NTFS-3G in Mac OS X Lion 10.7 (with read-write support) – by Sergey Nolar Vasilyev

NTFS-3G in Mac OS X Lion 10.7 with read-write support – Sergey Nolar Vasilyev.

An excellent round-up of the current solutions available to install NTFS read/write support on MacOSX 10.7.x Lion (in case, for some sad reason, you really have to deal with NTFS filesystems ).

Locate and Find in Unix

The Unix Command Line: Misc.

A good description of the differences and usage of these two useful command line tools.

Apple Serial Number Info // Decode your Mac’s serial number

Apple Serial Number Info // Decode your Mac’s serial number!.

Using the find command in a pipeline (UNIX)

Ask Ars: how do I use the find command in a pipeline?.

Un-hide the User Library folder on Lion

10.7: Un-hide the User Library folder – Mac OS X Hints.

I kinda of understand why Apple decided to hide the ~/Library folder when using Finder: they probably noticed how much user support they were wasting because people end up deleting the Library folder from their user account.

Anyway, it’s nice to have a way to get it back visible in Finder in Lion:

chflags nohidden ~/Library 

This command can be used to hide/unhide any folder. Neat.

OmniFocus for Mac Sneaky Peeks

Downloads – OmniFocus for Mac – Products – The Omni Group.

In case you use Omnifocus (I totally dependent on this piece of software to put some order in my life and actually GTD ), it’s nice to know that there are some beta revisions released quite often by the Omni developer team that may fix some issues with the most current stable release.

I’ve just “fixed” some annoying bugs in the most recent stable version (19.2.) in Lion, and got some new Lion specific features (e.g full screen). I’m probably getting some brand new bugs too, but so far, I like living on the bleeding edge

Apple OSX 10.7.0 Lion idiosyncrasies… (and some ways to circumvent them)

Ok, so the latest and greatest OS from Apple, codenamed Lion OSX 10.7, introduced some radical changes of paradigm in the way we have been used to interact with a computer  over the years (previous OSX incarnations included).

Some may be good, some may be weird till you grow accustomed to them and some may be just simply stupid. Anyway, your mileage may vary, and I will not go into a flame war on that topic. I’m just collecting in this post some links to modify some of Lion’s strange behaviors into some more mundane settings (if that’s what you want to do). So hang on, and give these a try

The strange case of key-repeat in Lion

Just open TextEdit and press and don’t release the key “a” and see what you get… Yeap, a plain, single, “a”. Not “aaaaaaaaaaa”. If you try with “*”, Lion will now happily repeat that for you. Some say there’s a reason for this behavior, and if you really care about the why, just google it.

If you want to force the key-repeat, and disable the “Press and Hold” for additional characters, here is the terminal command:

defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false

Then restart the computer. Via Seriously no key repeat in Lion?: Apple Support Communities.

Change Mac OS X 10.7 Lion iCal and Address Book Skins from Leather to Aluminum

I’m really not a fan of the ugly and non-sense iCal and Address Book GUIs, which follow a skeuomorphic paradigm for user interface. In fact, there is a nice discussion on this take from Apple in John Siracusa review of Lion.

But there seems to exist a way to get back to more clean and lean GUI for iCal and Address Book: I haven’t tested it yet, but here it is, in case you want to give it a try: Change Mac OS X 10.7 Lion iCal and Address Book Skins from Leather to Aluminum.

Additional tricks to revert some of the weirdnesses of Lion to some more usual behaviours

I’m pretty sure that in the following days/weeks/months people will eventually get used to the way Lion ticks, or just find some clever/hacky ways to revert it back to some more usual settings, and all of those will start be gathered in blogs (like this one), pages, forums and assorted resources (or people will start moving back to Wind… oh, never mind – personally, I would probably move to some flavor of Linux, but I diverge.). Meanwhile, here is a quite complete list of some tricks to make Lion a bit more like Snow Leopard

Some under-the-radar Lion features you might have missed

And in case you start feeling that Lion is all about weirdness, there are actually some quite nice features in it. Check some of the not so well known ones here.

Mac OS X 10.7 Lion: the extensive Ars Technica review (by John Siracusa)

Mac OS X 10.7 Lion: the Ars Technica review.

Excellent and in-depth review of the brand new 10.7 Lion OSX version, by John Siracusa (whose OSX reviews are by now legendary).

Some highlights in the review are: the document model, the Process model, and all the Internals Section (not for the fainted hearts around there ).

Since I’ve bought a brand new Apple MacBook Pro after June 6th, I’m entitled to a free Lion Upgrade. Neat

By the way, for you programmers out there, Apple just released XCode 4.1 as a free download for anyone running Lion (not available for Snow Leopard, though).

UPDATE: some not so well known, but quite interesting, Lion features can be found here.

Marsyas and Open Frameworks

I’ve been trying, together with André Perrotta, to make Marsyas and Open Frameworks (OF) play nicely with each other. The idea is to be able to use Marsyas inside an OF project.

Usually this is done using an OF addon, and Marsyas already provides an experimental ofMarsyas addon in the SVN repository (check it out at here, and some OF examples that use Marsyas here - these locations in the SVN repo may change place in a near future, though, as we probably tidy up the directory structure soon).

However, some problems seem to exist in making Marsyas  and OF play nicely together:

1. you’ll find that there is a clash between the MACRO define PI in OF and the const variable with the same name (elegantly) defined in the Marsyas namespace (MACROS could not care less about namespaces, and thats one of the reasons why its use should be sparse… and careful). Options to solve this would be to rename PI in Marsyas or in OF to some distinct names. This would imply having to modify all occurrences of PI  in one of the libs, essentially creating a fork of the code. A better solution (suggested by Pedro Silva in the Marsyas developers mailing list, is to just do #undef PI after the includes form OF, and just before the includes of Marsyas in your main code).
2. OF must be built as a 32 bit lib (at least in OSX 10.6.7) because of some legacy issues with QuickTime. Marsyas is built by default as a 64bit lib, so when you try to mix them together, the refuse to link. So, be sure to compile Marsyas as a static 32bit library (i.e. libmarsyas.a) before including it in an OF project. The way to do so in CMake is to set the CMAKE_OSX_ARCHITECTURES to i386 . Then in the OF Xcode project, you just have to point it to the correct 32bit libmarsyas.a lib, and make sure it also knowns about the corresponding .h headers. In case you wonder how to know if a library is 32 or 64 bit in OSX, have a look here.
3. As far as it was possible to understand, the ofMarsyas addon still has some problems (there are some hardcoded paths in some of the #include calls, and ofxThreads still borks in some occasions), and we are in the process of investigating it and will post about our findings ASAP.

We’ll post some additional info (and hopefully more detailed info) soon.

Time Machine – Frequently Asked Questions

Time Machine – Frequently Asked Questions.