This is mostly for my own benefit but found this useful tip today:
On a Mac you can make a non-linear selection in a body of text by holding the alt (option) button and drawing a rectangle around the text you want to highlight…. this is useful if you wanted to select a column from a text file
Most text editors seem to support this feature
I’ve never been a big ‘play computer games online’ kinda guy and never really seen the point… this has however now all changed!?Ǭ? I got a 2day free pass to Xbox Live when I bought ‘Gears of War’ and Im sad to say that the marketing worked and I’ve signed up for a years access!?Ǭ? The whole system is INCREDIBLY well put together and once you get the hang of it, its very easy to get involved in games etc.?Ǭ? Its kinda like MSN for gaming, so means you can keep track of your mates who play and invite them into games etc… brilliant.?Ǭ? Means I can play xbox with people that I can’t really normally due to geographic obstacles!?Ǭ? There is ZERO lag/delay and its as if the person was in the next room rather than many miles away, it even has voice communication which is useful for in games and out (id say its more reliable than Skype, even if the quality isn’t quite as good).
Also good is that the fact that the Xbox will play music from my iPod and most impressively charges it!?Ǭ? Woohoo, this is a life saver whilst my laptop is still MIA!
If anyone reading this knows me and wants my play get in contact and ill give you my gamertag!
P.S. Perhaps a ‘Slay Jellybass’ event could be arranged if you find our music particuarly offensive, me and Chix would make Jelly out of you (b)ass 
Been working collaboratively on a project that Binnit aka Mr Steamshift dreamt up. Its basically a software emulator of the Behringer BCF2000 MIDI Controller which would let you test out stuff on the move.
There are a few caveats for usage so ill just copy in what Binnit wrote as there is no point repeating
There are a few things you need to know:-
- It requires MidiPipe or similar; this is because it doesn?¢¬Ä¬ôt act as a midi endpoint in and of itself – it requires an application to do that for it.
- Because of the origin of the application, it is designed to work in a very specific way; it is designed to mimic the way that the BCF2000 controller works once you have applied Steve Mokris?¢¬Ä¬ô Quartz Composer Sysex files. In short, this basically maps all of the buttons (barring the encoder group buttons) as midi controllers.
Usage
First launch MidiPipe and create a new pipe – with just a midi in element and a midi out element. Then launch the BCF2000 application; you can now select the MidiPipe midi input from the drop down list. For control of Garageband, for example, that?¢¬Ä¬ôs all you have to do.
Enjoy (and if you use it let us know how we can make it better). SteamSHIFT out.
Future versions *may* let you change the MIDI channel for each control and possibly (unlikely!) act as a standalone MIDI endpoint, thus removing the need for MidiPipe.
If you find it useful let us know 
P.S. This uses the MIDI class I wrote for my AutoSampler application (Automatically creates EXS24 patches from hardware), that may now actually make it to completion!
#1: Since setting up this blog and moving away from blogger I’ve noticed an influx of junk/spam comments made to posts I’d written. Every hour or so Id recieve and email telling me that a comment had been made that was awaiting my moderation due to it looking a little suspect… well that is all over now!!! Today I found Akismet which does all the spam detection for me… love it, back to good old simple blogging once again!
#2: I’ve been getting a fair bit of work from online contacts recently and the most sensible way to recieve payment has been paypal, especially now that you can recieve payment from people without paypal accounts themselves. But its a bit annoying when you request money that you dont get the ammount you expected due to the Paypal transaction fees. Well here is a great tool for working out how much to charge the customer in order to get the ammount you want after fees-reduction: Paypal Calculator
Update:
This is not needed for Leopard!! The W300i will work natively out of the box with 10.5
So the latest version of iSync changed the way that plugins worked which meant that Miche was without the ability to sync her phone with her mac… this will be easy to fix says I…
After playing around for an hour trying to re-write the plugin myself and getting no-where fast I found this page which had a tutorial on creating iSync 2.3 plugins:
The site was incredibly helpful and with a bit of messing about I was able to get the correct settings for her phone and it all works again. Here is the fruits of my labours incase anyone else has a W300i that they would like to sync with their mac.
You need to extract this to:
/Library/PhonePlugins (then restart iSync)
The image is incorrect for the phone but is the nearest image I could find for the particular model (which turned out to be a SE Z520).
I had found websites selling their premade plugins but Im loathed to pay for something I think should be free, which is why Im sharing the above to hopefully save others the hassle!
As much as you love the products, Apple Customer/Technical support is the worst I’ve ever experienced. I’ve been a Mac user about a year now and have never had (or heard of) a positive convasation with their operators… Is this a run of bad luck or is this more of a ‘feature’?
To date…
1) Monkeying around with payment of Powerbook, canceling order for not getting payment after payment was made
2) Charging me twice for Logic 7 Pro, refusing to give money back… had to get bank to intervene on my behalf.
3) Same as point one for Miche trying to order a Photobook from iPhoto
4) 3 Hour convo (well 2hours 45mins on hold and 15min convo) after Hitch’s G5 tower didn’t come with the PCI slots it was sold as having
5) Si’s iPod delayed arrival due to the company purchasing it having problems like point 1
6) Chris having problems gettin Apple to aggree that his iPod is faulty (inspiration for this post!)
Anyone ever had a positive interaction with Apple staff??
If you have a mac, use iPhoto and wish you had an easy way to upload photos to your Wordpress blog then look no futher than WordpressExport. Its an iPhoto plugin that lets you easily select and upload photos.
This is a work in progress so may still contain a few bugs, if you do find any un-expected behaviour please let me know so I can fix/improve it. Registration will be available as soon as I get time to sort it out.
Just found out that you can send text messages direct from the Address Book (OSX) if you have a bluetooth phone… this is definately a nice feature . Also heard rumours that it logs all incoming texts as ‘notes’ for the contacts, although yet to see this occur.
Just got to find a nice Quicksilver plugin for this and ill never have to use the crappy phone keyboard again… woohoo!
Dont worry there will be updates with what I’ve been getting up to in the next couple of weeks once I get hold of photos… so stay tuned… if your not computer inclined feel free to browse away now
AcidSearch (link)
GENIUS!!!! Its basically a plugin for Safari that lets you monkey around with the Search bar… so now I can finally have google.co.UK as my default search engine which you would not believe how much time is gonna save me! You can also add in search strings for ANY searchable site and use the search bar to search it… all very useful BUT the best feature for me is the ‘Find As You Type’ which when activated acts like the Find function in Firefox which I have always loved and missed since using Safari.
Smultron (link)
Very very feature packed code editor for OSX which also happens to be completely FREE. Only used it for a couple of tasks so far but seems to be very flexible and so far I like it… so nice to have a reliable ‘Auto-Complete’ function back (Why Why Why Dreamweaver??!?!?!?)
I’ve been getting about 10 emails a day recently of the seemingly popular image spam, which is used to try get past regular junk mail filters. I found this junk mail filter on the web somewhere and it is currently working perfectly… it is also filtering out some of the annoying newsletters I’ve found myself “subscribed” to over the years.
This is a screenshot of the Apple Mail config but the rules can be applied in any email client that supports rules:
Two rules: