2005 January

Dave, how can I flatten a directory structure? I’ve got a directory “foo” with many more sub-directories and files within. I want to take all the files from all levels beneath foo and put them in foo itself.

I’ve tried this: find . *.mp3 -print0 | xargs -0 mv . but I get an error […]

I just realized that after two years of doing this Switcher’s blog, I never told you about a software company that should be a top bookmark in your browser - someone kick me!
Ranchero Software’s front page proclaims: “News and software for smart people. Mostly Mac.” The slogan says it all. You need to stop […]

Whether we want to admit it or not, our iPods hold a special place in our lives. We proudly show them off when we’re jogging or at the park, on a bus, or at school.
I keep mine in a special protective case and even have a protective cupholder for it in the car. Face […]

If you’ve waited until now to order the cute little desktop of your dreams, the Mac mini, well you’re in luck. The Apple store appears to have dropped the prices of the optional add-ons for the mini. A 1 Gig RAM upgrade has now dropped to $325, a Bluetooth/Wireless Airport card upgrade is now […]

Dave, I have just installed a new DVD burner in my computer (a Pioneer DVD-RW
DVR-105 internal drive) and am trying to figure out what kind of blank disks
I should be using. There are apparently five different blank DVD formats. Do
I want DVD-R? DVD-RW? or ??

Also, if I just want to burn lots of […]

The OmniOutliner 2 program was getting a little long in the tooth. It did basic outlining and lists, but needed a feature and face lift. Well the OmniGroup was never one to sneak by with minimal efforts, they basically tore OmniOutliner apart and started from scratch to give us a feature-rich, attractive and functional
OmniOutliner 3.

One of the best freeware programs for the Mac was from Dan Schimpf called MacJournal. It was a notebook, day planner, diary, journal, and personal organizer all rolled up in one. As of 2005, MacJournal 3.0 will be owned and distributed by Mariner Software and it will be a commercial product. There is a sale […]

The balance of the Best of Show awards go to some of the big names and the small names of the Mac community. First, one of the most well-known names in FTP software, Panic, is about to upgrade its Transmit program to version 3. Apple’s iPod shuffle and Mac mini were given the Best of […]

Another of the Best of Show winners at MWSF was Roxio’s Popcorn.
Popcorn helps you easily make high quality copies of your non-encrypted, DVD movies. Powerful compression technology gives you the flexibility to copy even the largest movies to a single DVD disc.
Compress an entire 9 GB dual-layer DVD-video to a standard 4.7 GB DVD […]

Griffin’s SmartDeck Intelligent Cassette Adapter for iPod won a Best of Show award at MWSF.
SmartDeck allows users to control their iPod using the built in controls of their cassette player. Using patent pending sensing technology, the SmartDeck determines which commands the cassette player sends to the iPod. SmartDeck is more than just a cassette […]

One of the big surprises of the Expo was the naming of Bare Bones Software’s TextWrangler 2 as a Best of Show.
This product has always been a little brother to BBedit and was an inexpensive and great alternative for most folks that did not need the power or the expense of BBedit.

Gizmodo has posted a tutorial showing impatient iPod owners how to make their existing iPods into an iPod Shuffle. With the new Mac mini announcement, we know a bunch of you will be wanting to reuse existing equipment, so why buy a new iPod Shuffle (or wait for it to ship) when you can have […]

Hi, Dave! I’m running a 500 MHz Titanium Powerbook with 512MB of memory, Mac OSX 10.3.7. I recently had to do a clean install on my powerbook and my shell is defaulting to the tcsh instead of the bash. First question… Why did it do that? Second question… How do I fix it?

A few days ago, I shared my thoughts about Apple, Think Secret and Non-Disclosure Agreements, in which I basically said that rumor sites were cool, but rumor sites that were using known confidential information or news that was obviously shared with them in violation of non-disclosure agreements were most assuredly not cool at all.

Yesterday I […]

The Third Day at MacWorld Expo brought me more conversations and information. I’ll put them together in the next few days, until then, here are the Expo photos I took yesterday while on the floor. Please Click here for the photos.

I am certain that you have all heard of the top Apple news from the Steve Jobs Keynote. I wanted to go over the details of the announcements and give you my take on them. The press pass I had was not a guarantee to get into the Keynote; we were placed in a press […]

I registered early for my media pass and took a trip to see the Apple Campus in Cupertino with the folks from Your Mac Life. I took some pictures and will be up early in the morning to get in the Moscone in time to see the Keynote by Steve Jobs. I will report tomorrow […]

As the technology community at large now knows, Apple has taken legal
action against ThinkSecret with allegations of a Non-Disclosure
Agreement violation. These violations concern the Mac mini, a
bargain-price Macintosh PC announced officially by Apple on January
11, 2005.
Many haven’t thought highly of this move by Apple. Let’s face it: in
this world of Open Source code, shared music […]

I have a Snow iMac G3 800MHz, with both OS9.2.2 and OS10.1.5 on it, and for jollies, I put 10.3 on my external firewire hard drive, and just boot off the external drive. I wanted to see how well that works, and it works wonderfully. (it is up to 10.3.7 right now)

Anyway, this is […]

Dave, I’m taking my iBook into the shop for some repairs and really want to do a backup beforehand, just in case. Problem is, I don’t have an Apple SuperDrive on my Mac OS X iBook. What’s the best strategy?