bananas on toast

So I am going to link out from a few holiday away messages with an overview of my holiday plans to ensure that when I miss calls/emails that people know that I am not just ignoring them, but I thought I would post it here to link to. Feel free to comment, but also expect updates every single day from now until I return on the 12th of January!

Let’s hope that makes it to the new year!

My holiday Itinerary

21st December – 23rd December
In Sydney, working at BuzzNumbers and finishing off some final things around the house!

23rd December – 26th December
In Dubbo, NSW visiting my folks and my brother. Been looking forward to a short visit home, but it will be all too short.

27th December
Arrive in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam. Quick check in and sleep before heading to Phu Quoc, Vietnam.

28th December – 30th December
In Phu Quoc sipping on drinks, taking in the sun and relaxing. The only quiet part of the holiday break.

31st December – 2nd January
Back to Ho Chi Minh for New Years Eve and loads of sight seeing and shopping.

3rd January – 10th January
Then up to Hanoi for the remainder of our trip with treks out to Sapa and Halong Bay.

11th January
Travel, lots of travel.

12th January
Back on deck in Sydney and back to work!

I’m not entirely sure if this post makes me feel warm and fuzzy or terrified. Sure it’s great that we live in the world we live in, but there are some scary facts in there.

As those who know me very well will attest, I have a very specific taste in music that doesn’t generally appeal to a lot of people. Furthermore, even though I love my tunes, I totally know that I couldn’t play my music at a party and get the room pumping.

So, I am asking the wider community to help me expand my horizons, and hopefully make my birthday party suck less, by letting me know your favourite party song or songs.

The rules:

1. You can put 1 or a hundred songs, but please choose songs rather than entire albums.
2. Please choose songs that you like listening to at parties with friends and that get you in a party mood, not just your favourite songs. This might be the same thing for some, but for most it’s slightly different to their normal taste in music.

Also, please retweet by clicking here and helping me get a larger response!

If you’re like me and you have accumulated several email addresses over the years, but are wishing to use one email address for everything, here are some Terminal commands that will come in useful. Sure you could write some AppleScript if you were inclined, but save yourself the time and get your hands dirty in some Terminal.

First, to set a reply-to email address:
defaults write com.apple.mail UserHeaders '{"Reply-To" = "First Last <first.last@domain.com>"; }'

Second, permanently change the from email address:
defaults write com.apple.mail UserHeaders '{"From" = "First Last <first.last@domain.com>"; }'

Third, set a BCC email address for archiving and message stores:
defaults write com.apple.mail UserHeaders '{"Bcc" = "Email Archive <email.archive@domain.com>"; }'

And, lastly, do it all in one sexy command:
defaults write com.apple.mail UserHeaders '{"Reply-To" = "First Last <first.last@domain.com>"; "From" = "First Last <first.last@domain.com>";"Bcc" = "Email Archive <email.archive@domain.com>"; }'

The next time you’re looking for an OS X application, don’t ask #lazyweb on Twitter, but instead install the latest must-have for any Mac user, Bodega.

From the website:

We’ve all been there – hunting for that one killer app that would make life so much easier. If only it existed. If only we could find it. With Bodega, you don’t have to spend your time hunting for software – it’s your one-stop for all your software needs.

Bodega really does look like an app to contend with, and once more developers have registered their applications and their database grows it’s usefulness will grow also.

Sick of seeing the same bootscreen every single day? Miss your “Happy Mac” bootscreen of old. Use BootXChanger to give your bootscreen a new look!

When it comes to form validation, it is always hard to have a versatile solution for every possible situation. Figuring out how to display errors is not a simple task and cannot be taken lightly. This script is an attempt to solve this problem.

Downdload Source Code | View Demo

So you’ve probably seen a bit of talk about SHTBOX (Hashtag / Twitter) on Twitter and that is more than likely why you are here. So what is it? Simply put it’s a weekly, informal Twitter meetup, with the idea of taking some of the online friendships out in the real world.

It is not a STUB or any other form of prior meetup and also doesn’t aim to “compete” with any of these events. It is intended to be more regular and less formal than any of the other meetups, with a focus of socialising with likeminded people.

Why SHTBOX? Because it’s funny and keeps with the theme of being informal.
When? Every Friday at 5:30pm.
Where? The Clock Hotel, Surry Hills [MAP]
RSVP? No need, just turn up.

Ever been annoyed at how expensive PC/Mac controllers are, just to find that when compared to console controllers they come up as cheap and inferior? To get around this, simply modify your Classic X-Box controller to work with your PC/Mac.

This guide provides simple, step-by-step instructions to rewiring your controller that even a beginner can follow. There are two primary aims of this particular tutorial:

1. Mod your controller to work with your PC or Mac
2. Ensure you aren’t throwing money away and the controller will still work with your X-Box

Note: Please make sure you follow each step closely. It is important because in some areas there are warnings which if overlooked could completely ruin your day.

• 

  Heatshrink, USB Extension cable, X-Box controller, USB Extension cable, Cutting tools, Electrical tape.

• 

  Cut both ends of the USB extension cable off about 4″ / 10cm from each end.

• 

  Remove the outer rubber casing from the cable by cutting it with your smaller blade. Expose approximately 1/2″ – 1″ (1-2cm approx) from the end.

• 

  Inside the cable will be some highly annoying shielding to protect the cable, some is silver foil and the other is silver wire. Simply discard of all of this.

• 

  Now expose a short piece of wire from the end of each of wire. Be careful, some of the wires are quite fine and will break easily.

• 

  Discard the yellow wire from the X-Box Controller, it’s only necessary for some of the X-Box light guns.

• 

  Pair your cables up. The FEMALE USB matches up with the X-Box end of the cable and the MALE USB matches up with the controller end.

• 

  This is reasonably obvious. The female end of the USB extension cable goes with the X-Box end of the cable. The reason for this is that we want the male end attached to the controller in order to plug it into your PC/Mac.

• 

  Cut off approximately 3″ / 7.5cm of heat shrink, enough to cover all of the exposed wire.

• 

  Put the heat shrink over the cable BEFORE joining the wires or else you won’t be able to get it on. I made this mistake once and it was highly annoying.

• 

  Twist the wires together at the end. Black to black, red to red, green to green and, amazingly enough, white to white.

• 

  Place a tiny amount of tape over each of the twisted pairs to ensure that none of the wires can touch each other.

• 

  Push your heatshrink down so that it is covering the exposed wire. DO NOT bond the heatshrink until you’ve tested the cables are working.

• 

  The male end gets attached to the controller in order to be able to be plugged into the PC/Mac. Repeat steps 9 – 13.

• 

  Test your cables. Use the controller with your X-Box/PC/Mac in order to confirm everything is right. On OSX use Xbox HID Driver for Mac OS X and for Windows XP use XBCD.

• 

  Finally, blast the heatshrink with a hairdryer or use a cigarette lighter to bond the heatshrink with the exposed pieces. Suddenly you have the final product ready to go.

What you should be left with now is a controller that can work with any and all of your devices. This will save you money on shelling out for expensive PC/Mac controllers, giving you a much better quality gaming experience.

I have tried this controller extensively with several Mac games, several emulators on Mac and various other cool stuff and have had no issues at all.

Disclaimer If you break anything along the way, it is so totally not my fault. I am really sorry if the instructions weren’t simple enough, but I am pretty confident they are and no one should run into any issues.

Australian Film Syndicate are giving away free tickets to The Combination in Brisbane and Melbourne (maximum 50 to give away in each city.

Both screenings on February 18th at 6:30pm at The Brisbane Myer Centre and The Melbourne Central.

For Brisbane e-mail tickets_brisbane@bananasontoast.org
For Melbourne e-mail tickets_melbourne@bananasontoast.org

One of the hardest things about blogging and reading blogs is trying hard not to spend time writing rubbish content, but even more importantly, reading rubbish content. Over the years I have tried a gamut of different RSS readers, both online and offline, and I have also subscribed to many, many blogs most of which I no longer read for one reason or another.

So when I come across a blog that seems particularly inspired and has some content worth sharing, I am going to take the time to make recommendations. Recently, I’ve started reading a very strong blog called TechMiso, a blog that I believe I really should share. Like any technology blog there is an amount of it that I skim over, but the articles I find interesting to my own technology interests are well written, informed and most importantly, interesting.

TechMiso is the brain child of Rich Chuckrey, who I admittedly don’t know very well, and Scott Jarkoff, someone who I met during my time as an admin at deviantART and have looked up to as a writer and blogger for quite some time.

While the blog is in it’s infancy, so far I have read quite a few interesting articles specifically focusing on technology issues that matter today. If you’re looking for another blog to add to your Google Reader account, this is one to watch and I would recommend checking it out!

One of the coolest things about owning a Mac is using the powerful underlying Linux tools available in a termal. If you’re new to Mac and/or Linux, I strongly recommend if you want to get the most out of your operating system you spend some time learning what is under the hood.

Recently I’ve done some searching around for some ideas on utilizing my iDisk storage a little more and unearthed the usage of rsync to automatically synchronize between my Documents folder and my iDisk/Documents folder.

Disclaimer: You can do this by automatically syncing using the GUI tools, however this gives little control over exactly what is synchronized, so I have written this tutorial.

Continue reading ‘Automatically sync your documents to iDisk with rsync’

If you have a Harmony remote and you’re looking to control your iPod Universal Dock, you’ll find it a bit tricky to find the settings. After many hours of searching I found the settings in the following location:

Digital Music Server » Apple » » “Apple Universal Dock”

Go forth!

With everything happening in today’s browser market one can’t wonder why all players seem to be missing one major hitpoint with all their attempts to gain market share. In my opinion there is one large component that is being missed by browsers today and it should be reasonable easy to develop. What I’m talking about is cross-platform, cloud-based integration. I’ll explain as I go.

Firstly let me make my point by explaining my current browser setup. At home I run a Mac and at work I use a PC. On both I have Firefox as my browser of choice, but due to the necessity of my work CRM I also use Internet Explorer 6/7 on both. I use several plugins to try and sync as best I can between the computers, but inevitably it’s all just a fix. Okay, so now I will try and make my point.

Google released Chrome today which has some interesting features. Tighter integration to applications is great, but is it enough to win the browser war? Better security is always a good thing, but in a market where most computer users don’t even know which anti-virus they’re running, does it really matter? In fact, most of the features are aimed at techies and not the people who actually need enhanced functionality from an out-of-the-box browser.

Imagine a browser that worked like this… You launch the application and you’re greeted with a login screen. You enter a username and password and the browser works it’s magic; it downloads your bookmarks, it loads your plugins, it downloads your saved passwords, it downloads your form information, and it also loads your history.

Now imagine the same thing can happen on any computer you’re using, with the same features and plugins, even if you’ve never used that computer before. Simple huh? How easy would your life be, honestly?

So many plugins have tried to make this happen, but it’s never truly been seamless and it’s never been 100%, especially when it turns to cross-platform. This would be, as Tolkien would say, “One Browser to rule them all, One Browser to bind them!” Think about it.

UNetbootin makes simple, portable USB thumbdrive Linux installations.

Yesterday at work I had the pleasure of sitting with the managing director and various interested parties at work to discuss the future of technology. One of the really interesting parts of this discussion was the fact that I was constantly able to speak of the technical aspects and our MD would always bring that back to business realities.

During the meeting we watched an amazing video called Shift Happens and also Shift Happens 2.0 which raised a lot of interesting points about globalisation. The video is very US-centric, but realising the implications on Australia is honestly quite eye opening.

If you haven’t seen these videos already, I strongly suggest watching them. If you’re in a business that is potentially effected by the statements, I even more strongly recommend considering what this means to you and how this will effect your life. Because it will effect your life.

In a world of outsourcing, our lives change daily and the effects of growing economies such as India and China are effecting our lives all the time.

Ask yourself…

• Can I be replaced by someone overseas?
• Am I costing my company money, or making my company money?
• Are there necessarily advantages of having me sit in my seat in Sydney?

TalentBar wrote an interesting article today on the value, and declining value, of information provided by social networks such as LinkedIn. My own company, Xpand, are expert at using social networks to find information, however it can become easy for anyone (ourselves included) to get caught up in the vastness of this information. Excerpt from Time to get beyond LinkedIn:

Twenty years ago, you had to build contact information databases the old fashioned way: a ton of cold-calling. But this aspect of our business is going the way of $2 gasoline.

We have to move beyond this initial shock of so much contact data. Master the tools, but then move on – because the value of that simple data is declining every day. Remember, executive recruiters and their clients often know the five obvious potential candidates. So why do they use a recruiter?

Whether you’re in recruitment or any other industry that may require you to gather corporate information, there is a lot of evidence to suggest these tools are highly valuable, but are also losing their value. Clients now have access to our networks and are motivated to use them as cost-cutting methods to outsourcing recruitment.

Value the data you have at your fingertips, but don’t allow the vastness to confuse the fact that the data you have is useless if you do not utilise it as urgently as you would any other lead available in your network.

From MacBlog: Corsaire has just published a new whitepaper on securing Mac OS X Leopard.