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  • MacFusion

    macfusionWhen I was writing PHP, Zach had turned me on to EditPlus [website]. By far my favorite 2 features of EditPlus were it’s light weight and integrated FTP functionality. Matt wrote of how he enjoyed the integrated ftp support in Coda, but I found it to be a bit to geared towards web development for what I usually find myself doing these days. I’ve been frustrated with OS X’s native, GUI FTP support being read-only, which is why I was delighted to stumble upon MacFUSE and MacFusion.

    MacFUSE is a port of the FUSE project to the Mac platform by Amit Singh at Google. FUSE stands for File system in USErspace, which, means that it provides a filesystem interface for things that may or may not be actual filesystems without troubling the operating system with all the messy details. The part that gets me excited is that I can mount an ftp site and then read from and write to it from the GUI or command line, but the list of things that can mounted using FUSE is quite extensive. Both FUSE and MacFUSE are command line based, so Michael Gorbach developed MacFusion, which lets you unlock some of the power of FUSE without typing a whole lot or even reading a manual. Now I essentially have ftp access as good as EditPlus’s from almost any application. I have to say almost? because Apple’s Backup program doesn’t like to recognize FUSE drives.

  • Witch Switcher?

    I’ve only been using it for a few hours, but I feel the need to write about Witch by Many Tricks. Expose lets you switch windows, but this can be difficult or confusing if you have many windows from many different applications open at the same time. I’ll often find myself with 20+ windows open after a few hours of work on my Macbook, at which point Exposé’s “All Applicationsâ€? (F9) feature is pretty much useless. I usually end up selecting the application that I want from the dock and then using Exposé’s “Application Windowsâ€? (F10) function to find what I’m looking for. I longed for an application switcher that showed me all open windows but also gave me their titles.  Witch at least shows me the titles and application names.

    If I have any complaints, it’s that Witch doesn’t function exactly like Exposé. If I could configure it so a single tap of the F8 key makes the Witch panel appear and a second tap of F8 (or any of the other Exposé keys) would make it disappear. Despite this minor annoyance, I still consider this a valuable addition to my productivity toolkit. I have to give props to The Unnoficial Apple Weblog, where I first read about Witch.

    Witch Screenshot

  • iTunes 7.2 released

    As up update to monday’s post, Apple today released iTunes 7.2, which includes iTunes Plus, Apple’s name for DRM-free downloads. Despite the press release‘s implication that the DRM free tracks are online, I dont’ see them yet.

    UPDATE: To see the DRM free tracks, you have to click the iTunes Plus link in the Quick Links box on the right side of the iTunes Store. After agreeing to the iTunes Plus Terms Of Service , the plus tracks do start to show up in the regular store. The enhanced tracks can be recognized by a ‘+’ icon next to the price (and the price itself).

  • Rumor: DRM-free iTunes this week

    Gizmodo is reporting that DRM-free tracks from EMI could be hitting the virtual shelves this week. This got me excited because I had been looking forward to an easy way to actually pay for music online without having all sorts of restrictions on what I do with this music when I get it. I started to wonder however, if there were any artists on EMI that I actually care about. I managed to find a list and there are quite a few artists that I had been listening to:

    • Lily Allen
    • The Beastie Boys
    • Blur
    • Depeche Mode
    • Duran Duran
    • Fischerspooner
    • Goldfrapp
    • Kelis
    • Lenny Kravitz
    • The Magic Numbers
    • OK Go
    • Liz Phair
    • Iggy Pop
    • Moby

    Most of these are artists that I had been listening to for a while, or that I picked up by listening to Pig Radio, which I can not recommend highly enough if you like Indie Rock, Techno and Electro Pop. The only exception is Lily Allen, who I had heard on Pig Radio, but didn’t really become interested in until Karl. played a few of her tracks over some EVE one afternoon.

  • Teaching Acrobat CS3 and Safari to play together

    I installed Acrobat CS3 on my Macbook for testing at work. I did experience the firewall-turning-off issue, but I also had another issue crop up. When opening .PDFs in Safari, rather then the the document opening up in an embedded version of Preview, I was getting a dialog asking me what application to use to open the PDF (which unfortunatley had preview grayed out).

    I suspected Acrobat was the cause of the problem, so I opened Acrobat and was greeted with a dialog asking if I wanted to make Acrobat the default application for opening PDFs (I said “no”, but it didn’t seem to take notice). After this, I restarted Safari, and just got a spinning icon in the middle of Safari when I try to open PDFs. I went back to Acrobat and unchecked the “Display PDF in browser using:” option in the Internet category. I quit Acrobat, relaunched Safari, and everything was back to normal.

  • Twitter

    I had read about Twitter when Casey first wrote about it, and later his critisism of it, but I didn’t have much interest in it at the time. Adam started using it it earnest last week and after hearing about it on Fair Game on Friday night I decided to give it a shot. So far I haven’t had too much of a chance to play around with it. I am having some trouble with the IM integration, “TwitterIM is under maintenance at the moment. Please check back later.” which I understand, but when trying to enable updates via my mobile phone I just get an “Invalid Address” message, which gives me much less to go on.

  • How to Hijack a Viral Marketing Campaign

    xkcd.com is hijacking ask.com’s viral marketing campaign. I’m a few days behind, but it’s such a great comic, I’ll do what I can to help. Check out the blag post for the low down.

    THE ALGORITHM CONSTANTLY FINDS JESUS
    THE ALGORITHM KILLED JEEVES
    THE ALGORITHM IS BANNED IN CHINA
    THE ALGORITHM IS FROM JERSEY

  • Dating Site Banners

    True banner

    Mate 1 bannerMate 1 banner 2

    Mate 1

    Mate 1 banner 3

    True - Naughty or Nice?

    True - Crawling Passion

    true - gold dress

    singlesnet banner

  • Emerging Blog

    It’s been on the blogroll for some time now, but if you haven’t checked it out already, take a look at Jenny’s blog, Book Embargo. It’s generally updated several times weekly and contains news on books and the book industry.

    In the interest of transparency and full disclosure, I should let you know that Jenny is my amazing, wonderful and perfect girlfriend.

  • Pile of Gold music video

    A few months ago, Khaela Maricich of The Blow posted a video to youtube asking for video submisissions for the song Pile of Gold. Shortly thereafter, she ran into some difficulty and apparently has yet to complete the project. I, with my filthy little paws on a computer with Final Cut Express, went to work putting together a quick and dirty compilation like Khaela had described. Below you’ll find the combined fruits of the labor of many people more creative then myself. Enjoy.