todbot blog

Wow, those guys at Ambient Devices,
the makers of the fun but useless Orb,

have full
Technical Resources
on how to build your own. Even with schematics.

hardware-hacking | 1 Comment »

I just got a new Powerbook and had to re-remember all the bits I need/like:

• uControl — Capslock -> Ctrl key remapper
  I also use it to remap the ‘enter’ key next to the arrow keys to be a ‘fn’ key, so I can do ‘fn+arrows’ to give me easy pgup,pgdown,home,end.
• Codetek VirtualDesktop Pro — pager / virtual screen
  Like any good Unix, this functionality should be part of OS X, but oh well. It also supports a hack to sorta give one Sloppy Focus.
• WindowShade X — Windowshade functionality (window minimizer)
  This was part of MacOS, but left with OS X. Here it is as a third-party app. Sigh.
• Carbon Copy Cloner — disk backup and cloner
  My backup solution is to clone my Powerbook’s disk to an external disk that I boot from in case of catastrophic disk failure.
• MenuMeters — menubar stats
  Gives you little graphs of CPU, net, disk, etc.
• PDF Browser Plugin — view PDFs and .ps files in the browser
• Adium — multi-protocol IM client
  Adium is based off of libGaim, and supports tabs.
• Mozilla Firefox — Kick-ass fast browser
  Sort of obvious, yeah, but Firefox still beats out Safari in terms of dealing with all the crazy pages out there
  (especially forms-based broken-ness)
• Fink — Unix program package manager
  Fink can give you all the crap you can get on RedHat, if you want it.
  Things I use:
  • gnuplot
  • ncftp(get)
  • nmap
  • mtr
  • unrar
  • wget

  All my other Unix needs, even X11, are (surprisingly) supplied by OS X itself.

• Media players
  Sometimes you just gotta view the occasional .rpm or .avi:
  - RealOne Player
  - Windows Media Player
• Network Beacon — Rendevous service publisher

Almost recommended:

• XBattery
  — battery monitoring utility

macosx | No Comments »