Software

One solution to avoiding that chime on booting your mac is to hold down the F3 key at startup. A more permanent solution is offered through the StartupSoundPrefPane which is described in more detail here.

{.imagelink}I have received a constant stream of questions for an Intel-version of the little MultiControl software I made many years ago. MultiControl makes it easy to use any standard game controller (HID compatible) to control music software through OSC or MIDI. Still only for OS X, but a Windows version will follow at some point. A UB-version of the application is now available here, and I will try and get around to making a Windows version one day....

I recently became aware of Skim, a PDF Reader and note-taker for OS X made by the team behind BibDesk. Skim is designed to help reading and annotating scientific papers in PDF, or what they say: “Stop printing and start skimming”. While v0.2 of Skim didn’t contain much more functionality than what’s already available in Preview, v0.3 starts to become interesting. Particularly the possibilities to save and print the notes taken separately....

Bibdesk is just getting better! In version 1.3.4 they have included searching inside linked PDF files in the library. It is not as powerful as the AI search functionality in DevonThink, but it is still very, very useful. {width=“500”}

I tried to update to 10.4.9 yesterday, but got an error message, and when booting everything hangs. I haven’t found a good solution yet, but at least I came across a list of useful startup keys, some of them being: C : Forces most Macs to boot from the CD-Rom drive instead of the internal hard drive. Only works with Apple ROM drives and with bootable CD discs. D : Forces the first internal hard drive to be the startup disk....

I had the rather unpleasant experience of trying to update to 10.4.9 last night, which crashed and left my computer hang on bootup. Trying to boot with cmd-s gave me this nice message: Load of /sbin/launchd, errno 88, trying /sbin/mach_init Load of /sbin/launchd failed, errno 88 Fortunately, after reading this blog entry, I managed to recover doing something like this: Started my MacBook with a FW-cable from another computer. Downloaded the Mac OS X 10....

I also came across a list of useful keyboard shortcuts, the most interesting being: cmd opt i - to get “Super Get Info.”, a floating window changing with each file and folder you click on. cmd opt h - Hide other applications. cmd shift 3/4 - screen capture keys. 3 capturesr the full screen, while 4 only a selection.

Strange that I didn’t see this before. Apparently, W3C has made a draft for multimodal annotation called EMMA: Extensible MultiModal Annotation markup language. The abstract of the document reads: The W3C Multimodal Interaction working group aims to develop specifications to enable access to the Web using multimodal interaction. This document is part of a set of specifications for multimodal systems, and provides details of an XML markup language for containing and annotating the interpretation of user input....

I have been looking for a lightweight spreadsheet software, as Excel isn’t in universal yet and is nearly as slow as NeoOffice to start up. Often, I only need some basic spreadsheet functionality like summing a bunch of numbers, etc. and then it isn’t worth the effort opening one of the mastodont programs. So I have been looking for something similar to TextEdit in the spreadsheet world. Strangely enough, the only program I have found so far is BC Spreadsheet....

I learn new things every day. Gisela just sent me a hint about putting those super-long URLs between brackets to avoid breaking the URL when the line is wrapped in an e-mail application: <http://www.somesite.com/a/really/long/url>