every word of it.

Did you know that MacOS X has faxing built-in to the OS? It’s true, take a gander at this page on Apple’s site.

Like a chump, I’ve been going to The UPS Store or FedEx Kinko’s to do my faxing, and taking a hit of about $3 every time. It didn’t occur to me this morning that my laptop had a fax/modem built-in. I was about to go dig through my scrap heap to find my old fax/modem and save myself the cost of a #6 Spicy Chicken. Seems those old dinosaurs aren’t useless afterall.

And you know, using the fax feature is easy as pie. The option to fax is right there in the Print Dialog.

After filling out the relevant information, you just hit fax and you’re part of the 20th century again.

If you use Windows, you can do the same thing. It’s just not as nicely presented. Here are instructions how.

Applescript! Never really used it before. Mainly cause I was afraid of it’s natural language syntax. But today, I decided that has to change.

Since I’ve been forced to link the videos I’ve recently posted using Quicktime’s embedded player, I needed something to help me write the bit of HTML that makes the magic happen. So what better way to try my hand at Applescript than with this little problem.

The great thing about Applescript is that it’s available everywhere in MacOS

Here’s my first Applescript script: (more…)

Automator, touted as one of the big features of Mac OS X 10.4. Have you used it? Of course not, it’s rubbish.

For one, the program itself is horribly resource intensive. You need a 4-way G5 with 4GB of memory for it to be useable. I don’t know what it’s doing, but the longer you leave it open, the slower and slower the program gets.

Secondly, there’s no good way to debug. Stuff happens, and you just hope it’s the right stuff. And it doesn’t help testing when Automator slows to a crawl.

Automator, what a rubbish program. But then it finally works, and the clouds part and the sun shines down and all is well with the world.

Yes, I’ve finally gotten some results with Automator. I’ve created two workflows. The first creates a thumbnail and uploads the thumbnail and original image to raishad.com. The second is a “Folder Action”. A “Folder Action” is a script that is attached to a folder, and it runs whenever you drop a file in that folder. The second workflow uploads .torrent files that I drop in that folder, to a folder on my server that Azureus scans for new torrents.

After the jump, I’ll walk through the Workflows (more…)

Today is Laptop Day. Why? I got my laptop back. Surren got his new laptop, a Dell 600m. And Jenny got her Toshiba Monstrosity. So how did I celebrate? By getting my laptop back to the default “Raishad” state.

What is the default “Raishad” state? Glad you asked.

<li><a href="http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/">Quicksilver</a> - I can't live without this program. I use it as an application launcher, but Quicksilver is the swiss army of MacOS X Utility programs. It can do <em>anything</em>. It can control iTunes, send emails, do sums, and probably the most useful



<li>Bash Prompt - I need a colorful prompt, and I need colorful directory listings. Without these things, I'm useless.

Here’s the relevant section from my .bashrc

export CLICOLOR=1
export HISTCONTROL='ignoredups'
export PS1 = '[\033[00;36m]\u@\h[\033[00m]:[\033[00;35m]\w[\033[00m]\$ '

• lftp – There are no good ftp clients for MacOS X. Cyberduck is passable, but it’s no Flashfxp. In fact, you can take any MacOS X ftp client and apply it to that sentence, ______ is passable, but it’s no Flashfxp. To install lftp, you need Darwinports/Fink.

<li><a href="http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/">Firefox</a>/<a href="http://www.caminobrowser.org/">Camino</a> - Safari is a great browser, but it's missing a few things that I can't do without. You can get plugins to enable these things in Safari, but in my experience they are awfully clumsy. These "things" are:

• Quicksearches – You know the ability to type ‘artist cardigans’ in the Location bar and have it take you to the appropriate allmusicguide page. It’s such a great feature that you don’t miss until you can’t use it anymore.

<li>Find-As-You-Type - Only suckers type Command+F.</li>

<li>Automatic Image Resizing - No one likes to scroll those huge pictures from NOAA/NASA. </li>

• Adium – It’s only the best chat client ever.
• Growl – This goes along with Adium. I like having notifications from Adium, so that way I can continue what I’m doing and still read the incoming message.
• SubEthaEdit – For when you need a good light text editor. It also has a nifty command line tool, see. see let’s you open SubEthaEdit from the command line.
• SideTrack – My laptop was released before the 2 Finger Scrolling trackpad, so I need this to be able to use my laptop without a mouse.
• NetNewsWire – I’ve tried a bunch of different news readers, and this is my favorite.

Those are the essentials, all that is required to make me a happy camper.

Let’s hear it for Apple’s Repair Service

Here’s the (rough) timeline

(from Joel Trussell)

It has not been a good week for Apple (in my house). First the Powerbook thing, now iTunes 6 locks up my Windows Desktop. I’m not sure why, but I’ve conducted scientific tests. iTunes 6 => Windows Freezes iTunes 5 => A-OK! Also, talk about a waste of a version number. Apple should be more conservative.

But outside my house, Apple has been doing great. I think their model of selling tv shows, is going to change the (digital) world. I will go on record to say that a year from now, we’re going to see other networks start selling tv shows. May not be through iTunes, but it’s gonna happen. You can feel it.

People like Long are going to poo-poo the idea. But people like Long are completely wrong, and they’re full of hate. They just don’t realize that Apple can’t make a bad move. See iPod Shuffle.

People with satellite and cable (me) have often complained with the way you purchase programming, the whole “bundles” idea. Back with Dish, you had to go up another package level just to get Nicktoon! This idea of paying for what only what you want will definitely spread. Though I won’t go on record and say things will change with satellite/cable in a year.

I reformatted and reinstalled. S.M.A.R.T. says the drive is failing. Looks like I win.

Update: They’re finally sending the box. I didn’t even have to beg.

Yep. My hard drive has gone wonky. Yesterday, MacOS X would become slower and slower until it completely froze. Only the mouse would move. Running Disk Utility would result in a whole bunch of errors. After running Disk Utility, I would go into MacOS, and the same thing would happen.

All signs point to hard drive failure.

Good thing I bought Applecare. It’s perfect for situations like these. Ben from Applecare, unfortunately, doesn’t believe me. He recommended a reformat and reinstall. So that’s what I’m going to do. I have to play ball.

You hear that Apple has some of the best customer service, but that was definitely not my experience.