I thought I had written about this trick on my blog before, but couldn’t find it. So I try again: How to invert the screen (systemwide) in OSX: ctrl-alt-cmd-8 This makes it possible to change between regular and inverted view. I find it particularly useful when sitting in a dark environment, since it makes the screen much less bright to look at. Screenshots below: {width=“524” height=“424”} {width=“524” height=“424”}
I was looking for solutions on how to type the degree symbol (like in 0°) on OSX, but could only find solutions for English keyboard layout (or solutions suggesting copying an image…). After some trial and error I figured out the correct combination for a Norwegian keyboard layout: shift-alt-Q.
To follow up on my previous post about the differences between browser plugins, web interfaces and desktop applications, here is another post about my current rethinking of computer habits. In fact, I started writing this post a couple of months ago, when I decided to move back to using Apple Mail as my main e-mail application again. I had used Mail for a few years when I decided to test out Thunderbird last year....
Nowadays I have a hard time deciding on what type of application to use. Only a few years back I would use desktop applications for most things, but with the growing amount of decent web 2.0 “applications” I notice that I have slowly moved towards doing more and more online. Let me use this blog as an example. It is based on WordPress, which now offers a good and efficient web interface....
After working happily with FW-products for many years, the recent trend of disappearing FW-ports have made me look for USB-based solutions. For hard drives the switch has been easy, and I also recently got my first USB-based sound card. The hardest part has been to figure out how to handle video cameras. I have been using various Unibrain cameras for years, and have gotten used to the simplicity of being able to hook up multiple cameras to one computer....
I was at the Musical Body conference at University of London last week and presented my work on visualisation of music-related movements. For my PhD I developed the Musical Gestures Toolbox as a collection of components and modules for Max/MSP/Jitter, and most of this has been merged into Jamoma. However, lots of potential users are not familiar with Max, so over the last couple of years I have decided to develop standalone applications for some of the main tasks....
The latest beta version of Skype (for OSX only, apparently) offers something called “Skype Access”, which makes it possible to pay for access to commercial WiFi networks through a per minute basis using your SkypeOut account. I recall reading this when I downloaded the latest beta a couple of weeks ago, but didn’t think much about it before I opened my MacBook at the Brussels airport last week and saw a “do you want to pay using SkypeOut” message on screen....
I am back at work after a long vacation, and one of the first things I started doing this year was to reinstall several of my computers. There is nothing like a fresh start once in a while, with the added benefits of some extra hard disk space (not reinstalling all those programs I never use anyway) and performance benefits (incredible how fast a newly installed computer boots up!). I have been testing Ubuntu on an Asus eee for a while, and have been impressed by how easy it was to install and use....
I hadn’t thought about the lack of verb labels in Windows as opposed to OSX before I read this blog entry. The point made is that adding some meaning to the buttons we push greatly enhance the usability, since it is not necessary to read the text above the buttons. Look at the two examples below for a proof of concept: Simple idea and easy to implement!
I bought a 1TB Western Digital hard drive the other day, and it came preformatted with FAT32. Since I will only be using this on OS X machines, I wanted to reformat it with HFS instead, but had problems doing this with Disk Utility. Then I came across a thread suggesting to change the partition type to GUID, and everything worked fine. This can be done in Disk Utility as the screenshot below show....