To get rid of the hidden .spotlight folder on removable volumes like flash drives, cd to the volume and then:
touch .metadata_never_index
This tip compliments of Cro Magnon on the Ars technica Mac forum, and Mac OS X Hints, from whence it came.
Sometimes when doing development work, or for some other particular workflows, I like to be able to set up web pages/sites/whatever in the Sitesfolder on my Mac. Accessing that material becomes as easy as typing http://localhost/whatever/ into my browser. Making material in the ~/Sites viewable is as easy as navigating to System Preferences and turning on Web Sharing, which starts up apached. But what if you don’t want everyone to share your web? Here’s the file I created in /etc/apache2/users as userhome.conf:
<Directory "/Users/userhome/Sites/">
Options Indexes MultiViews
AllowOverride None
# Order allow,deny
# Allow from all
Allow from 10.0.1.195
</Directory>
Obviously userhome is the short name that you use that is also the name of your home directory — often called $HOME by better geeks than me, but I was afraid if I typed that above, someone would actually use it.
A tip of the cap to Apple for making it so easy to do by following this knowledge base article.
I spent part of my time with the flu trying to figure out how to convert a collection of old Word documents into Markdown-fomatted plain text files. I determined that textutil is close to useless in this regard because it does not maintain headings, instead preferring to collapse headings into a styled paragraph. To get to HTML, then, I will need to use Word itself, which means AppleScript or Automator. I need to first open a document, then save it as HTML.
Microsoft’s Site for Mac Developers is here.
UPDATE: It looks like Microsoft does have an Automator Workflow that does what I want, but the bundle of workflows does not come with the Student and Teacher Edition. Thanks, MBU!
Here’s a guy who’s written a book and released some podcasts on automating Office.
Pinching in iPhoto’s Map View can be enabled by opening a Terminal window and typing the following:
defaults write com.apple.iphoto MapScrollWheel -bool YES
