Luckymonkey

Ever since I updated to 10.5.2, booting my MBP with the external screen attached meant that the external screen wasn’t detected properly, and ran at the same resolution as the MBP screen. Initially, I read something on TUAW which suggested booting with the external screen not attached, and then attaching the screen once Leopard had finished booting.

This does work, but it’s not ideal. Tonight I got annoyed with it after hooking the MBP back up, and found this updated post on TUAW explaining a better fix.

power on the laptop, immediately close the lid (with external display still attached) and wait for the machine to boot completely. I tried it; lo and behold, the external display is now recognized correctly, and when the machine is slept and awakened or “Detect Displays” is triggered, everything behaves as expected.

Works for me - thanks TUAW

My replacement MBP came with iLife08 - brilliant. Time to give this new movie editing program a bit of a workout, and see if those people who think it’s a massive step backwards are right - or if its ease of use outweighs any missing features..

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I’ve discovered these over the past few months, and you begin to wonder how you lived without them..

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(I’m sure the answer to this one is certainly, of course it is, duh). If I had a category for ‘wild speculation, this would certainly be in there, but i’ve been thinking about this, and then I read this TUAW post this morning about iTunes *and* the Apple store being down at the same time.

What *if* the 2 week press time for DVDs which some sites seem to be concerned about (that I can’t find the links to right now) doesn’t actually matter. What if they were going to push Leopard using iTunes and Software update for existing ITMS / 10.4 customers?

From listening to MacBreak Weekly yesterday, the current version of Leopard isn’t quite ready for prime time yet - it would give them a couple more weeks to work on it and make their intended ship date..

Just a thought..

(previously on Luckymonkey - 5 weeks missing)

Tomorrow will be the 5th of October. That makes it 12 weeks since I handed my MacBook Pro over to the Genius at my ‘local’ Apple store. Initially the machine went in for a replacement screen, after something crawled behind the LCD, in front of the backlight and passed away. They would replace the screen under warranty - brilliant.
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Sunday just past was 5 weeks into a ‘5 day’ repair for my MBP. Other than learning some of the things you can do with fetchmail, I have also learnt that it’s utterly useless trying to contact the particular Apple store via the telephone - you might as well just burn your money instead. The only thing you can do is email them and wait for 48 hours before getting a reply..

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Or, how to use Fetchmail to reliably move large quantities of email from one place to another

If, like me, your normal email machine has vanished into a black hole at some service department somewhere *cough*apple*cough*, then you’ll quite quickly find out that :

• Being un-connected is a strange, but not wholly unpleasant experience..
• .. but you still need to get at your email, but you don’t want to be setting it up on another machine because then you’ll just have email spread in a whole bunch of different directions

Fear not - the solution to the problem is just to create a webmail account with GMail* and use Fetchmail to push all of your email in there. All you need is a little terminal magic, and a program which is installed by default in OS X.

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I was down in Southampton today, so I thought I’d go along to the new Apple store (in West Quay), to see if I could pick up one of the new keyboards, as released last Tuesday (along with the new iMac, MiniMac speed bump and a bunch of other stuff). Reason being that I used to really like my MB keyboard, and I don’t like the MBP keyboard quite as much.

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http://www.oneriver.jp/JKR/

Just installed it - updated..

Ok - I installed it for a day or so, and then I had to remove it again. Why? - because it’s got a couple of showstoppers for me. Most of the work I do is with PHP, so the potential for comparing previous revisions in the application itself looked very good. Alas, it doesn’t treat .php files as text files, so it doesn’t offer the comparison option. In addition to that, I had a few applications (transmission being one) struggling with TimeDrawer running. I guess it’s probably trying to archive the torrents being downloaded and getting in a twist somehow

All that said - it does look like a nice application, and if I could work out how to make it recognise .php as plain text files, then it might be worth considering.

Better still would be a TimeDrawer type interface into Subversion, which I also use for Source code control.. i’d pay money for that one

101-essential-freelancing-resources - which came via Lifehacker. Really great list of applications (browser based & traditional). One which I’m interested in is ActiveCollab - an open source clone of Basecamp (although it’s implemented in PHP, not Ruby + Rails). I’ll be trialling this one out. I do really like Basecamp, but the powers that be wouldn’t go for the monthly cost, and the inability to hack it to better suit us (without creating a wrapper site using the API + our own data).

Refresh the finder - Sometimes, finder (bless it), just won’t freaking refresh the current display of files. This is far more common on network shares mounted via SMB, even SSHFS shares seem to be work ok. Anywho, this allows you to add a refresh button to your finder window.

XKCD, Very funny online comic, if you’re slightly nerdy/geeky (or a lot, in my case..)