Mac OS X Shortcuts

alternateorg on April 10, 2001

OK, so Kev has been bugging me for weeks to get this up… here goes;

Mac OS X is the newest operating system from Apple, it has a *completely* different feel and interface from *all* prior version and any other OS for that matter. This has caused massive changes in the way people work and means adjustment is something we are going to *have* to become used to (short of switching to Windows; yeah fucking right). SO here are some of my humble findings and tips:



1) Visit MacOSXApps.com and download TinkerTool: use it to set up a few of the standard hacks like Trash on the desktop and make hidden apps in the dock show up transparent a la MacOS 9.

2) Download VolumeDockling or MenuStrip so that you can control volume from the dock or desktop.

Now, on to the tricks…

3) Hold Command as you drag customizable menu items in any Finder toolbar or application toolbar to quickly re-position them.



4) You can also Command-click the wide toolbar hide/show widget in the upper right corner to switch between icon and text view (in Cocoa apps at least).

5) Command-dragging into the dock stops the excess movement of the folder and trash icons.

6) Holding option as you mouseover files that have been truncated in any view will instantly bring up a tooltip-style flag with the entire filename. Very cool!

7) Holding command and option while you drag any file onto an application in the dock will force that app to open the item you are dropping. (try telling the calculator to open HTML … mmm!)


8) Set up a large horizontal window in column view with maybe 3 or 4 columns in it, and click the Computer icon in that window’s toolbar. Close the window, and click on the Finder icon in the dock.. This will give you a wonderful starting point. Notice it is in the same place? This is very handy as it becomes the only window you need in column view and you can treat all your other windows like MacOS 9 windows by removing the toolbar from it (click the widened widget in the top-right) and using icon or list view.


9) I’m getting tired, I’ll keep at this.. and edit it later.

Mildly interesting

alternateorg on April 10, 2001

I just quickly figured out how to move your MacOS 9 Internet Explorer 5 favorites into your MacOS X IE 5.1 favorites.

Copy the file ‘favorites.html’ from OS9 Drive/System Folder/Preferences/Explorer/
to
OS X Drive/Users/(Your username)/Library/Preferences/Explorer/

It makes sense, when you think about it.

Feel safe that He is watching out for you and your children

alternateorg on April 9, 2001

I’ve spent the last few hours reading over articles on what Bush has been up to recently because I have kind of fallen behind. Aparently he is trying to kill us. If you think I am being facetious, I’m not. This is a malevalent, mean-spirited killing of just about everyone in the United States. It’s not the clueless bumbling of the Reagan era. This is just downright mean.

Who, in complete honesty, wants to raise the maximum arsenic levels in drinking water. I guess only George W. Bush, because after he anounced his intentions his staff quickly clued him in that it wasn’t a good PR move to poison people in his first year in office and that it might affect his chances at re-election.

Then he decides to hit non-voters by proposing to eliminate salmonella
 testing in public school lunches. Who wants to send their kids to schools that knowingly feed their children food that, very likely, could be contanimated with a widely spread disease? I wouldn’t. Apperently 5 percent of the meat is contaminated. So that means that 5 out of 100 school days your child may have to be sent home with at least mild food poisoning. That isn’t a very reassuring statistic. His staff didn’t think it was a good one either, so they asked him to back off until further testing, or whatever.

The icing on the cake is really the Kyoto accord. Here is his broadest genocidal/suicidal move to date. He is entirely refusing to sign this treaty that would require the US to lower its emittions levels by about 5 percent in ten fuckin’ years. This required some foresight on Bush’s part because he wont even be President then. This is like a global, long-term fuck, because he thinks it is ‘unfair to the United States.’ This is based on the fact that developing nations wont have any restrictions in this treaty. What gives the President the right to complain about unfair, we already have them by their economic balls. Sometimes I wish he would shut his fucking mouth and think about someone other than himself and his business interests.

Fuck everybody involved

alternateorg on April 9, 2001

I can’t scream this loud enough: FUCK INTUIT! FUCK WEBTURBOTAX. Fuck ’em all. Here’s what those jerks have done to me:

Two years ago, TurboTax for the Web worked perfect for me. I got my refund from both state and federal in under 2 weeks, and because of my low income then, I didn’t even have to pay for the service. Last year, my employer paid their accountant to do a number of the employees’ taxes. So this year, with perks like a low income and a free tax accountant gone, I figured I’d go back to TurboTax and get it done quickly and easily on the web, complete with electronic filing and refunding. I expected the same service and mediocre interface they had two years ago. This wasn’t the case, on both counts. Fortunately, the interface has gotten much better, and the Java app is much more responsive. Great, wonderful, grand. Their service, on the other hand, has gone to shit.

When I completed my taxes over two weeks ago, I made a mistake: I entered in my wife’s birthday wrong, something I often do. I got an email telling me that the IRS had responded to my electronic transmission, and that I could log in to my account, and see what the status was. It was rejected due to -surprise- the wrong birthdate entered in for the secondary filer. So I fixed that, and resubmitted. Couple days later, I get another email, telling me to check the website again. So I did, and this time, what was the problem? Apparently her social security number was wrong, as well as her birthdate, still. So I check all the sections pertaining to birthdates and social security numbers. Everything matches what’s on her W-2 perfectly. So I wait a few days, figuring I’d let the database get updated or whatever, and resubmit. Same fucking result.

So I check the help sections, and find a section that seems to be what I’m looking for: ‘What if my federal return gets rejected due to a wrong SSN, but I know that it’s right?’ Perfect. What’s their answer? Call the SSA, and verify that they have the correct records. Okay, so I call the 800 number. First call, I get shuffled randomly into finding information about my local office. When I enter in my zipcode, they tell me that they can’t find an office, and to CALL BACK. So I do. Second call, totally different message, and I get put on hold, then hung up on. Third call, same thing. Fourth call, they tell me to call back on a regular business day between the hours of 7am and 7pm.. the only place where it isn’t between those hours is in fucking Hawaii at this point in the day.

So I figure I need to just redo the whole thing by hand. So I call Intuit looking for a refund. First of all, their site says that their support is entirely web-based (web-based help I have like zero confindence in), and that their support costs a certain amount of money PER MINUTE. So I search their web-based help, and there’s a hidden number if you’re looking for a refund. So I call, and after 24 minutes of being on hold, some jerk is trying to tell me that it’s a problem with my ISP’s server and some damn thing with cookies… Don’t try to tell a web designer how the fucking internet works. So I have to PRINT out my return, and mail it, because my ISP’s server is in some sort of loop, and keeps sending the same return over and over again. Fuck those guys, fuck that shit.

I’m one of the biggest web proponents you’ll meet… if it’s web-based, I’ll try it. But it’s this kind of thing that is holding the web back right now.. servers going into loops and poorly designed systems that fail. Like EK at SVN says, the technology should be transparent to the customer.. I shouldn’t have to print out a form that I was expecting to submit electronically just because some dude’s server ain’t working right. If I’m a 40-year old mechanic, how am I supposed to understand cookies and server loops? All I know is that I was told by my son that the web is the future, and that I should file electronically this year. Well screw that and this whole web thing. I can walk down the block to buy a book, and can do my taxes in my kitchen in one night, not three weeks on the web.

Let them eat cake!

alternateorg on April 7, 2001

Michael Dell offers the following words of wisdom on Apple: “We know how the movie ends, it’s just a question of what happens in the middle.
… It’s not to say that Apple’s products aren’t innovative or cool, but the economic factors here are so overwhelming, it’s very hard for them to swim against that tide.”

Let’s see, ‘we all know how the movie ends, it’s just a question of what happens in the middle’. Woah, that’s deep. Coming from an upper class princeling who has never had to worry about anything other than how to get the next million.

Would it ever occur to him that he just described EVERY SINGLE HUMAN LIFE? If he is implying that ‘what happends in the middle’ is a trivial side note of no consequence to the conclusion, why doesn’t he take his own advice and kill himself? After all, it’s the same ending to every single human life, regardless of what happens in the middle, right?

Born into a rich white upper class family, he has no idea how the rest of us live from day to day, without any hope of being a millionaire before 30.
“…the economic factors here are so overwhelming, it’s very hard for them to swim against that tide.” No sh*t, Michael. Has it occurred to you that ‘swimming against the tide’ is what the rest of us do our whole life? What would you know about saving up for a mortgage on a 5 figure salary with three kids?

It’s hiliarious when one of these upper class doughboys thinks he can dish out advice on what other people should do with their careers.

They just want to help

alternateorg on April 6, 2001

Worth checking out. For George Dubya: The World: a primer. Pretty fucking funny.


Canada
A winter-sports town that is popular with vacationing Americans. Sizeable minority of population speak in unidentified foreign language.

Ha.

Design vs. Code

alternateorg on April 6, 2001

Jen has posted a rant on why designers should know the code (HTML, at least…. we’re not talking about Cold Fusion or PHP here) that builds their site designs. Interesting, and I’m always one to advocate that designers know what their designs need in order to function.

WTF?

alternateorg on April 4, 2001

What the fuck is this?

Fucking ABCNews. The President’s CAT ran away, and it’s an ‘Exclusive?’ And people wonder why I don’t respect major media outlets.