Mumbling Again

Using the Motorola PEBL with a Mac

This is not a generic review of the PEBL but rather one that is geared towards using it with a Mac. Check out Mobile Review if you want the full details, I don't want to be redundant.

This is the most beautiful phone I've ever held and it feels great in your hand. The rubberized metal shell is rugged but warm and somehow soft. The keypad is a little awkward at first but I easily adjusted to it and the subtle textures and raised divisions make it easy to operate without looking. Unfortunately the directional rocker with select button in the middle is very uncomfortable for me to use with my large hands. I've started holding the phone so that the bottom when flipped open is above my ring finger. This is slightly more ergonomic for me and doesn't hurt my thumb as much while using the rocker/select area. However this area is still very small and slippery compared to the other buttons and its easy to hit the wrong function.

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Saft Shortcuts

Since my switch back to Safari and adoption of Saft, I've added a number of useful shortcuts to my Saft configuration. This feature of Saft allows you to quickly return search results from a site just by typing a shortcut and search phrase into the address bar. For example you could type "wiki web browser" to return this page. Continued with examples...

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Comment Spam and Installing MT-Scode on OS X

Recently I've been getting a lot of comment spam. It ironic because I haven't even written anything lately. The truth is I've been distracting myself with installing Debian Sarge on my old Dell and I recently decided to pick up Objective-C and Cocoa programming. Needless to say, its frustrating that the only time I've been spending with my blog is removing comments about onl1ne gam6ling and pr0n. Porting the blogs hosted on my box to another platform was something that I didn't want to consider and my choices for solving this problem while keeping movable type 2.x.x were limited. I found mt-scode and now that its running I think it will solve the problem better then banning IPs or using mt-blacklist. However getting it to work on OS X 10.3.9 was a challenge.

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Share Your EyeTV Archive - v1.2

When I posted my original shell script to make a folder of links to your EyeTV recordings with human-readable names, it caught on faster then I expected. I made no real effort to promote it, but soon my referrer logs showed it had been posted on the CenterStage message board and the AV Science Forum. The only explanation is someone found my comment here. Since at least a few people found the script useful too, I was motivated to rewrite it in perl. I had been meaning to do this for a while, and I knew I should have done it with perl in the first place. Plus, I fixed a bug where two recordings of the same show on the same day would only link the latter. (Thanks Jan!)

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Download a Web Gallery with wget

Ok, let's skip the obvious jokes about downloading pr0n. People look at galleries of photos that their friends upload on the web too. If you want to download the entire gallery it can be tedious and time consuming. Enter wget—a great and free application that will allow you to download files off the web in an automated process. Give it a list of things to download and it will return a directory full of the files you wanted. The following tutorial covers two parts: Using a perl filter to extract the image paths from a web gallery and downloading the images with wget.

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Laptop Maintenence Script

If you own a laptop that runs OS X and you put it to sleep, chances are the built in maintenance scripts don't run often or ever. Cron executes these tasks in the middle of the night by default. This script will run the regular periodic maintenance tasks plus it will repair your disc permissions, updated your prebinding (to make applications start faster), and if you have fink installed it will update that and all your packages too. Just run it with root permission: sudo optimize.sh

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Share Your EyeTV Archive

If you have an Elgato EyeTV PRV for your Mac and you want to share the recorded programs on a local network you've got a problem. I love the interface but you're pretty much forced to use it if you want to access your content. EyeTV stores your programs in a directory on your hard drive but its far from as user friendly as the system iTunes uses.

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