Mac OS X - Aldoblog

TextMate

I’ve been a BBEdit user for more than a decade, and consider it one of the finest pieces of software I’ve ever used. But a new text editing application, TextMate, has me re-evaluating my loyalty. I hope to make 2006 the year I achieve “text editing zen,” and I think TextMate is the application to help me do it.

I’ve used BBEdit for many years, starting with version 3.5 and buying every version released since then. It’s a wonderful application, one where when I learn of a new version, I send them my credit card info before reading what’s actually in a new release. To say that I love BBEdit is an understatement; it’s been one of the core tools I’ve used to earn a living for more than a decade.

A little over a year ago, a new kid on the OS X text editing block appeared. TextMate was the first text editing application I’ve seen in 10+ years which has tempted me to leave BBEdit, mostly on the strength of a screencast for Ruby on Rails, where TextMate was (in theory) an incidental part of the demo.

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iPod 101

There’s not much about audiobooks (except how to buy them in the iTMS), but Apple’s new “iPod 101”:http://www.apple.com/support/ipod101/ is likely to be an extremely useful resource to all the many visitors who are coming here after getting an iPod for Xmas.

There’s not much about audiobooks (except how to buy them in the iTMS), but Apple’s new iPod 101 is likely to be an extremely useful resource to all the many visitors who are coming here after getting an iPod for Xmas.

Do check it out, and then come back to Aldo on Audiobooks to start on iPod 102, all audiobooks, all the time.

For SaleSold!: PowerMac G4 dual-800MHz

Just a quick note in case anyone is interested, I am selling off my old Mac (a PowerMac G4 with 1 gig of RAM and a large, fast SCSI disk; more details in the listing) on craigslist.org:

“http://www.craigslist.org/sfc/sys/98433667.html”:http://www.craigslist.org/sfc/sys/98433667.html

All things considered, I’d rather sell to someone I know, so if you’re interested, let me know. (Quickly, it’ll surely sell this week.)

Just a quick note in case anyone is interested, I am selling off my old Mac (a PowerMac G4 with 1 gig of RAM and a large, fast SCSI disk; more details in the listing) on craigslist.org:

http://www.craigslist.org/sfc/sys/98433667.html

All things considered, I’d rather sell to someone I know, so if you’re interested, let me know. (Quickly, it’ll surely sell this week.)

Medicine (the restaurant)

Rochelle and I ate lunch today at a new restaurant called Medicine. The food is Japanese Zen monk vegan, called “new-shojin”. The flavors are delicate, subtle, and quite good once your brain and palate adjust. And I thought I was at the Apple Store.

Rochelle and I ate lunch today at a new restaurant called Medicine. The food is Japanese Zen monk vegan, called “new-shojin.” The flavors are delicate, subtle, and quite good once your brain and palate adjust.

What’s kind of funny is the weird visual sensation I had while eating. The restaurant has an Asian-style glyph, which the staff all wear on their black shirts (photo at right). The glyph, rendered in white, has shape elements to it — most of a cross-hatch, loop-ish strokes at three corners — that it looks, out of the corner of your eye, like the Macintosh Command symbol: ⌘

So, the effect — of the clean lines of the restaurant’s brightly-lit interior, and of the couple dozen staff whizzing around in their black pants and black shirts with the Command symbol on it — is that you’re eating in the Apple Store.

Zen vegetarian food, beautifully prepared and presented, served in a clean, simple environment. I think Steve Jobs would be a fan.

Importing MP3 audiobooks into iTunes

Our preferred method for obtaining audiobooks is from Audible.com. Second is from the public library. Third is buying them on MP3 CDs.

Note: These instructions have been superceded by a new version available in the Aldo on Audiobooks section of this site. Use that version instead of this page.

Our preferred method for obtaining audiobooks is from Audible.com, as part of our monthly subscription. For about $11 each, we receive an electronic-only version of a book, broken in to manageable chunks of 5-6 hours long each. The files arrive pre-encoded in a format which is bookmarkable in iTunes and on an iPod, and have all appropriate meta-data attached. The subscription format is both cost-effective and highly usable. Audible.com’s major liability is the selection; while there are thousands of books from which to choose, if you get interested in an author who has been writing for a while, chances are good Audible.com won’t have the older books, at least not yet.

The next best method for getting audiobooks is to borrow them on Audio CD from the local public library. While the procedure for importing them into iTunes is laborious, the price is right. This is an ideal way to experiment with authors you don’t know, to find books worth paying for. However, like Audible.com, the selection can be limited.

So, what do you do when you want a book that’s not available from either method?

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PGP Desktop Manual Proxy Configuration for Mac OS X

I upgraded to PGP Desktop 9 because the new version would finally work with Eudora on Mac OS X. All I had to do was install the new version, reboot, and the new automatic mode began immediately discovering and auto-enabling my email accounts as I used them.

Unfortunately, the automatic mode doesn’t work so well if you are also using some kind of network tunnel, such as a VPN or ssh port forwarding, which is increasingly common for me as I take the laptop to clients or on the road. I thought I would document the configuration of manual proxy mode for Mac OS X users, since I found the documentation light in this area.

Two months ago I upgraded to PGP Desktop 9, because the new version would finally work with Eudora on Mac OS X. Indeed, all I had to do was install the new version, reboot, and the new automatic mode began immediately discovering and auto-enabling my email accounts as I used them. It does this with some clever connection redirection using the built-in Mac OS X firewall, courtesy of the Unix subsystem.

I finally got around to figuring out how to set up PGP Messaging’s manual proxy mode, courtesy of decent instructions for Windows users written by Robert Johansen of PGP. I thought I would document the configuration for Mac OS X users, since there are substantial differences in the application between the two platforms.

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Subscribing to Audible.com Podcasts in iTunes

Phillip Torrone’s “Audible does Podcasts – the complete guide (and HOW TO)”:http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2005/06/audible_does_po.html is a nice write-up of a new feature at “Audible.com”:http://www.audible.com/ that supports the automatic download of periodic audible content. Although his article uses the very nice “iPodder”:http://sourceforge.net/projects/ipodder/ application to demonstrate the features, there’s no reason why you can’t use the built-in podcasting features of iTunes 4.9. Here are instructions and a couple of screenshots.

Phillip Torrone’s Audible does Podcasts – the complete guide (and HOW TO) is a nice write-up of a new feature at Audible.com that supports the automatic download of periodic audible content, such as NPR’s Fresh Air (probably the best talk radio show on today).

Audible.com’s features provide support for receiving paid content using the same process for subscribing to the free podcasts which have recently become very popular. Although his article uses the very nice iPodder application to demonstrate the features, there’s no reason why you can’t use the built-in podcasting features of iTunes 4.9, and skip the extra application.

Here are instructions and a couple of screenshots, which you can splice into Phillip’s article where he’s working with iPodder.

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The Inevitable Apple on Intel Post

Since I write about Mac OS X so often, it seems mandatory to post something about Apple’s announcement this week that they would be “moving the Macintosh platform to use Intel microprocessors”:http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2005/jun/06intel.html. Most of the insights and big ideas about this have already been written, so my thoughts are mostly about, well, me.

Since I write about Mac OS X so often, it seems mandatory to post something about Apple’s announcement this week that they would be moving the Macintosh platform to use Intel microprocessors. Most of the insights and big ideas about this have already been written, so my thoughts are mostly about, well, me.

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Dell 20″ Flat Panel Under $500 $400

A while back I took advantage of a special running at Dell, to get one of these 20.1″ flat panel LCD displays. It arrived a week later, and I’ve been using it as a second monitor off my laptop since then. The quality of the display is terrific. I dunno about doing color-calibrated print work, but as just extra screen space (which I’ve found I absolutely need to do web development productively), it’s spectacular, and makes the built-in screen on my laptop seem dingy by comparison.

The quality of the display is terrific. I dunno about doing color-calibrated print work, but as just extra screen space (which I’ve found I absolutely need to do web development productively), it’s spectacular, and makes the built-in screen on my laptop seem dingy by comparison.

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Importing Audiobook CDs into iTunes

Rochelle and I have fallen in love with listening to books on our iPods. We’ve signed up for two books a month through Audible.com, and for me, that pace is actually pretty good. Rochelle goes through them faster, though, and recently started going to the SF Public Library to get more books to listen to. Importing them onto an iPod is not terribly intuitive. This post describes what I think is a fairly optimal process, using only iTunes to do the importing.

Note: These instructions have been superseded by a new version available in the Aldo on Audiobooks section of this site. Please use that version instead of this page.

Rochelle and I have fallen in love with listening to books on our iPods. We’ve signed up for two books a month through Audible.com, and for me, that pace is actually pretty good. But Rochelle has more time to listen while commuting and at work; she blows through our two books a month.

She recently started going to the library to get audio books there, on CD. The San Francisco Public Library has quite a lot of them, and you can reserve them online. The only downside with the CDs is they cannot be played (directly) on an iPod. Enter the second half of Apple’s one-two combination, iTunes, which makes importing CDs relatively easy, and keeping them organized, syncing them with an iPod, and making custom playlists extremely easy.

The only problem is, it’s optimized for music CDs. It’s taken quite a bit of trial and error — mostly error — to come up with a recipe that works well, and produces audiobook files that are reasonable in size and quality, and as easy to use on our iPods as the books from Audible.com. I’m going to save you some time, and share the recipe.

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Cocoa Eudora?

“Michael Tsai”:http://mjtsai.com/blog/2005/05/02/eudora-cocoa/ brought to my attention that “QUALCOMM is rewriting Eudora”:http://www.eudora.com/techsupport/kb/2654hq.html to update it to the latest Mac OS X technologies, etc. While it is exciting to know that Eudora for Mac OS is still supported by QUALCOMM, and even being modernized, I hope that QUALCOMM is appropriately cautious about making gratuitous UI changes. It may not be pretty, but the interface is highly usable.

Michael Tsai brought to my attention that QUALCOMM is rewriting Eudora to update it to the latest Mac OS X technologies, etc. While it is exciting to know that Eudora for Mac OS is still supported by QUALCOMM, and even being modernized, I hope that QUALCOMM is appropriately cautious about making gratuitous UI changes. It may not be pretty, but the interface is highly usable.

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The Definitive Tiger Review

John Siracusa has written his usual “tour de force review of a major Mac OS X release”:http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars, this time for Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger”. For the technical Mac OS X user, and OS geeks in general, it does not get any better than Siracusa’s reviews.

John Siracusa has written his usual tour de force review of a major Mac OS X release, this time for Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger”. For the technical Mac OS X user, and OS geeks in general, it does not get any better than Siracusa’s reviews.

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