QuickSilver is back!

It has been years since I last used QuickSilver, a quick launch (and so much more) utility for Mac OS X. Despite that, I still keep the icon in my Dock. Well, I accidentally clicked it just now, and before I could quit it, it popped up with a window saying it was downloading an update. And then proceeded to also update several of the base plugins.

I hadn’t even noticed that it had been open sourced in 2006. It was created in June 2003 by Blacktree Software, and received rave reviews. It was quick, unobtrusive, and extensible. Apparently, the project languished between 2006 and 2010. Then, development picked up again last year. I’m not sure when the current version was released.

If you have never used QuickSilver, LifeHacker has a brief tutorial. And here is another one with a list of common tasks that can be performed with QuickSilver.

How to watch some Flash-based videos on YouTube without Flash

One of the larger annoyances of YouTube video producers is that they may restrict their video to Flash only. Even if you turn on HTML5 support, videos do not play. Here is a quick fix for some of those types videos if you use Safari.

 

The basic idea is that you change the user agent to "Safari for iPad". This makes YouTube think that you are browsing from an iPad, and it will serve up a non-Flash video.

First, you have to turn on the Develop menu. Go to the Advanced tab of Safari Preferences. At the bottom, check on “Show Develop menu in menu bar”. You will now have a Develop menu (between Bookmarks and Window).

Go to that menu, and pick User Agent. A submenu will show various browser types. Select “Safari iOS 4.3.3 – iPad”. The YouTube page will immediately reload, and in most cases, you will be able to watch the video.

I haven’t tried this trick in Chrome, yet, but will update once I do.

UPDATE: This also works to play music without Flash on Tumblr, except that you will have to select Safari iOS for iPhone.

UPDATE 2: Well, YouTube seems to have started blocking this work-around for Safari. It does seem to still work in Chrome: use the User-Agent Switcher extension.

Time Machine on a network drive

Stephen Morley has provided instructions on setting up a non-Apple network drive to work with Time Machine.

Apple’s Time Machine software made it easy to setting up incremental back-ups, with one exception: network drives (more formally called network-attached storage, or NAS). Time Machine only directly supports drives formatted with Apple’s HFS+J file system, and will eventually use all disk space on the drive. This page provides an illustrated guide showing how to set up Time Machine on a network drive, using a sparse bundle to emulate a smaller HFS+J drive.

How to Delete (or Archive) Attachments in Apple Mail and Free Up Disk Space

Apple Mail is a pretty decent email client, but it saves all your attachments in a folder deep within your user library, sucking up disk space without ever really letting you know. Fortunately, this is an easy problem to solve if you know where to look. Sort of, anyway. Apple made removing your attachments very simple, but if you want to actually save and archive them it can be a bit more complicated—especially if you're running Lion. But not to worry, we'll walk you through the whole thing. The process can be a little tedious, but it's not too tough.

via gizmodo.com

Some tips from Gizmodo about cleaning up attachments from Apple’s Mac OS X Mail application.

Convert a DMG disk image file to an ISO disk image in Mac OS X

If you ever need to convert a .dmg file to a .iso file so that the disk image can be more easily used in Windows or Linux, there is a simple way to do it from the command line:

hdiutil convert something.dmg -format UDTO -o something.iso

Update to Mac OS X Lion

I bit the bullet and updated to Mac OS X Lion last night. Had a little trouble with Safari at first: it would hang for minutes. So, I just left it alone and it‘s all better. However, when Spotlight first started to index the machine, it gave me a bit of a shock.

UPDATE: And the autocorrect looks familiar:

How to build a Hackintosh

Lifehacker has updated their Hackintosh build guide. Unfortunately, the some of the hardware listed (including the CPU) is no longer available at Newegg.

Applying adjustments to multiple images in Aperture

Let’s say you have multiple images, all of which need to have white balance adjusted in the same way. First, make the adjustment on the first image. Then, in the browser view, right-click on the adjusted image and select “Lift Adjustments” from the contextual menu. Next, select the remaining images to be adjusted, right-click on any one of the selections, and choose “Stamp Adjustments” from the menu. The shortcut is Shift-Cmd-V. When I found this out, it saved me a whole lot of tedium.

Quick tip about Mac OS X menu extras

From an ancient (2003) posting in the MacRumors Forums. Backstory: I found myself looking at an Eject icon in my menu bar, and didn’t have any idea where it came from. And then wondering how to get rid of it. Apparently, all you need to do is hold down Cmd, and drag it off.   

In fact, you can Cmd-drag it into any position. Guess where that GNOME and KDE UI feature came from? In any case, OS X comes with a bunch of menu extras: they are in /System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras.

iPhoto and RAW format

I only just found out that iPhoto handles RAW image format. D’oh!

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