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 Feb 2013

Making a thing that goes “Bong!”

I’ve been meditating for a while. For decades, in fact, on and off. I normally use a meditation timer provided by a plug-in to the Mac app pzizz, whose primary function is actually getting you off to sleep, or power napping. But pzizz doesn’t seem to be supported any more, and I wanted something a […]

9 Feb 2013

Making a Dragon

I’ve had a Walter Ruffler Paper Machines kit of a Chinese dragon waiting for me to get around to building it for a very long time. More than a year, in fact, as it was a birthday pressie last year. I finally got around to it. I also used it as the first proper test of […]

5 Jan 2012

Marco, on whether the e‑reader is “doomed” or not

Marco Arment has a good response to Matt Alexander’s suggestion that the e‑reader is already dead. Most telling for me was what I thought Marco was going to say in his last paragraph. I think it could equally well read: ‘I don’t think the e‑reader is “doomed” at all. It may just be relegated to […]