blog  Upgrading to Lion: tips and tricks.

Oct 2011

I've finally decided to upgrade my mac operating system from Snow Leopard (10.6.8) to Lion (10.7.2). Not really for the new features such as Mission Control and LaunchPad (which although being pretty cool are not going to change my life) but mostly for the fact that the new OS is well integrated with iCloud. Sharing my iCal calendars, Address book contacts and other useful stuff across my apple computers and mobile devices is going to be a digital-life-changer, hopefully for the better.

blog  Installing Mercurial on OSx 10.6.5.

Dec 2010

Mercurial is a free, distributed source control management tool. It efficiently handles projects of any size and offers an easy and intuitive. That's what you read on its website, at least. I decided to give it a go mainly because I was looking forward to use a decentralized version control system for a couple of side projects I'm working on; moreover, because a friend pointed out that BitBucket (an online free code-hosting service based on Mercurial) has a free plan that doesn't force you to make your projects public by default - like most other competitor services do. Free + private = time to test it!

blog  Editing PDF metadata on OSx (ie: having the Kindle display the right title/author with pdfs).

Oct 2010

One of the cool things you get to do with a Kindle is being able to access your pdf library on the go; however soon enough I ran into the problem of getting all the pdf files to show up with the right metadata, e.g. name, author, creator etc..

blog  MacBook: getting the backlight to behave the way you want.

Jan 2010

Ever wanted to switch the keyboard's backlight on even if there's daylight? Or to have it dance at the rhythm of your itunes playlist?

blog  Opening UIF files on Mac.

Apr 2009

The UIF file extension stands for Universal Image Format. An UIF file contains a compressed disk image – basically it is an exact copy of a CD or a DVD. Just like the more common ISO filetype, the UIF format is typically used to create CD/DVD backups.

blog  NetNewsWire - Great RSS reader for mac/iphone!.

Mar 2009

For my online and offline RSS needs I've been using Shrook for a while - but since recently I got an iPhone the issue of syncing it with my mac gracefully has become quite important.

blog  How to make a (Mac) screen saver that shows your uptime.

Jan 2009

Found an interesting blog post that shows how to use QuartzComposer and a few patches to create a screensaver for your man... all the instructions can be found here

blog  Subversion on OSX.

Oct 2007

Day one - part time job - semantic web services. Need to install SVN on me mac… I've bothered at least two people in kmi till i found this really useful tutorial here.....

blog  AquaMacs 1.0.

Jun 2007

I read from Bill Clementson's blog that AquaMacs Emacs 1.0 (is an Aqua-native build of the powerful Emacs text editor) has made its appearance during the last days - let's see how many new users it will conquer!!!

blog  Lyx on the mac.

Mar 2007

I'm probably one of the last ones getting there, but I decided to do my best not to use Microsoft Word for editing my phd thesis. Oh yes - since I managed to arrive till this painful state, shall I give myself ever more troubles by using word? Not at all...

blog  Ecto : multiple blog manager and WUSIWYG editor.

Mar 2007

Read an article about the "must-have" applications for the mac on slashdot - incredible how they havent inserted QUICKSILVER, which is a revolutionary launchbar program in my opinion.. actually more:

blog  Dear old paper, how could we do without you?.

Mar 2007

blog  MacFUse - Gmail-gigs on the desktop.

Jan 2007

Got this news from here :

blog  IChat to MSN - only one IM client please!.

Jan 2007

blog  Fink fhink think.

Dec 2006

There a class of applications that conquered a big slice of new mac users, after the appearance of OSX: the applications coming from UNIX. I'm not one of them unfortunately (or maybe luckily), but with the time I'm more and more appreciating all that free stuff, apparently difficult to understand. Cause it makes you feel you're getting the best out the wonderful machine you're spending most of the time on....

blog  Smultron text editor.

Dec 2006

A nice alternative to BBedit (which beyond being not free, takes a long time to load on my machine - too many plugins installed maybe) is Smultron. Just found out about it - many features, programmed in Cococa, and FREE

blog  Pathway: Wiki Semantic Navigator.

Nov 2006

Just found a very cool app that lets you organize and store the navigation on any mediawiki site, Pathway. It basically represents visually the link's structure of a wiki-page, all the departing nodes centered around the page of interest. The whole navigation can thus be stored in the form of a a net with nodes and links! Developed in Cocoa, works easily and fast on any mac (intel based as well) running Tiger! I quote the author's reasons behind the development: