Nov. 9, 2009
One thing that I’m missing in Snow Leopard is the “add as email attachment” option in the Finder context menu as I find myself constantly right-clicking a file when I want to send it to someone. The functionality exists but not in the context menu. You need to go all the way to Finder->Services->New Email With Attachment.
Some may argue well, that’s the way it is, Apple decided this is the best way of doing things, you need to accept it and move on. Why do that, when fixing it the way you want it is a couple of seconds away?
If you want to be able to right-click a file in Finder in order to add it as an attachment, this is what you need to do:
- Start Automator
- Choose the Service template
- In the dropdown boxes that appear choose “files or folders” and “Finder”
- Click the Mail application in the Library tree
- Drag the “New Mail Message” to the workflow area
- Save the new service (the name of the workflow will appear in the context-menu)
That’s it! The new action should appear at the bottom when you right-click a file in Finder.
Posted by patrik in Snow Leopard | No Comments
Oct. 22, 2009
Truecrypt 6.3 has finally been released and now fully supports Snow Leopard. No need to patch and compile anymore, simply grab your copy from here: http://www.truecrypt.org/downloads
Posted by patrik in Snow Leopard | No Comments
Sep. 22, 2009
A part from my Mac running OS X I am running quite a few Ubuntu and Debian servers and workstations. One thing that has been bugging me for quite a while is the fact that the backspace key has not been working properly in the nano editor on these systems when accessed over ssh from my OS X laptop. Instead of deleting the character immediately to the left of the cursor, it deletes the character to the right as if I was hitting the delete key.
I got some creative suggestions such as: “Well, don’t use nano use vi/emacs/pico instead”. Those are all great suggestions but I still wanted to solve the problem with nano as it’s installed on all of my systems, and I find myself using it a lot.
Doing some Googling I came up with one solution, which I wasn’t entirely happy with as it involved changing the TERM settings on the remote computer. This isn’t all bad but I wanted to try to find a solution that actually just affects nano rather than every other program that uses the TERM environment variable. For those of you that don’t consider this to be a problem you can simply place the following in your .bash_profile or equivalent file.
export TERM=xterm
By studying the /etc/nanorc I immediately found something interesting which turned out to be a better solution:
## Fix Backspace/Delete confusion problem.
set rebinddelete
In order to set this option for everyone on the system it needs to go in /etc/nanorc, however for me it’s sufficient to fix it for my own accounts. This can be done by issuing the following command:
echo "set rebinddelete" >> $HOME/.nanorc
Now, the next time you start nano the backspace should behave as backspace rather than delete. Delete still works by pressing fn+backspace as usual.
Posted by patrik in Snow Leopard | No Comments
Sep. 17, 2009
Ever since I upgraded to Snow Leopard my MacBook took for ever to go into sleep when closing the lid. This was very frustrated as being a time optimist I usually work until I really need to leave and then I don’t want to spend 20 seconds before being able to put the computer into my computer bag. Anyway, looking in to the problem I found that OS X provides several sleep (hibernate) modes where some are considered more safe than others and therefore require more time.
In short when closing the lid the MacBook can either:
- Sleep and keep the RAM memory powered on
- Hibernate and write memory contents to disk and power down completely
Writing memory to disk is considered safer as even if your battery runs out of juice memory contents are still preserved and the OS can bring you back to where you were. This of course comes with a time penalty. The following article explains everything in more detail and also provides information on how to change between different sleep and hibernation modes:
http://www.macworld.com/article/53471/2006/10/sleepmode.html
I changed my settings from hibernation to sleep and went from 22 seconds to 1 second of wait when closing the lid.