Raible Designs

Disk Space love from .Mac

I'm getting close to filling up the 200 MB quota on my .Mac account. That was before I got the following e-mail:

Dear .Mac Member,

We're excited to announce that every full .Mac membership now comes with 250 MB of combined .Mac Mail and iDisk storage. We want to say thank you for your past purchase of additional storage by immediately increasing your total storage to 1.2 GB for the duration of your current membership.

Wow - very cool! It's wierd that my PowerBook only reports 512 MB available in System Preferences -> .Mac -> iDisk. Oh well, it'll be another year or two until I max that out. Is it possible that unlimited disk space will be the way of the future?

Fix Tab to drop-down in Firefox on OS X

Firefox is a great browser as most of you probably already know. I recently switched to using it as my default browser on OS X because Safari is flakey with GMail. One of the annoying things about Firefox on OS X is you can't tab to drop-downs in a web page. No longer my friends - in this month's Macworld there's a solution!

In Firefox (or Mozilla), type about:config in the address bar. Then search for "accessiblity.tabfocus". Change the value to "3" in order to allow tabbing to all form elements, or "7" if you want form elements + links.

Now if I could only get my two favorite Safari features in Firefox: auto-fillin of forms and spell-checking as you type.

No G5 PowerBooks Anytime Soon

Mac Rumors: No G5 PowerBooks Anytime Soon. If I had a vote, I'd say it's time to give up on the G5 for the PowerBook and make OS X run on Intel or AMD chips - then produce an Intel/AMD version of the PowerBook. Apple makes great hardware, but their laptops are much slower than their Intel counterparts (for Java at least). All I want is a PowerBook that can keep up with an Intel-based laptop - is that too much to ask?

Setup Apache 2 and mod_jk2 on OS X

From the Denver JUG Wiki, I found Server Logistics. There I found an Apache 2 installer and mod_jk2 installer (in the Connectors folder) for OS X. Time to install and get working: under 5 minutes. Got it all working with Tomcat 5.0.27 and all I had to do was restart Tomcat after installing everything.

OmniGraffle

I've seen OmniGraffle diagrams show up in a blog entry and and an article in the last week. Both diagrams show how OmniGraffle can produce high-quality, professional looking diagrams. The best part is that (I believe) it comes out-of-the-box with OS X. I seem to remember deleting it off my hard drive a while back b/c I didn't know what it was for. After seeing these sites, and realizing what OmniGraffle can do - I'll be searching through my Panther CDs in hopes of finding it. Anyone know where it's at and what version it is?

Cinema Display on Linux

I received all the new hardware I need to hook my Windows XP and Fedora/Suse boxes up to the 23-incher. So I started to hook it up last night. Windows was easy. I did have to plug in a VGA monitor in order to install the Radeon 9600 LE drivers, but then everything just worked. As for Linux, that's a different story. I can't seem to download these drivers - it just doesn't work. I sent an e-mail to ATI Support, but that resulted in an auto-reply with this link that results in a bunch of links and suggestions, but no downloads. Anyone know where to get Linux drivers for a Radeon 9600 LE card?

2 minutes later: After posting this, I tried the download again. It worked this time. Figures. A kid's birthday party and a concert will likely keep me from tinkering again until tomorrow. Of course, there's a bug show tomorrow and a friend is throwing us a baby shower. Aahhh, living life is so much better than tinkering with technology.

3 days with the 23"

Because I didn't have a DVI Video card for my Windows or Linux boxes, I've been working all week on my PowerBook with my new kick-ass 23" monitor. I'm in love.

It's actually changed my whole perspective. The whole machine actually seems faster. I can see so much fricken' stuff on the screen that I never close anything anymore. The bad part? Now that I'm enjoying OS X so much, I can tell I'm going to have to buy a dual G5. Probably not this year (I have to pay off my monitor loan first), but it's definitely in my future.

23"

I arrived home this afternoon and found that my new 23" monitor had arrived. This thing is fricken' awesome! It's so crisp, clear and BIG!! The only bad part is that I thought it supported Windows out-of-the-box - by having a VGA port. No such luck. It looks like I'll have to buy a DVI male to VGA male adapter - or possible new DVI video cards. New video cards would suck since I'd have to buy 3 for my two Linux boxes (Fedora and Suse) and one for my Windows box.

Regardless, it plugs right into my PowerBook and works great with it.

Your order has shipped

Let's hope it's in Denver when I get home on Sunday...

______________________________________________________________

Item Product   Product                        Total   Total   
     Number    Description                    Ordered Shipped 
______________________________________________________________

001 M9178LL/A  APPLE CIN HD DISPLAY 23" FLAT      1     1 

Yeah baby - I've been waiting to get one of these bad boys for years!

Importing OS X Address Book into GMail

One of the problems with using GMail over .Mac is that I don't have easy synchronization of my contacts from OS X's Address Book. However, there is an easy way to get your initial set of contacts imported. Google is your friend - "export contacts gmail mac" brings up this howto. Here's the condensed version:

• Download AddressBookToCSV
• Click on "Contacts" in GMail and import

Very nice - GMail definitely has one of the best web interfaces I've ever used. Who says JavaScript sucks?