OS X
wg:Staging websites on Mac OS X
Great Deals on Macs and Mac Stuff
One of the things I love most about the Net is the growth of useful communities. One such community is dealmac, a site which provides the latest information on the best prices for Macintosh related items. These prices are often submitted by community members, who happened to stumble upon a good deal, and want to spread the word.
The site provides a wealth of tools as well, including e-mail alerts tailored to your needs, and RSS feeds of the latest products added to the site.
Change File Associations in OS X
Update: I’ve revised the directions slightly to show the difference between 10.3 & 10.4, plus I’ve added a screen shot.
Just a quick note to document how to change which applications are used to open specific file types.
All you have to do, is select a file in the Finder and ‘Get Information’ (cmd + i or right-click > Get Info or cmd + click > Get Info) for it. Then toggle the ‘Open with…’ option and choose the proper application.
To make sure that every file of that type (every php file for example) uses the new application, make sure you choose that option below the application drop down box (it may be grayed out until you’ve chosen an alternate application from the current default:
10.3: “The generic application for documents of this type”
10.4: “Use this application to open all documents like this.” > Click the Change All button.
Source: macosxhints – Changing application/file associations
OS X Broken Drag and Drop
Sarah’s Mac recently decided that it wasn’t going to allow her to drag icons around her desktop or use the cursor to move objects within Adobe Illustrator. After a good bit of searching via Google, and browsing through Mac OS X Hints, I determined that the problem was due to the fact that coreservicesd, the process responsible for dragging and dropping, wasn’t starting when the computer booted up. So, after I tried a ton of different possible solutions, none of which worked, I finally came across the article OS X Odyssey 431 – More Nickling And Diming From Apple and Checking Out XDock Dock Utility which provided these instructions from MacFixIt reader Kevin Grant that actually solved the problem:
I have discovered the cause in my case: ‘coreservicesd’ never starts, and this might happen if the file /var/run/StartupItems/coreserviced.run already exists. This is an empty placeholder file, which apparently (if coreservicesd crashes) never gets removed.
After deleting the placeholder file, we rebooted the Mac and were pleased to find that drag and drop works again. An easy solution that was hard to find.
Transfer Files Between Macs Using FireWire
Just a quick note to myself documenting a handy tip Eric Meyer posted to his site: FireWire Transfer. Apparently this is known as “Target Disk Mode“.