Bought a moviepeg, very impressed with moviepeg. You should buy a moviepeg.

Look at that glorious black bubble-wrap.

This is totally random. Hate when cables tangle, love when they make punctuation at me!

Iconpaper is a great website. Relatively trustworthy source of customisation stuff for OSX. Browsing today, I came across a large-type Adium theme, Bloc, which suited me down to the ground. It’s tracked on Macthemes; basically a goldmine for people who like to tinker with how OSX looks.

After having had a couple of small problems with the original, I sleuthed to try and get in touch with the author of the theme. Turns out, he’s a very nice bloke who agreed to do me a theme in the same style as my website. Whilst it may be difficult to believe, I love the way this site looks, and I couldn’t be happier with it (sad, right?)! I’m pretty sure that those of you who use Adium and aren’t lame should give it a go. If you don’t like my personalised variant, there are some other great colour schemes bundled with it.

No real reason for this post, other than a big thanks to krayon (the author) and to try and throw some more links his way.

PHP 5.3 release, for some reason, does not like my default install of iconv. Firstly, I made the grave mistake of failing to point PHP properly at an install in /usr/local/, so replaced my OS installation of iconv with a new one. This was all well and good until I started opening apps that needed specific parts of OSX’s default iconv. So, an OSX restore later, we’re at square one. PHP keeps telling me various crap when I’m trying to compile that it didn’t work with iconv because it’s the wrong version, but would fail during make because it couldn’t find the correct symbols.

I had compiled and installed iconv (./configure –prefix=/usr/local/iconv –enable-static) then pointed PHP at that (–with-iconv=/usr/local/iconv) and it was failing during make with Undefined Symbols: “_libiconv” then some stack trace of php string functions. Great. After much Googling and cobbling together my own way to do this with trial and error and a mixture of other people’s part-baked solutions, I have come up with the following method:

1. install iconv: ./configure –prefix=/usr/local/iconv –enable-static && make && sudo make install

2. configure PHP with the following prefix: env LIBS=”-lresolv -liconv” ./configure ……

   Mine is:

   env LIBS=”-lresolv -liconv” ./configure \
   –enable-pdo \
   –with-apxs2=/usr/local/apache2/bin/apxs \
   –with-mysql=/usr/local/mysql \
   –with-pdo-mysql=/usr/local/mysql \
   –prefix=/usr/local/php \
   –enable-mbstring \
   –with-mysql=/usr/local/mysql \
   –enable-cli \
   –with-curl \
   –with-gd \
   –with-png-dir=/usr/local/png \
   –with-jpeg-dir=/usr/local/jpg \
   –with-freetype-dir=/usr/local/freetype \
   –with-zlib-dir=/usr/local/zlib \
   –with-mcrypt=/usr/local/mcrypt \
   –with-iconv=/usr/local/iconv

3. After configure has finished running, hopefully there has been no problem. If there has I have no idea how to fix it. Normally this runs smooth as hell for me, this has taken me about 6 solid hours to fix and I can’t be remotely fixing everyone else’s, sorry.

   You’ll need to be modifying the Makefile generated from your ./configure. Search for the following string (without quotes) “libs/libphp$” and replace that and the next line with the following:

   libs/libphp$(PHP_MAJOR_VERSION).bundle: $(PHP_GLOBAL_OBJS) $(PHP_SAPI_OBJS)
   $(CC) $(CFLAGS_CLEAN) $(EXTRA_CFLAGS) $(LDFLAGS) $(EXTRA_LDFLAGS) $(PHP_GLOBAL_OBJS:.lo=.o) $(PHP_SAPI_OBJS:.lo=.o) $(PHP_FRAMEWORKS) $(EXTRA_LIBS) $(ZEND_EXTRA_LIBS) $(MH_BUNDLE_FLAGS) -o $@ && cp $@ libs/libphp$(PHP_MAJOR_VERSION).so

4. make
5. You can run make test if you want, but it’ll fail everything it doesn’t skip
6. sudo make install
7. Restart apache
8. Everything should work fine now. If it didn’t, I’m sorry – I don’t know why. If it does, hoorah! You just saved yourself 6 hours. You owe me a beer!

Again, I must reiterate, if this doesn’t work for you I probably won’t be able to fix this or even help you slightly. This is just what worked for me. There are plenty of things you can try with a bit of Google-fu, though.

I have, however, found a way to combat my laziness with it’s strongest rival—you guessed it—my compulsiveness! Lists. Until recently, I listed everything in my diary, in a notebook, on my laptop, basically anywhere I could find some paper. That is, until I started using GTD apps.

I started out with Cultured Code‘s Things. A deceptively simple app that organises your lists into projects, areas and tags with a useful Quick Entry HUD for creating tasks as soon as you think of them (so they don’t just go in and out). I love the simplicity of Things, and the fact that it has a counterpart iPhone app (buggy though it may be) is very useful. I used it briefly in the beta, but I just couldn’t integrate it with my workflow. It wasn’t until I started listing everything I do that I saw how useful having this on a computer could potentially be.

As much as I love Things, it does have some holes. I won’t go into all of them, because a lot are bugs in the software or things that are on the roadmap, so it wouldn’t be fair. All I’ll say is that I’m no longer using Things, and have replaced it with Potion Factory‘s The Hit List.

For me, The Hit List’s single feature that sets it apart from Things is the presence of timer functionality for each item in your lists. You simply select an item, hit B and the timer starts. As a freelancer (or anyone who works on billable projects, really) this is incredibly useful. I create lists that directly map onto projects that I’m working on, so being able to log time against each item shows me not only how long each aspect takes me (for future quoting), but how much to charge.

The Hit List is still in beta, but I’ve found it to be very usable. I’ve only had to restart it once, when the HUD wouldn’t invoke, and it’s not done it since so I’m happy! There is also the promise of an iPhone app (which I have found to be almost a must-have), which I hope materialises soon.

Now that I have my GTD app in-hand, I’m able to make lists and set deadlines. My compulsiveness doesn’t like deadlines, oh no. It forces me off the sofa and to the sink to do the washing up, or to take out the bins, or to send the email I’ve been putting off and offers laziness as a reward. How generous!

So, there you have it, if you’re compulsive like me, but also incredibly lazy at times; try pitting your compulsiveness against your laziness. If you give it the right ammo, compulsiveness always wins!

Well, not anymore! I’ve found that if you yank the plug out really quick, then plug it back in before the OS notices what you’ve done, it rejigs the drive back to life and you can carry on as normal. Obviously, it would be better if it just worked, but where’s the fun in that?!

For the record, slow though it is, I recommend using USB2 for regular use. I transfer large files with Firewire, but idle with USB2. Again, not ideal but at least it’s a solution(ish).

This is all well and good, but one of the pieces of software that comes with my sparkly new drive is Drive Manager. It doesn’t do anything obvious, save tell me that my drive is connected (if it does do something else, please enlighten me!) and put a horrible icon in my menu bar. Well, here’s how to make that icon a little easier on the eye.

The app, for starters, is in /Library/Application Support/WesternDigial/WDDriveManager/WDDriveManagerStatusMenu.app. Not /Applications or /Applications/Utilities. First annoyance! To get to where the icons are stored, ctrl/right click WDDriveManagerStatusMenu.app and “Show Package Contents”. Navigate to Contents/Resources and you’ll see WDLogoBlue1.tiff – this is the icon you want to change.

Annoyingly, I couldn’t get to a stage where I was able to complete this using the Finder, so we’ll need to drop to the Terminal. Firstly, though, create the icon you’re going to be using. The one I used was a 16×16 version of a hard drive icon by David Lanham, but you can use whatever you want. The image needs to be in the tiff file format (Photoshop tries to save this with a .tif extension so you’ll need to add the extra “f” in). Once you’ve got your new icon on your desktop, fire up the Terminal and enter the following:

cd /Library/Application Support/WesternDigial/WDDriveManager/WDDriveManagerStatusMenu.app/Contents/Resources
sudo mv WDLogoBlue1.tiff WDLogoBlue1.bak
sudo mv ~/Desktop/WDLogoBlue1.tiff ./WDLogoBlue1.tiff

If you go back to the Finder, you should now see that your icon is in the directory, and the original WDLogoBlue1.tiff has been backed up to WDLogoBlue1.bak. To use your icon, restart OSX, plug your drive in and you’re good to go. Your fancy new icon will appear in the menubar instead of that horrible WD logo:

One app that I got really excited about when it was first release was Guitar Toolkit. This was at a time when I was plaiyng a lot of guitar and the idea of a tuner and chord book really appealed to me. I wasn’t expecting much from it, but it was excellent. I could choose from a load of “standard” tunings, as well as open, which just showed the current tone of the note being played. It was pretty accurate, and when compared with my standalone tuner, I couldn’t tell the difference and I’ve got a pretty decent ear.

At the time of the first version, I sent the developers some suggestions for future versions of the app that would make it perfect for me. As far as I can remember, the main thing was just for polish, and that was the notes on the fretboard screen representing the currently selected tuning. Boy did they implement that and more!

Now, as well as open notes, you can show scale positions of every scale I’ve heard of and some that sound totally fabricated all the way up the fretboard! Furthermore, when you touch the note, it plays the actual note! They listened (when they replied to my first email, they said they were already going to do all of my suggestions, so technically they didn’t listen, but I like it better if it was my idea)! The scales also respond to different tunings, which is super useful – that’s one thing that always gets me about different tunings.

The current chord book has changed loads. They’ve added the awesome auto-strum and the position selector. Auto-strum does what it says, when you change to a different position of a chord, it plays that chord at you. Soon I won’t even need to have a guitar!

They’ve also added the Instrument tab. As you can see, you’re able to change the type of instrument you’re using (oddly enough), whether you’re left-handed or not (this flips the fretboard in Chords and Fretboard – silly southpaws!) and your default alternate tuning, which influences the view of the Tuner and the available Fretboard scales.

Lastly, they’ve quite substantially changed the metronome. I’m not a huge user of metronomes, so I’m not really sure what most people look for in this, but you now have tonnes of new metronome-related options. If you’re distracted by sounds, you can choose a flash instead. There are new sound effects and time signatures which, when added to the tap pad, make what I see to be a very full-featured metronome.

Needless to say, I see this as a must-have application for guitarist iPhone owners. As well as being brilliant at everything it attempts, it’s stable and incredibly reasonably priced (£5.99) with regular updates that have been free so far. In honesty, I’d be happy to pay even if they charged!

Until today I’ve been switching to the very capable Coda, but I’m way too used to the power of Textmate’s text manipulation for this to be a long term solution. With no sign of FTP or SSH support on the horizon, I got my Google on. I’ve found a pretty great solution that will integrate very well with my workflow, so I thought I’d share.

First off, I downloaded the FTP/SSH bundle for Textmate from fuerstnet. This gives you reload and upload over FTP and SSH, along with 2 keyboard shortcuts, direct from a Textmate project. I then set up a folder in the following way:

./project
./project/TextmateProject.tmproj
./project/.ftpssh_settings

I wont reiterate the step-by-step for setting this up, as it’s on fuerstnet and it’s relatively easy.

Once you’ve got this file structure, open your favourite version control client (I use Versions or terminal with Subversion, but only because that’s what I’m used to. Git is also pretty awesome) and check out your project to the ./project folder so that the path to ./project now matches up with your path in .ftpssh_settings file.

At this point, it’s pretty obvious that this method relies on the fact that you’re working on 2 identical copies of 1 project – not ideal, but it works.

Once you’ve got your checked out files, go to your ./project folder and drag all the files in there (except TextmateProject.tmproj and .ftpssh_settings to your Textmate project drawer. Now save your project and it’s ready for you to use. To edit a file on your server, open it in your Textmate drawer, make your changes, save it and use the FTP/SSH bundle to upload it (2 keyboard shortcuts: cmd-S, option-S and your file’s uploaded). You’ll get a tooltip to tell you that the file has uploaded successfully (if it has), and a quick check in your browser should show you that the changes have taken place.

As I said, this relies pretty closely on you having a close affiliation with a version control system, but as long as your files in ./project mirror what’s on your server, it will be a relatively seamless process. I only say to use version control as it streamlines the whole thing, and makes it easier if you’re modifying the files in more than one place, or you have a team working on them. It’s nice and easy to set up a version repository on a local machine, and it’s great for managing projects so I’d recommend it anyway!

If I’ve omitted anything, let me know in comments, and please, props to fuerstnet for writing the awesome bundle that makes this process possible!

I no longer have an ‘orrible yellow tinge to my screen! A happy day, I’m sure you’ll agree.