Silvermac

I came across a very interesting geek debate on Digg, related to this story on BBC News.

More than 150 passengers and crew have been rescued from a stricken tourist ship after it hit ice off Antarctica. The M/S Explorer is now lying on its side close to the South Shetland Islands, in the Antarctic Ocean.

As usually, when a bunch of geeks get together, things soon become obvious, too obvious … These are just some extracts from the comments by Digg users:

- MS explorer crashes. Outlook not good.

- Did the ship Bob?

- It was held together with Clippy

- I’m just glad this didn’t happen to ME

- It’s no surprise that this hit the FrontPage

- Well, Paint me surprised.

- Luckily the other ships picked up their 404 signal.

- OneNote, Access to such treacherous waters should be limited to ships which Excel at breaking through icebergs…

- I wonder if the penguin had anything to do with this?

And the discussion goes on …

If you are happy to do a little code editing, you can modify the labels in the sidebar of your Finder (Leopard only). You can change the labels to the lower case, e.g. from PLACES to Places, or you can completely rename them.

You need to log in as an administrator (root) then navigate this way:

/Macintoch HD/System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app

Right-click on Finder.app icon and select Show Package Contents the select Resources/English.Iproj

Once in this folder, locate the file LocalizableCore.Strings and copy it somewhere else, (e.g. Option-Click and drag it to the Desktop) just in case things go wrong.

Now, back to your Finder and edit the file LocalizableCore.Strings (double-click)

Scroll down to lines 50-53 where you can modify the following values:

“SD5″ = “DEVICES”;
“SD6” = “SHARES”;
“SD7” = “SEARCH FOR”;
“SD8” = “PLACES”;

and change them any way you like. I have changed mine to

“SD5″ = “Devices”;
“SD6” = “Network”;
“SD7” = “Search for”;
“SD8” = “Places”;

Once you have saved the file you need to either log out and log in, or simply restart the Finder. Open Terminal and type killall Finder and press return.

You can do the same with the iTunes, however the path is slightly different:

/Macintosh HD/Applications/iTunes then right-click and Show Package Contents, then select Resources/English.Iproj and edit the file called Localizable.strings. (You have already backed it up, haven’t you?)

Find the lines 162 – 165

“135.011″ = “LIBRARY”;
“135.012″ = “DEVICES”;
“135.013″ = “STORE”;
“135.014″ = “PLAYLISTS”;

and make the changes any way you like.

Have you used Help in Leopard? Not yet? Well, I think you should, because it’s so cool. Go and try it now, it’s really fun.

Open Safari and, let’s assume you have no idea how to view the source of the web page, click on Help and type ‘view source‘

All other operating systems, including OS X Tiger and earlier versions, would tell you how to do it, something like “In menu bar, select view, then scroll down and select View Source…”

However, Leopard will show you how to do it. So once you type ‘show source‘, just hover your mouse over the first result line in search menu and voilà, Leopard opens the View menu and shows you where the option is.

So just click on it and Bob’s your uncle.

After reviewing the Best Skins Ever skin for iPod touch, I thought it would be only fair to review the Invisible Shield iPod touch skin as well. The folks from ZAGG Inc were kind enough to supply a free sample skin, as well as a few strips of material for the review.

The skin arrived in a well padded retail pack, consisting of the skin itself (front and back covers), application solution spray bottle, installation squeegee and the installation instructions sheet. continue reading…

There are a few ways of using built-in Dictionary in Mac OS X

You can simply open the Dictionary from Applications folder and key in your search criteria:

When in Cocoa applications, such as Safari or Mail (but not Firefox, Camino, Thunderbird), you can hold Ctrl+Cmnd+D on your continue reading…

Unfortunately Finder has no option to show hidden files. But if you open the Terminal and ask your computer nicely – it will display the hidden files. This is how you do it.

Open ~/Applications/Utilities/Terminal and type the following:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool true

and press return. Then restart the Finder by either typing

killall Finder

and pressing return, or hold down Ctrl+Option while clicking on Finder icon in the Dock and select Relaunch.

To disable displaying the hidden files, just repeat the process above, only replace the word true with false.