mark++

Just a few minutes ago I was sitting in bed, shuffling 3 hours of The Beatles across AirTunes when suddenly iChat pops up with a video chat request. It was my wife, who is off visiting her family.

It wasn’t until after the chat session ended that I realized that iChat had automatically paused/resumed iTunes. Wow, Apple. Just…wow.

I know the Apple ecosystem is a walled-garden of sorts, but damn — is it ever nice in here.

Thanks to this MacUser article and the just-released Safari 3.1, I finally have the tab behavior I want and expect. Now when I hit the “V” hot key in Google Reader, the article opens up in a new tab just like Firefox. Awesome!

To try this yourself, merely cast the following spell and restart Safari:

defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool true


Update: It seems that I don’t have the behavior I expect after all. New links indeed open in a new tab, but a foreground tab. I often “queue up” a bunch of pages to read, so I prefer to open all my links in background tabs. Doh.

The latest security update from Apple broke ssh for me and, apparently, many others:

mark@dijkstra:~$ ssh
Bus error

Update:
Looks like this is due to an incompatibility with Instant Hijack from Rogue Amoeba. Disabling this software restores ssh functionality. Thanks to Adrian for pointing this out.

Update #2:
As if there was any doubt that Rogue Amoeba was awesome, they have already fixed this in AirFoil 3.1.3. Quoting the site:

Updated Instant Hijack to 2.0.3 - fixes a crash in ssh and related commands when using Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) with Apple Security Update 2008-002

Update #3:
Full details on the fix are available on Rogue Amoeba’s blog here. Thanks for the link, Paul.

A guest-post courtesy of my buddy Rob, who has been a Mac guy since birth:

The Staedtler Mars Plastic Eraser. So special. Engineered in Germany and hopefully not assembled in Mexico like the VWs.

You may ask, why is this eraser so special? Legend says, and the internet says, this eraser may be used to remove the brown stains on a white MacBook’s wrist area with just a few quick flicks of the wrist with the Staedtler in hand. Are your hands excessively sweaty? Save that debate for another day because it makes no difference to the Staedtler. Do some gardening, then some computing. Staedtler eats it up. Watch out for eraser offspring though. They could easily take refuge in your MacBook through the spaces under your keyboard or other various holes.

Are you the live fast, die young type? Put your Mac to sleep quicker by disabling Safe Sleep:

$ sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0
$ sudo nvram "use-nvramrc?"=false
$ sudo rm -P /var/vm/sleepimage


If you change your mind:

$ sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 3
$ sudo nvram "use-nvramrc?"=true


Update 3/22/08: I’ve started using SmartSleep instead of this hack. Check it out. It’s free.