38:00.003+01:00

For some reason, my iMac was shipped with verbose booting turned on. In this mode, all boot messages that the core Unix-system within OS X creates, are displayed as the system boots up. This is of course completely harmless, but keeping with the nice look and feel of the Mac, it has annoyed med for quite some time.

I finally got around to try to figure out what the problem was. It turns out that there is a boot parameter you can use to turn this feature on or off (really just on, the absences of this parameter is the same as off). It is a parameter in nvram, which can be set or displayed with the command “nvram”. To see what the parameters are, go to the terminal, and type

sudo nvram –p

and look for “boot-args” (or type sudo nvram –p | grep “boot-args”). In my case the boot-argswhere “-v”, for verbose.

To turn this off, just type

sudo nvram boot-args=

and your Mac should be booting in normal mode, without displaying all these messages. If you need to see the messages again, go back to the terminal and type

sudo nvram boot-args="-v"

and it is back to booting in verbose mode.

If you would only like to turn on verbose mode for this one boot, you could press and hold command-v when you turn on the system, and it will boot verbose mode only this one time, reverting to normal (graphical) boot the next.

Why my iMac was shipped with the verbose mode on I do not know, but finally it is back to normal.

Keeping MacPorts clean

2008-11-27T22:27:00.002+01:00

In a previous post, I wrote about how to clean up your installation of MacPorts. After haveing gone through the steps previously described, it might be a good idea to keep your installation of MacPorts clean.

It turns out that there is a way to keep the installation clean all the time. If you run the command

sudo port -nuf upgrade outdated

in a command shell, MacPorts will uninstall any outdated versions of any packaged it upgrades. We do need to force (-f) the installation, as MacPorts believes that you need the old versions. When checking for dependencies, it does not take the version into account. Since we are installing a new version, this is OK.

UPDATE: jmr pointed out in a comment that it is no longer necessary to the "nf" flags, as the bugs that made them necessary have been fixed. See his comment for more details.

Stop password expiry in Windwos Vista

2008-11-20T15:06:00.006+01:00

By default, Windows Vista will prompt you to change your password every 42 days. This is very annoying, but at techblissonline.com, they have a solution. Just start a command prompt as administrator and type in the following:

net accounts /maxpwage:unlimited

There should be no more need to change the password unless you choose to your self. If you would just like to change the number of days between password changes, type in the number of days (between 0 and 999) instead of "unlimited".

Making Lepoards help window go behind other windows

2008-11-19T19:13:00.005+01:00

On of the things that really bug me with Leopard, is that the help window always stays on top of other windows. I found this tip (and I should have written down where I found it) that allow other windows to go on top of the help window.

If you type the following command in a terminal window

defaults write com.apple.helpviewer NormalWindow -bool true

the help window should fall behind other windows. You will have to click on the window to get it back to the front. In my world, this is so much better.

If you would like to have the old behavior back (the help window always on top) just use the same command, but change "true" at the end to "false".

Cleaning up MacPorts

2008-11-10T00:48:00.015+01:00

I am running MacPorts on my laptop. Unfortunately, the laptop have a limited amount of space on the hard drive, so I constantly have to keep trimming away things that I do not need.

I noticed that my MacPort folder was growing quite a bit, and I wondered if it would be possible to trim what was in the MacPorts folder without removing any of the applications? After searching a little on the net, I discovered a few interesting things.

It seems as though MacPorts, when upgrading to a new version of an application, leaves the old version behind. After a while, this will eat up quite a bit of your precious hard disk space. So in order to see what you have installed on your machine, type in the following:

port installed

There will probably be a lot of ports installed, and only the ones marked "(active)" are used. The rest may be removed. Before doing so it might be fun to see just how much space MacPorts is using. I run the command

du -sh /opt

This will give you an aproximate value for the disk space occupied by MacPorts. On my machine (which already have been cleaned once) it reports 2.5G. The next step is now to remove all the old versions. I would start out by doing a "clean" for all the installed ports. You do this by typing

sudo port clean --all installed

This erases all temporary files in that are being generated during a build of an application. Only things that can be rebuilt are removed in this step. For fun you could run the "du" command again, to see what your savings are. It might not be much at the moment, but on my system I now ended up with 2.7G, a saving of 200MB.

Now for the actual removal of the old versions. This is accomplished by this command:

sudo port -f uninstall inactive

My first attempt was a bit longer, but it also did the trick:

port installed | grep -v "(active)" | while read i; do sudo port -f uninstall $i; done

This will give you an error message as the first line of output is "The following ports are currently installed:", and since there are no port with that name, it will fail, but continue. This is harmless, and I decided that creating a fix for this would make the command line more complicated that necessary. Anyway, after running the first command, the "du" command showed my /opt directory to be 2.6G. I had run this series of commands before, so my savings were not that grate this time around, but the first time I saved almost 1.5G.

I hope this was to some help for some of you.

The first post

2008-11-09T20:35:00.002+01:00

This is my first post on this blog, or any blog for that matter. I have used a tumblr blog for short and interesting link etc. but here I will try to write longer texts.

The content of the blog will be a mix of what I happen to find interessting at the moment. Since I am very interested in computers, that will probably be a topic I will return to as the time goes by. I will post hint and triks that I come across.

I am mostly using Macs at the moment, but I also use Linux and Windows machines quite a bit, so thre might be a mix of information here.

So, lets get on with it. Lets start blogging. :-)