9 Nov 2013

Trace/BPT trap: 5 when accessing SystemVersion.plist in Mavericks

If you’re reading this blog entry because you’re a subscriber, I’d stop now and skip this one. Unless you’re extremely geeky. This is more of a public service announcement to anyone who’s installed OSX 10.9 and Xcode 5, and finds themselves oddly unable to compile even the simplest program using the command-line tools, from gcc […]

22 Jul 2013

Command-Backslash not working with the 1Password Safari Extension?

Posted by in Mac, OSX, tips | No Comments

For us old-school keyboard-lovers, 1Password’s Safari extension provides a handy shortcut: pressing Cmd-\ activates the extension. If you’ve found this doesn’t work on your Mac (it worked fine on my Air, but not on my iMac), it’s probably a conflict with another keyboard shortcut. Head into System Preferences→Keyboard and check through the Keyboard Shortcuts for […]

19 Jul 2011

Little Lion Luxuries

Posted by in Mac, OSX | One Comment

I’m sure the release of Lion will be accompanied by an entire pride of in-depth reviews. In fact, people have been doing warm-ups to get ready for John Siracusa’s mammoth review… So, instead of digging too deep, or tackling any of the more controversial features — and it’ll be interesting to see which generates the most arguments […]

19 Jul 2011

Revealing Lion’s Hidden Library Folder

The OS X user-level Library folder (/Users/<your short name>/Library, or ~/Library for short) is hidden by default in OS X, from Lion onwards. I’m going to show you several different ways to show and open your Library in Lion, in increasing order of geekiness and permanence. Mavericks update: Yet another, easier, way to reveal your library has […]

19 Jun 2011

Linen Backdrop

Here are some linen-textured backgrounds, with a vignette added, that I think work pretty nicely as a backdrop. The size/aspect ratio here (1920x1080) works well on both my iMac and MacBook Air — let me know if you’d like me to generate a different size. (All created with Pixelmator, mostly because it has an extra random noise […]