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Archive for the ‘mac’ Category

syncing your textexpander snippets using Dropbox

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TextExpander is a incredibly useful Pref Pane plugin for OSX. The basic premise is that you define “snippets” and a delimiter. When you’re typing, you type a keyword + the delimiter and TextExpander will automatically insert the snippet for you. For example, I often have to sign my emails with different signatures. In Entourage, when I am composing an email, I can just type: “sig1′” and that automatically gets translated to “Cheers, Yi”.

One problem I’ve had with TextExpander so far is that it doesn’t offer syncing of your snippets unless you have a MobileMe subscription. Fortunately for us, it stores all the snippets and settings in a simple XML plist file in ~/Library/Application\ Support/TextExpander/Settings.textexpander.

All you have to do to sync your snippets & settings across all your machines is to copy that file somewhere into your Dropbox directory and make a symbolic link (ln -s <src> <dst>) from the Dropbox location to your Application Support folder.

Written by Yi Qiang

May 11th, 2009 at 3:07 pm

Posted in mac

Tagged with , ,

Using Sage with Fluid

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Above is Sage running in Fluid.app, which is a “SSB” (Site Specific Browser). I am starting to like using the Sage notebook this way because it doesn’t interfere with my regular browsing and it’s nice having a dock icon to show your friends ;-)
Here’s how you can get it up and running in no time:
1) Install Fluid.app (http://fluidapp.com)
2) Create a new SSB by pointing it to http://localhost:8000
3) You can use this Sage logo for a dock icon (the icon is from artwork done by Sirio who originally posted it to the sage-devel mailing list) 
Obviously this will not work if you don’t run sage from elsewhere. I thought about including some script-fu to make it launch Sage automatically, but since I do sage -br so often it’s rather pointless. 

Written by Yi Qiang

May 9th, 2008 at 8:49 pm

Posted in mac, sage

remove /home directory on leopard

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If you’re like me and are curious about everything on your system, you might like this tip:

http://www.tipstrs.com/tip/1821/Fix–home-directory-after-installing-Leopard

It shows you how to remove the /home directory in your root on a Leopard machine.

Written by Yi Qiang

April 11th, 2008 at 1:08 pm

Posted in mac

Updated version of Colloquy which fixes Python plugins on Leopard

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You can find an updated binary distribution of Colloquy here:

http://yiqiang.org/Colloquy.zip

The only modification is that it is linked using -weak_library so that it uses Python 2.5 if it exists on your machine and falls back to Python 2.3 if you’re using 10.4. This is needed because Python plugins for Colloquy need the pyobjc bridge, which is in Python 2.5 (as shipped with Leopard), but not Python 2.3.

You can find a sample plugin here:

http://yiqiang.org/sage-devel-trac.py

To install it, drop it into

~/Library/Application Support/Colloquy/PlugIns/

and either restart Colloquy or type /reload plugins.

Written by Yi Qiang

April 9th, 2008 at 10:22 pm

Posted in mac, sage

Fixing home and end key for Terminal.app in Leopard

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I’ve finally found a good solution for making the home/end keys work as expected in Terminal.app on Leopard.

  1. Go to http://www.starryhope.com/tech/apple/2006/keyfixer/, download and install it.
  2. Open up Terminal.app and go to Preferences (Cmd+,)
  3. Find the Keyboard tab for your settings
  4. Find the entry for home, click on edit, change “Action” to “send string to shell” and type in ctrl+a (it should expand it to \001)
  5. Repeat this for the ‘end’ key, and type in ctrl+e

Restart Terminal.app and voila!

Written by Yi Qiang

December 28th, 2007 at 5:34 pm

Posted in mac