![]() ![]() You should see text in the blue box from GeekTool: If you do that, the path should be “/Users/YourName/Documents/new.command”. I’d recommend putting it in your home folder, possibly in Documents. Now in the “Command” text box put the path to the script. Click “New Entry” and then choose “Shell” from the drop-down menu: Now install GeekTool, and open it in System Preferences. Hit enter, type your password, and that’s it. Open a terminal and type “sudo chmod +x” and drag the file into the window (or enter the path manually). First, rename the shell script as “mand”. To get it on your desktop, you’ll need to download GeekTool, and then the shell script from Novak (it’s the one entitled “news.sh”). That means you can configure GeekTool to embed the output from Novak’s script on your desktop, like so: GeekTool is a preference pane for embedding images, system logs, and output from Unix commands. By itself, not very useful unless you love the terminal (like I do). That’s why Apple has such a fiercely loyal following.A man by the name of Rodolfo Novak has created a shell script that parses RSS feeds and generates excerpts for the last few entries. I wouldn’t have thought that such a simple change in layout would make such a difference, but it does. I haven’t noticed any new functionality, but the presentation of the options is much better. Let me say one good word about iTunes: I think the changes made in iTunes 7 for handling iPods are very well done. I re-deleted the episodes maybe they’re really gone this time. I suppose there’s some value in all those “Are you sure you want to do this?” dialog boxes, but I can’t see why anyone would want to keep a file on disk but not list it in iTunes. The desire of iTunes to save me from myself had the effect of doing exactly the opposite of what I wanted. No doubt I had given the wrong answer to one of those questions iTunes is always asking me when I delete or rearrange things. One surprise I had after importing was that many podcast episodes I thought I’d thrown away-and which had not been showing up in the list of episodes on the mini-suddenly appeared. (If I’d remembered that some of my smart playlists were based on my ratings I might not have been so cavalier about trashing those files.) This lost me my playlists, which were easy enough to recover, and my song ratings, which were not. I thought about Googling for a solution, but decided it would be faster and easier to just throw away those two files and import all the music. The problem with this was that the iTunes Library and iTunes Music Library.xml files still thought the music was on the external disk so iTunes tried to go to the now-disconnected disk to get the MP3 data. When I first started iTunes, I opened its Preferences and made sure it was looking in the right place for the music files. So I connected the external disk to the iMac and copied its iTunes Music folder over to ~/Music/iTunes/. Since the music wasn’t on the mini’s internal disk, it didn’t come over during setup. The problem stemmed from the mini’s small (80 GB) hard disk, which had forced me to keep its music library on an external hard disk, a hard disk I wasn’t going to use on the new iMac. The only problem was iTunes, which shouldn’t have surprised me as iTunes and I have a difficult relationship. I had to reestablish the Bluetooth connection to my cell phone-the article had told me I would-but after that iSync worked fine. All the settings, bookmarks, cookies, passwords, messages, alarms, etc. Safari, Mail, iCal, and Address Book started up perfectly. When the setup was done, the iMac’s desktop looked just like the mini’s had-only much bigger, of course-the first thing I did after setup was reposition my GeekTool items to put them down at the bottom of the new screen). Before starting I read a little bit about how the Migration Assistant would work, so I was ready with a FireWire cable to hook up the mini and transfer its settings. The setup of the new iMac went very well. It’s on its way to becoming a single-purpose server, a job it will handle with ease. The experiment was a success, but the mini started to feel a little underpowered as I expanded the number of programs I used regularly and simultaneously. The mini was sort of a test to see if I could use a Mac for work again after about 8 years of Linux. It’s replacing the Mac mini I’ve been using since April of last year. Last Friday, I set up my new 24-inch iMac at work. ![]()
1 Comment
|
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |