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Finally! With a heavy heart and spasms of grief and guilt, I finally managed to delete Mafia Wars from my Facebook account. It was nice while it lasted - but the horror of the Lost Hours! The incessant and obsessive desire to click-click-click and level up - only to find …. more of the same thing. This is addiction. For good measure, have parted company with Farmville (which thankfully was only a 2 minute fad) and a few other data grabbing apps too. Finally can get back to the Face of Facebook. ...

Have just signed up to http://posterous.com. Needed something like this for a long time. My new Online Grand Central is now at http://evolve75.posterous.com/ Enjoy! Posted via email from evolve75’s posterous

I finally bit the bullet and installed Snow Leopard over last weekend. I did a clean install (i.e., reformat and install afresh) - considering the significant under-the-hood changes that this OS revision has. The basic steps I followed are: Cleaned up the existing Leopard install to remove applications, preference panes and documents I did not need Reviewed the preferences under ~/Library/Preferences as well as the application support items under ~/Library/Application Support and removed the items which were out of date or detritus from old installs Took an image backup using SuperDuper! of the Leopard install Took a backup of the disk using Time Machine to allow easier data restore during the installation De-authorized my iTunes to prevent increment of the install counter after reinstall of the OS Popped in the Snow Leopard DVD and started the install During installation, I used the Disk Utility to reformat the Mac OS partition I also did a custom install to prevent the printer drivers (over 2 GB) being installed. In addition, I selected the optional Rosetta and Quicktime 7 components (seriously Apple, these take less than 10 MB - why the optional tag?) Waited for around 20 minutes to have the base image installed, and then used the migration assistant to restore data from my Time Machine backup The install was relatively smooth, and restoring the data from my Time Machine backup also went without any issues. However, post-install, some of the glitches started appearing: ...

A major aspect of using Emacs is that it is more than a text editor - it is more of an application platform - some would call it an Operating System - that allows a host of applications to run within the same context and session - and vastly enrich the user experience. This is in fact a primary reason why many Emacs users spend their entire computer interaction via Emacs. ...

Off late the Mail.app email client on OSX has been acting up on me. It often stalls or displays the spinning beach ball of death till a forced quit is required. Also, it seems to have display rendering issues when a mail classified incorrectly as junk is moved back to the inbox. I tend to use the Mail.app as a local email client for three main purposes: Offline mode for reading my emails when there is no Internet connection available Easy desktop search for the mails via Spotlight, and Easy archival of important mail in my project workspaces (either in Devonthink or plain text export) The other features (TODO and Notes) are nice, but not really useful for me as I use other tools for these items. The mail itself is served out via gmail accounts and IMAP synchronization. ...

In an earlier post I had listed the server-mode mechanism to allow client/server editing using Emacs. However, this require some setup and also an active Emacs session. With the latest version of Emacs (23.1), a new mechanism to invoke Emacs in a server mode has been introduced. Basically, emacs can be invoked with the –daemon option from the shell command line: $ emacs --daemon This will run emacs in the background as a daemon which will be listening in to emacsclient connections. To actually start a edit session, use emacsclient from the command line as before with the file name as a parameter. ...

Emacs is a great editor, but has one setback - it is slow to startup if you have loads of packages to load. On my G4 iBook, it takes around 45 seconds before Emacs becomes usable (OK - I use lots of packages). However, Emacs is not meant to be restarted every so often. The canonical usage is to start Emacs once, invoke the server mode (see EmacsClient) and then use the emacsclient from the command line to invoke the editor instance when needed. I.e., the classic client/server model for editing! ...

A Small function to set the PATH variable from within Emacs. You can define the function and the path definitions in your .emacs file: Very useful for OS X, where the default path is set by plists. ;; Define a function to setup additional path (defun my-add-path (path-element) "Add the specified path element to the Emacs PATH" (interactive "DEnter directory to be added to path: ") (if (file-directory-p path-element) (setenv "PATH" (concat (expand-file-name path-element) path-separator (getenv "PATH"))))) and use it as: ...

Traditionally, mice on Macs have had just one button (including the iBook/Powerbook trackpads) - even through Mac OS (including OS X) can accept 2 or 3 button input without any problems. Emacs on the other hand maps quite a few functions to the second and third chords of the mice. If you want to emulate a three button mouse in Emacs on OS X, a simple customization option will do the trick. ...

The standard Emacs key-binding for moving to the other frame (‘other-frame’) is C-x 5 o. That’s quite a few key-strokes, and also does not match with the standard OS X key-mapping for switching windows, which is Command-`. On OS X, the Command key maps to Meta in Emacs. However, this is easy to fix. Put the following code-fragment into your .emacs file: (define-key icicle-mode-map [?\M-`] nil) # Only needed if you use Icicles (global-set-key [?\M-`] 'other-frame) # This sets the key binding Note that by default M-` invokes ‘tmm-menubar’ which can also be accessed via [F10]. Also, you do not need the first line (to undefine the key binding in Icicles) if you do not use that package.