Tool

So I upgraded to OS X Mountain Lion yesterday. The install was pretty smooth (though had a tough time with the redeem code for the upgrade, worked on the third code that Apple sent across). Most of the software is working fine. However, I found that my existing Xcode installation needed an upgrade (via a Xcode install from the App Store). The problem is that any new Xcode install seems to nuke the command line development tools (think make, autoconf, etc.). The solution is pretty simple though. Once Xcode has been installed, run Xcode and then open the preferences. There is a section on downloads, which lists installing the command line tools as an option. ...

Why TaskPaper and Org-Mode? TaskPaper is a simple and elegant task management software for the OSX platform. It combines the simplicity of a text micro-format to mark the tasks, and the elegance of a Mac UI. It also provides a quick launch time and a nice system-wide quick entry window that is accessible with a single shortcut key. I have been a heavy user of Emacs’ Org-Mode for some years now, and love the power and flexibility it offers for tracking not just outlines and tasks, but any text based item, including notes and calendar entries. In fact Org-Mode has become one of the primary software that I use regularly, every day. ...

The gnuplot graphing utility has always had excellent support for multiple terminal types. While the X11 terminal is a satisfactory GUI view for the graphs, I prefer to use the AquaTerm terminal on OSX as it is more ‘Mac-like’ and feels more natural. Also, I do prefer to compile gnuplot by myself on OSX rather than downloading the pre-packaged binaries - as this gives me more control over the compilation (including getting around the stupid Apple readline bug - where Apple has essentially shipped a broken readline by using libedit to emulate the non-existent libreadline). ...

Found an interesting ASCII Art conversion site at http://www.typorganism.com/asciiomatic The site takes 60x50 pixel JPEG images (size has to be exactly that) and converts them to a ASCII glyph based image.