Macintosh

I started my “switch to Mac” in 2006 by selecting a MacBook Pro at work when my Dell laptop was 3 years old and time to be refreshed. It took a couple months to get completely comfortable with the Mac, mainly looking for replacements for all the PC software I was used to using.

Software I Use:

• Adobe Lightroom
• AOL Radio (for XM BPM)
• Adium instant messaging client
• iTerm terminal / shell
  • For Emacs backspace compatibility, change bookmarks -> profiles -> keyboard -> xterm OSX -> delete = hex 08
• smcFanControl to keep the MacBook a bit cooler
• SpeedIt slows down the Intel CPU to extend battery life
• CocoaMySql database management client
• CocoViewX
• ffmpegx
• Firefox
• The Gimp
• MoodBlast
• OmniGraffle
• Parallels
• PDFLab
• PixelStick
• QuickSilver
• Chicken of the VNC
• Fink
• TextMate programmer’s editorExtra bundles, snippets, etc.
  • Extra Bundles:
    • PHP Language Bundle
    • PHPdoc comment block fix
• HandBrake DVD to MPEG4 encoder
• NicePlayer media player
• VLC media player
• http://monolingual.sourceforge.net/
• http://www.xslimmer.com/
• Temperature Monitor
• Max CD ripper / encoder
• Agua icons
• UNO unified gui
• GrApple Eos Pro Firefox theme

Tips and tricks

• Set up keyboard shortcut for ‘paste as plain text’ in Word 2008
• Display the date on the menu bar
• Resize OS X partitions non-destructively [Hint: diskutil resizeVolume disk1s2 70G]
• Enable Time Machine for networked drives: touch .com.apple.timemachine.supported
• Add spacers to the Leopard dock: defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array-add ‘{“tile-type”=”spacer-tile”;}’

Other sites

• http://www.macrumors.com/
• http://mactactic.com/
• http://www.macosxhints.com/
• http://www.macupdate.com/
• http://www.versiontracker.com/macosx/
• Walt’s OSX Software Recommendations
• OSX Keyboard Shortcuts
• Insanely Mac OSX86 Forums:
  • Fool-proof dual-boot guide
  • Overclocked BadAxe2/Core2Duo guide
  • Sigmatel 9274D audio guide
  • Wake on sleep issues
  • JaS 10.4.9 update
  • 10.4.10 info

Mac HTPC

• http://www.machtpc.com/
• http://www.macminicenter.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page
• http://www.itheaterproject.com/index.php

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