Simo Virokannas

Writings and ramblings

Category: OSX

  • Poor man’s photo backup, part I

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    Simo
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    A photo library, around 100 000 photos, not really professional but nice-to-have photos. Some of them are blurry, unfocused, or just plain horrible photographs. No time to browse through everything and only keep the really good ones. Aging hard drives and you badly need a backup, but 300 GB is just too expensive to store in…

  • Create ringtones from YouTube

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    Simo
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    Most of the methods online for creating ringtones from YouTube seem to involve shady websites with ads and registering accounts, if they even happen to work. So here’s a simple workflow for choosing what you want and creating a ringtone in a matter of minutes. All of this assumes you have a Mac, if you…

  • Emoji nonsense

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    Short history of Emoji characters: Many smartphone manufacturers released Emoji first only for Japanese products as a keyboard layout. Later they became popular elsewhere as a nicer replacement for the traditional :-) or :) smileys. Now, for some reason, first people started pushing these apps for activating Emoji on iPhones, as the layout was hidden…

  • Xcode, NSOpenGLView, internal crash

    Xcode, NSOpenGLView, internal crash

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    Simo
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    I’ve been encountering a frequent problem with Xcode interface builder with NSOpenGLViews – whenever you add one, connect it to a class, and touch something, interface builder starts crashing like mad. First, you try to save everything hitting continue, then you realize saving, restarting, loading, deleting the control, creating it again, nothing helps. You just…

  • Dashcode, part II

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    After using Dashcode for almost a year now, this is the bottom line: “Don’t make any big projects with it.” – A random Dashcode user After a while, when the project gets bigger, you’ll have some 20+ Javascript files, thousands of lines of code, several data sources (which are great, btw), it gets really slow.…

  • MacRuby and (too) persistent objects

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    If you’re starting with MacRuby and Xcode, you might stumble upon the same problem I did: If you deploy the project even once, those precompiled ruby object files (.rbo) stick to the deployment directory and you have to clean it up each time before testing any new code. Here’s a simple script you can put…

  • Xcode 4.0.2 and 4.1 distributed building

    Xcode 4.0.2 and 4.1 distributed building

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    Simo
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    For some reason, the distributed building system in Xcode 4.x seems to be broken. You can search for distcc servers in your network, define them, turn on distributed building, but still it does everything on localhost. If you take a closer look at the build log, it says: setenv DISTCC_HOSTS localhost ..so can’t expect much…

  • OSX Wine Keyboard layout

    OSX Wine Keyboard layout

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    Simo
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    This one applies at least to the OSX version of WINE. One good frontend is PlayOnMac, which, despite the name, also runs other software than just games. It is similar to WineBottler in many ways. Now on a Mac, usually your locale is an UTF-8 one. This doesn’t go well with Windows software. So here’s…