OS X disables the ability to take screenshots when a DVD is playing. With the regular key commands, at least. It still works from the terminal. I wrote a little script that takes a screenshot and advances the DVD one frame.

Another day, another keynote. Phil Schiller told the crowd at this week's WWDC that Macs are not overpriced because a Mac Pro costs over $1,000 less than a comparable Dell. But...

Woo hoo! My new MacBook showed up two days early--July 3rd instead of July 5th. Here's my notes on setup (hardwre and software) and other observations.

Boot Camp is very cool, as is Parallels, but tech writers crack me up.

Here's a short tutorial of how to format video clips for some cell phones. Specifically, this covers how to make a very low quality movie that will play on phones like my Nokia 6820.

A few days after SGI was delisted, I stumbled across an old (1994) article about SGI while I was poking around in one of my favorite places, the Wired archive.

I've got an ugly-but-it-works approach to fighting spam.

Update: this works. Perfectly. I haven't had a single piece of comment spam since implementing it. Of course, if spammers decide to start creating comment spam with less than three URLs, I'm hosed, but until then, I'm fine. Almost by definition, they won't. Having three links instead of twenty seems to be not worth it.

OS X made a big improvement to some of their command line utilities in OS X 10.4 Tiger. CP, MV, TAR, and RSYNC can handle multipart Mac files with no problem. Read on for an awesome way to back up your files.

I heard about this a loooong time ago and finally got around to reading it. The first chapter is thoroughly entertaining and I expect the rest are just as good. It's a story about a Mac technician in New York who helps the police solve a murder. I'm not sure how long it will be or when it will be finished but it is free and available here.

I spend a lot of time SSHing to various boxes. This handy little script will set the Terminal to a certain color when I start a session and set it back to white when I'm done. There's nothing worse than being on one box and thinking you're on another. Also, this makes the minimized icons colorful.