Although DarkAdapted can be used control individual gamma levels to create a custom mix of red, green, and blue, I usually gang the sliders, move change the backlight of the screen to it’s next to lowest setting (not off), and slide the slider group until it is comfortable.

The farther you dim the screen, the more battery life your MacBook will yield. It’s a win-win!

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While some people see April’s Fool’s Day as a childish way to spend your April 1st playing practical jokes on your peers, the internet has changed everything. The lighthearted have now jumped on the April Fool’s Day bandwagon and use the day to gain laughs and increased site traffic. Google, an innovative company, has previously had jokes such as “Gmail Paper“, and I’m sure that Google’s recent announcement of their name change to “Topeka” is just following suit. I’m not sure I’d go Topeka something, but you can head on over to Topeka and try it yourself.

I keep meticulous records of everything that I do, which includes all files that I accumulate at Clemson. When I’m without my laptop and want to look at a PDF article from a class, I’m at a loss to read it unless it has been posted on BlackBoard (the class management system in use at Clemson). I don’t want to move my entire organized Clemson folder into the Dropbox folder, but unless I do this, how can sync my files? Previously thought impossible, I’ve learned that this word does not exist.

The answer is symbolic links.

Similar to a shortcut, a symbolic link will sync all of the files in the linked folder as if it were in the Dropbox folder itself. This opens up a world of possibilities for syncing, accessing, and sharing files with multiple users across the internet on multiple platforms.

To create a symbolic link in MacOSX, open up Terminal and use the ln command, for example:

ln -s /path/to/folder/name_desired_folder/ ~/Dropbox/desired-folder

If you find that venturing into the Terminal is a bit too hard to make a Symlink, there’s a great tool that streamlines the process called SymbolicLinker, by Nick Zitzmann. This provides a contextual menu (for Leopard and below) or a software service (for Snow Leopard) that allows the user to create symbolic links to files without ever leaving the Finder.

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In the first days after the iPad’s announcement, some media and many online commenters criticized the name “iPad”, noting its similarity to “pad”, the common name for a sanitary napkin. Shortly after the launch announcement, the hashtag “iTampon” became #1 on Twitter.

The only thing we’ll have to worry about is whether iffy Wifi coverage be called iSpotting…

Others noted that “iPad” sounds like “iPod” in various regional accents, including Bostonian and the Irish accent. That’s not surprising, considering it’s just an oversized iPod.

All things considered, the iMat is definitely a better investment than the iPad. I’ll wait until 2014 for that to come out. Huzzah! Giant Dance Dance Revolution! Ugh iNeed an Advil.

Go to System Preferences => Spotlight, and under the Privacy tab, click the plus button and then choose the user/Library/ directory to be excluded form the search and indexing functions.

Immediately after you’ll notice a remarkable improvement in speed, and that goes for the whole system since lots of apps write temporary files to that directory and Spotlight is always working on indexing those. No mortal need to know the content of those files, anyway, so off ye go!

If you haven’t guessed already, I’m really into computers. I love having the latest, greatest product, but I LOVE my MacBook Pro (BTW, I will NEVER own an iPad). Not only is Snow Leopard infinitely better than Windows, but the hardware is incredible, too.

One thing I’ve noticed, however, is that the OSX dock doesn’t give you an option to add a spacer to organize your program. After scouring the internet (and not willing to install another program [though this is as simple as dragging it into the Applications folder]), I found a snippet of code that will allow you to do just what I wanted.

Step 1: Fire up Terminal.
Step 2: Paste the following code and press [ENTER].

defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array-add '{"tile-type" = "spacer-tile";}'

Step 3: Run a killall Dock" to restart the dock.

Now you should see a space at the end of the last permanently visible program. You can drag this to whatever space in the dock you would like. To add more spacers, just repeat steps 2 and 3! You can see an example of my dock on the left side of the screen. I have my dock permanently visible on the left, expanded to full height (which automatically adjusts as new programs are run), and with a transparent background.

Step 1: Download this file.

Step 2: Once you download the utility, issue this command from a shell prompt in the directory where you downloaded the file:

sudo cp bchunk /usr/bin/

Step 3: To convert a .bin/.cue pair to a .iso, you can issue this command:

bchunk myinputfile.bin myinputfile.cue myoutputfile

And that’s it!