Archive for the 'Tips & Tricks' Category

Optimal Packing for Travel

On Imgriff.com I read about a truly interesting website, solely dedicated to the Optimality of packing lightly for travel: http://www.onebag.com

Installing iPhone SDK 2.x on PPC

This post is really just an edited summary of instructions found elsewhere. I used instructions from two sources (here incl. comments, and here), the first of which is slightly outdated and incomplete. Here’s the full story:

BOM-files – What do/did Mac OS X Package Installers Install?

The answer can be found in the so-called BOM-files, which stands for Bill Of Material. More information about bom files be found in the Apple Developed Connection (ADC) bom man page, or by typing man bom in the terminal.
These files are buried inside installer packages as well as in receipts of already installed programs. [...]

Remove Short Description for Feed Items in iGoogle

When I looked at my iGoogle page today I found a short description under each item. Unfortunately that made the paper longer than one screen so I couln’t view all my items w/o scrolling — very inconvenient. Even worse, there was no immediately clear way to restore the original layout. I tried to click on [...]

Export Outlook Mail PST-Files to the Mac

While there are multiple software solutions that cost money, I prefer the free alternatives. In this case it comes in the form of Mozilla Thunderbird, and to be more precise, the Windows version. Thunderbird’s import function imports your current Microsoft Outlook folders including attachments and all. It also has options for Outlook Express and other [...]

Resize Sparse Disk Images

I am a big fan of encrypted sparse disk images in Mac OS X. I use them primarily to keep my financial data secure w/o the need to use FileVault. This way, only the data that needs to be encrypted is protected with quick access to everything else. Using sparse disk images saves space, b/c [...]

Rescue Application-Windows Lost in in Monitor Nowhere-Land

If like me you have two monitors connected to your MS-Windows laptop at work, I am sure you have experienced the nuisance of “loosing” your application windows. Basically, the window manager appears to be smart enough to remember a window position, i.e., which monitor it was on last, but too dumb to realize that that [...]

iMac G5 Do-it-yourself Instructions

This site in the Apple knowledge base is a comprehensive index of instructions on how to open up and repair your iMac G5.

How to Add a Blank Line in WordPress

I don’t know if it is a problem with my current theme, or what else caused it, but there is no blank line after an unordered list and a following paragraph that makes it look like the following line belongs to the list like so:

item 1

item 2

Not part of the list.
The quickest and [...]

MS-Office SP3 Overrides “.mat” Matlab File Association

This morning MS-Office SP3 was pushed onto my machine, and afterwards I noticed that all my former “.mat” files were missing their file extension and were identified as “Microsoft Office Access Table Shortcut” as can be verified by looking at Tools -> Folder Options -> File Types.
Deletion of this file association, and creation of a [...]

Print Address Labels & Return Address Labels with OS X Address Book

If you want to print address labels for mass mailings, you cannot do that with Apple’s Pages, because Pages puts only one address per page in its mail merge function. This is fine, if you want to write a lot of identical letters to different people and also want to add custom printed envelopes. But [...]