Why Google Chrome is great for Safari
Google Chrome is the new browser on the block, and boy is it getting all the neighborhood girls excited. I am sure you can find some entertaining article about why Google Chrome will rule the world, but I am going to tell you why I like it. Webkit. Yes, Google Chrome uses the exact same rendering engine as Safari which is my browser of choice, mobile Safari, and Android. This means that any site that renders well in Safari will look the same in Google Chrome.
What this also means is that if the adoption of Google Chrome is high enough, which it will be, web designers all over the world can finally give IE the boot. I see the signs already, “This site works fine in Firefox, Safari, or Chrome.” That’s three choices other than IE.
Start backing up your Mac to S3 in 5 minutes
There are many tutorials out there on how to back up your Mac to Amazon S3, but over time this process has been simplified.
Requisites
Before we get started we will need a few things. Also, make sure you have your Amazon S3 access identifiers at hand. You can get those from your AWS account.
- Amazon S3 account
- Mac OS X Leopard
- Terminal Skills
Back it up
In order to keep this under five minutes I am simply going to list the steps required and not going to really go into any major detail.
First
Install the S3Sync Ruby Gem. Read more about Ruby Gems here.
Second
Add your Amazon access identifiers to the top of your .bash_login file.
Third
Execute the command to backup where my_backup_bucket is the name of your bucket.
I personally do not like to schedule the backups with a cron because every time it runs I am doing something important. I suggest you create an alias for the command in your .bash_login file like this:
Then all you have to do is type backup whenever you want to run this command. Easy.
If the Terminal is not your kind of interface or your just want to backup a few folders of important files, I suggest you go with a full blown S3 file manager. Here are some of the applications I have used.
Applications
References
MindNode Mind Mapping
MindNode, which is Leopard only, is a new mind mapping application with a sweet interface.
Better volume control on Mac OS X
The other day I stumbled upon a very useful keyboard shortcut for Mac OS X Leopard. If you hit ‘option’ + ‘shift’ + ‘volume down’ or ‘volume up’ you will get a more sensitive volume control. Four times more sensitive to be exact. This is useful if you have very sensitive speakers that need a smaller adjustment to get to that perfect volume level.
Updates
April 18, 2008: Changed F4 and F5 to Volume Down and Volume Up. Thanks Evgeny.
Building Git on Mac OS X
You have surely heard of the latest thing to happen to version control. Git, written be Linux creator Linus Torvalds, is a popular version control system designed to handle very large projects with speed and efficiency. Installing Git on Mac OS X Leopard is actually pretty simple and blazingly fast. It installed so quickly I thought it was a mistake.
Prerequisites
- Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard (untested in Tiger)
- Xcode 3.0
Terminal skills
Set Options since we don’t have GNU gettext installed
export TCL_PATH=/usr/bin/tclsh export NO_MSGFMT=1
With those environment variables set we can move on to building Git.
# Get and Install Git
curl -O http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-1.5.6.2.tar.bz2
tar xjvf git-1.5.6.2.tar.bz2
cd git-1.5.6.2/
./configure
make
sudo make install
cd
That’s it, enjoy.
Reference
Updates
July 9, 2008: Git binaries are now available from the official git-osx-installer Google Code project.
ScreenFlow
There is a new screen casting application available for Mac OS 10.5 called ScreenFlow. Although it comes with a hefty price tag of $100, it is by far my favorite screen casting application available for Mac.