QuickLook in TextMate

This is a TextMate plug-in which allows you to QuickLook items in your project, either by selecting the item(s) you want to preview and using QuickLook from the context menu, or pressing ⌥␣ when the project drawer has focus.

Download QuickLook in TextMate here.

TextMate in QuickLook

This is a TextMate plug-in and a QuickLook generator which renders QuickLook previews (for certain filetypes) using the TextMate syntax highlighter. Currently it’s configured to highlight Perl, PHP, Ruby, Shell, C headers and Obj-C(++). Note: this effectively sets up TextMate as a server for the syntax highlighting, so it won’t work unless TM is running (QuickLook will just fall back to the standard preview if it’s not).

Download TextMate in QuickLook here.

The QuickLook generator will be automatically installed by the plug-in the first time it loads. Hopefully QuickLook will notice and start using it right away, but if it doesn’t you can try running qlmanage -m

Needless to say, both these plug-ins are Leopard only.

Here's a tip, if you use .Mac with a locally-cached iDisk.

There are two problems with Time Machine and iDisk. First, while the iDisk .dmg file is backed up, you have no access to any folders within your iDisk through Time Machine. This is kind of unfortunate, as I keep my all my personal documents on an iDisk (locally cached at both ends) to keep my iMac and Macbook in sync.

Second, every time you make the slightest little change to your locally-cached iDisk, Time Machine has to copy the entire disk image again. The same would apply to disk images for virtual machines, for instance. In addition to making your hourly backup more time-consuming, this will quickly eat up free space on your backup disk. Since Time Machine for iDisk is already pretty useless, just exclude the local DMG of your iDisk from Time Machine backups. After all, all the files on it are already backed up on .Mac servers, and on your other computer.

To do this, open Time Machine's System Preferences panel, click the Options button, then click the plus sign to add a new excluded location. In the file dialog that appears, navigate to ~/Library » FileSync, and click the Exclude button. I'd also recommend excluding any other large disk images you might have -- you can just make manual backups of these. Otherwise, your Time Machine drive is going to fill up pretty fast.

Hopefully, a future update to Time Machine will have special provisions for these large, frequently-updated files, and possibly will provide an interface for iDisk backups. (One solution to the iDisk problem would be to not have the local cache of the iDisk be a disk image, but rather some hidden-away bundle.) In the meantime, save yourself a headache and exclude local iDisk images and other large files from Time Machine.

Time Machine may be the biggest advancement in backups since sliced bread (you didn’t know you could back up your data in carbohydrates? It works great—just don’t toast them), but it has some shortcomings. For one thing, for a mechanism that purpots to allow you to control the very space/time continuum, you’re pretty limited in how often you can tell it to backup your files. If you go by the usual schedule, Time Machine backs up once per hour; you can force a backup, as we’ve pointed out, but only if you want to keep Time Machine in your Dock.

If, however, you simply seek a longer interval between backups, Stefan Klieme’s got you covered with his TimeMachineScheduler. Using TMS, as I’ll call it, you can set an interval between 1 and 12 hours, and set it to run at startup and/or login. It works by installing its own launchd daemon and disabling Time Machine’s built in scheduler, but you can always uninstall it if it’s a problem. And it provides a handy button for backing up immediately, too. You don’t have to run the app constantly, either; just launch it when you want to make an adjustment.

This might actually be handy for me; since I’m running off a MacBook, primarily, I don’t spend most of my time plugged into my backup drive, so there’s no point in it trying to backup every hour anyway.

So you and your friends have a wild party and you wake up in the morning to realize someone has changed the admin password on your beloved mac and you can no longer access your computer. No problem, you can just pop in the OS X DVD that came with your computer and reset the password....but wait, that's missing too.

Here's how to reset your OS X password without an OS X CD. You need to enter terminal and create a new admin account:

1. Reboot
   
2. Hold apple + s down after you hear the chime.
   
3. When you get text prompt enter in these terminal commands to create a brand new admin account (hitting return after each line):
   
   • mount -uw /
   • rm /var/db/.AppleSetupDone
   • shutdown -h now
4. After rebooting you should have a brand new admin account. When you login as the new admin you can simply delete the old one and you're good to go again!

I love my Mighty Mouse, especially the way the little scroll ball allows you to scroll effortlessly in any direction.  A lot of users have reported the little ball starts sticking and this happened to me today, I could scroll down or sideways but not up.  I found a simple and quick fix to deal with the problem and while it's probably appeared elsewhere on the web I figured I would share it here.

The scrolling problem is because dirt gets underneath it.  First slightly and carefully moisten the ball, I used spit on my fingertip. :)   Then take a clean sheet of paper and turn the Mighty Mouse upside down.  Run the ball rapidly in all directions on the paper.  In about 5 seconds my problem was fixed as the dirt worked itself loose and came out on the paper.  I love my Mighty Mouse again.  :)

You've already downloaded your Gmail messages via POP, but now you want them again in another client. Gmail will have marked those messages as downloaded already, but to re-download them, use this neat trick, spotted in the Gmail help list:

Gmail POP will only download once, but you can used the recent command to get the last 30 days emails. For all other POP clients, replace 'username@gmail.com' in your POP client settings with 'recent:username@gmail.com'

Handy, especially for downloading messages to a handheld after getting them once on your desktop.

Every now and then, I still get emails asking me if there is an easy way to enable ssh on the Apple TV. Yes, we have tutorial for that but that one requires an uncivilized way of opening the Apple TV up, take out the hard drive, put it in an enclosure, etc. (you know the whole drill). That’s just old school and so cruel to your Apple TV. Besides that method actually voids the warranty on your Apple TV.

It is much easier to use the Patchstick method, which has been around for a while now. All you need is a USB stick and an Intel Mac. You have probably seen the Patchstick in action on the Jaman post a month back. However, Jaman’s version is specifically designed to get the Jaman player on to the Apple TV and nothing else.

Francesco Cerofolini has written a simple tutorial (in both Italian and English) of how you can get your Apple TV ssh-enabled. It is pretty much the same as what I have written for the Jaman post. The Patchstick file used in his tutorial also adds access to the Plugins directory from AwkwardTV. This makes it much easier to install new plugins from AwkwardTV.

To many of the frequent readers of the site, I know that this is nothing new. However, my intention was to simplify hacking for a lot of the newcomers out there.