loopkid: Category English

how to apply the ghostly decal

Stefan — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 16:37:00 +0100

One of my favorite record labels have created a laptop decal which works especially great on Macbooks. When applying the decal however, great care needs to be taken. Basically, if you mess it up, you don’t get a second chance (well, maybe you do). So if you’re more the clumsy type and ordering internationally, you might want to buy two sets from the start.

With this being said, if you know what to watch out for, it’s actually not that hard getting it right the first time. If you’re unsure how to get it done, see my little how-to below. I’m not saying this is the smartest way to get it done, but it worked great for me.

Step 1: Remove the protective cover of the decal so that the sticky surface is exposed. Be careful not to touch it. Then place it on the laptop with the non-sticky side downwards. Adjust the position of the decal so that the actual artwork completely covers the logo. Now mark the edges with something that stays firmly in place. I used regular household grade plastic tape, which is certainly not the best solution, but it did the job.

Step 2: Carefully apply the decal by gradually lowering it on the surface while applying gentle pressure. If you mess it up there will be air bubbles.

Step 3: Remove the tape with the help of a tissue (using your uncovered finger nails might leave scratches on the surface) and remove the glue rests with a mild cleaning fluid.

Step 4: Enjoy!

save a youtube video as mp4 with title

Stefan — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 18:48:00 +0100

The following one-liner fetches a video from Youtube and saves it to an mp4 container with a reasonably safe file name generated from the video title.

youtube-dl -q -o - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QH2-TGUlwu4 |
ffmpeg -i pipe:0 -vcodec copy -acodec copy "`curl -s \
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/QH2-TGUlwu4 |
w3hxselect -c title | tr -sc '[A-Za-z0-9._{}\(\)\]\[\- ]' '_'`.mp4"

If you want to install the prerequisites via MacPorts: youtube-dl is available and w3hxselect is included in the html-xml-utils package.

peter sunde explains irl vs. afk

Stefan — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 14:36:00 +0100

safariomnibar port for powerpc

Stefan — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 03:39:00 +0100

I did a port of Olivier Poitrey’s SafariOmnibar for Macs with PowerPC processor running Safari 5.0.6 on Mac OS 10.5.8. Go ahead and grab the current version over at Github.

old swedish mailbox in helsinki

Stefan — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 04:33:00 +0100

In the staircase of my current residence in Helsinki I have discovered traces of swedish language history. The mailbox sign says “Bref och Tidningar” which is swedish for “letters and newspapers”. It is not uncommon to find swedish labels in Helsinki since there is swedish speaking minority but this one caught my attention because it had a non-standard spelling. Since the house has a Jugendstil architecture my assumption was that maybe it’s an old spelling from the turn of the last century. I did some research and found some statements supporting my assumption.

Before the spelling reform of 1906 the v sound was represented by hv- at the beginning of some words, -fv- medially and -f finally. One may still encounter forms like hvad (vad), hvem (vem), gräfva(gräva), bref(brev) in older texts. (Swedish: a comprehensive grammar, Philip Holmes and Ian Hinchliffe, Routledge, 2003, page 584)

Furthermore I found out the house was actually built 1900 by the finnish architect office Usko Nyström, Petrelius & Penttilä which is six years before the spelling reform so it seems quite reasonable they’ve used the old spelling on the mailbox.

vox for mac os x website moved

Stefan — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 13:24:00 +0200

The minimalist Mac OS X audio player of Alessio Nonni has moved. Check out the new Vox website for a Lion compatible version. If you enjoy the app don’t hesitate to make a donation to support ~~the suffering italian economy~~ a talented developer!

really empty the safari cache

Stefan — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 09:24:00 +0200

After telling Safari to empty the cache I wondered If Safari actually did what I told it.

$ du -sh ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.safari
629M    /Users/stefan/Library/Caches/com.apple.safari

Hm, 626 megabyte don’t look like obedience to me. Let’s see what’s in there.

$ du -sh ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.safari/*
173M    /Users/stefan/Library/Caches/com.apple.safari/Cache.db
5.6M    /Users/stefan/Library/Caches/com.apple.safari/Extensions
450M    /Users/stefan/Library/Caches/com.apple.safari/Webpage Previews
 64K    /Users/stefan/Library/Caches/com.apple.safari/com.apple.opencl

450 megabyte of “Webpage Previews”?

$ find ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.safari/Webpage\ Previews -type f \
| sed -E 's/.*\.([^\.]*)/\1/' | sort | uniq -c
7016 jpeg
 400 png

No wonder we need gigabyte sized hard disks today. Let’s delete the crap altogether.

$ rm -r ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.safari

And let’s make sure it doesn’t come back (works in Safari 5.0.3).

$ defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSnapshotsUpdatePolicy -int 2

So, what have we gained after restarting Safari?

$ du -sh ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.safari | awk '{print $1}'
3.6M

Nice, especially in times of undersized solid state disks.

downgrade safari 5.1 to 5.0.x on lion

Stefan — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 07:11:00 +0200

If you want to downgrade Safari 5.1 to Safari 5.0.x on Lion you can download Safari 5.0.3 from the original Apple servers and extract just the Browser with Pacifist. The installation image is called Safari5.0.3SnowLeopard.dmg but it works just fine on Lion. Have fun!

recursive chmod and chown on files

Stefan — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 21:47:00 +0200

If you want to recursively apply permissions to files it’s best to use GNU parallel because it handles obscure filenames robustly:

find directory -type f | parallel -m chmod mode

If you want to change ownership of the files, you can use a root subshell:

sudo bash -c "find directory -type f | parallel -m chown user:group"

make ard work with dynamic dns

Stefan — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 14:11:00 +0200

With its default settings Apple Remote Desktop doesn’t play well with dynamic DNS services. If you add a domain with a dynamic IP address it retrieves the IP address only once and if the IP address changes, the connect fails. A temporary workaround is to remove the IP address from the computer information window or to remove and readd the computer, but that certainly sucks for the long term.

A permanent solution is to disable reverse IP lookups:

defaults write com.apple.RemoteDesktop \
DisableReverseIPLookup -bool yes

Now Apple Remote Desktop will update the IPs upon launch.