Mac

Running LTspice IV on Mac OS X Before I start testing a new idea for an electronic circuit and building it on a breadboard, I usually want to check it with LTspice. It’s a fantastic piece of software for testing almost any kind of component. Nearly all manufacturers have a spice equivalent for most of their parts. But there’s a snag. The Mac version of LTspice is a piece of crap. Having to run a virtual PC or reboot using BootCamp feels unnecessarily slow and convoluted. But there’s a way of running it as a “normal” Mac application. Here’s how to do it. ...

There’s one thing that I fear when it comes to my storage and that is to lose all the pictures I’ve been taking for all these years. I have seen customers of mine that have lost all their images due to a hard disk crashing and seen the tears. I usually do my regular backup using TimeMachine on my Mac to an Apple Time Capsule. But my photo library in Adobe Lightroom is too big to fit on the SSD drive used in my MacBook Pro, and TimeMachine doesn’t do a backup of external drives. So I use rsync to make a backup to my NAS which uses RAID–1 for extra protection. But I don’t want to rely on a single backup. A fire, burglary or simple hardware failure makes me uneasy. So I also do an off-site backup using the excellent Arq backup program. ...

MultiMarkdown has just been updated to version 4.7. MultiMarkdown 4.7 Released. Unfortunately it looks like my biggest gripe with MultiMarkdown still isn’t fixed. ...

I’ve started to use the excellent iPhone app Next to keep track of my expenses. My bank has a utility that automatically tracks every purchase I make, but for me, being a notorious money spender, it’s kind of a therapeutic thing to be forced every time I buy something to actually acknowledge the expense and not just buying without thinking. It’s also a great way of keeping track of what kind of things I spend my money on. ...

“furbo.org · Clearing the Icon Services cache in Yosemite” After installing or updating a system to Yosemite, I have seen blank (missing) icons on several Macs. I have also seen cases where the desktop doesn’t get updated after a change to the document icons in the application itself (which happens as developers update their apps to use the new icon guidelines.) Saving this link for later. Looks like a good thing to know.

[caption id=“attachment_2704” align=“alignleft” width=“272”] Photo by phrawr[/caption] Going paperless Tired of drowning in stacks of papers? Want to go paperless? Here’s how I moved all my documents to the cloud and cleared up a lot of the clutter at home. I used my old trusty photo scanner, because when all the old papers are scanned and achieved, I only have to scan the new inflowing papers, not the insane stacks of paper I had previously. Scanning Workflow The easiest route is to buy an advanced duplexed document scanner like the highly regarded and award winning Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500 duplex document scanner. It comes with all the software you need and you just put in a stack of papers, receipts or business cards and away it goes. There’s also a small portable scanner called Doxie Go that looks interesting, with rechargeable batteries and a SD card slot. But I don’t have the money to buy one now so my old flatbed scanner, the Canon CanoScan 8800f, now discontinued and replaced with the better Canon CanoScan 9000F have to do at least for now. It’s not really made for scanning large amount of papers, but it does the job. I’ve made what I think is a pretty good workflow so I’ll try to describe it. Maybe you can find some nuggets here. ...

Better battery life Macbook Pro with gfxCardStatus Update: Just installed Mac OS X 10.8.4 and now it works much better. Fantastical, Growler, Hardware Grower, Scrivener and Tweetbot now works without switching cards. Later models of Macbook Pro computers comes with dual graphics card. This makes it possible to use a low performance card when not using graphics intense applications, and automatically switch to the faster, but less energy efficient card if needed. But how do you know which card is currently active? There is a great application available called gfxCardStatus that shows you when the computer switches, and even uses notifications. If your on the move and on battery power, you can force the computer to use the Integrated less power draining graphics card. If you need full speed, just select the Discrete card. The third alternative is to have it in the normal Dynamic Switching Mode. But there’s a snag when using Switching Mode. A lot of applications forces the Macbook Pro into using the Descrete high performance battery draining card, for no apparent good reason. Let’s examine that. ...

After getting my Raspberry Pi I used the one built-in on my MacBook Pro, but the SanDisk SDHC-card showed up as read-only in finder on my mac, and Disk Utility refused to format it. The write protection switch on the card was correctly set, so that made me a bit baffled. But it seems that the internal card reader on the MacBook Pro is a bit finicky. [ ...

Instead of having one favorite password that you use on every account you create on the web,making it very easy for someone that gets ahold of it to wreak havoc of you life. Wouldn’t it be great if you had different, impossible to guess passwords on each site? But you only had on password to remember? Well, 1Password can help you both generate random passwords and to help you log in automatically to those sites using just one master password. ...

Choosing an excellent keyboard for your Mac Let’s face it, Apple produces some great products, but there are two things the past years that they aren’t that good at. They can’t make usable mouses, and the keyboard is less than stellar. The laptop keyboards are ok as far as laptop keyboards go, but after you’ve tried a “REAL” keyboard, you will become a keyboard snob. Thankfully Apple stopped using proprietary connectors many years back, so you can buy any mouse for PC and use that instead. Even USB keyboards made for PC works after changing a setting, by switching the alt-command keys. But you won’t get all the unique keys for controlling iTunes, volume and other settings. The funny thing is, that if you want to find a good keyboard, you see the most extensive selection of keyboards with good, tactile and clicky response among all the PC gamer keyboards. Most of them look horrible though. I’ve been working with computers since 1979 and here’s my list of the best keyboards ever produced. And I’ll try to give some tips on getting your hands on a tremendous clicky keyboard. ...