The .dmg image format is great. But when you want to play nice with the Windows world, sometimes an ISO is just easier. Here is a quick set of instructions for creating ISOs from the command line using dd. A great quick reference to have.
Outlook is a professional-grade messaging tool, right? So one might be able to imagine where with the thousands of contacts people accumulate, they might get into a situation where they enter a person’s data into two separate contacts. Now, one might think that there would be an option to merge two contacts into one (I mean, the Microsoft CRM has that feature, Plaxo has that feature, heck event the not “professional” OS X Address Book has that feature built in).
But no.
There are plugins that can help you eliminate duplicates contacts, but nothing that I can find built into Outlook 2007 natively. Oh, to dream…
Found this interesting video on College Humor by way of Digg. Not your usual College Humor fodder; this describes a method for re-targetting images by removing the least relevant part. Very interesting.
UPDATE: The creator of this technology has joined Adobe. Good for him (and for the people who will get to use his technology). I really wish it wasn’t Adobe, though, their software is crappy.
While I’m on the topic of posting links to free software, here is a listing of a bunch of free graphics/design program. Everything from Illustrator alternatives to 3D modeling software. I forget if I found this on Digg or Lifehacker a few days ago.
Found a great little utility today on Lifehacker. This Mac utility just keeps your computer from going to sleep, dimming the screen, starting the screen saver, etc. Useful for when your showing pictures or non-full screen movies and such.
This reminds me, lifehacker also had a link to another mac utility that lets you combine multiple PDFs into one. Sure you could do this with Adobe bloatware, but if you like avoiding crappy products, then this might be a simple, better alternative.
If your coding C# here is a good listing of coding standards for the language.
This is really cool. 1Passwd has developed a drag and drop graphical software license key. You receive the key via email or on the web, and then drag it to your application. It avoids having you type in random letters and numbers, and the software developer can put as much information as they want in the key. I haven’t read the details of the technology, but they could be using steganography to encode information in the images. This doesn’t really change the fundamental problems of software license keys (such as forcing them to be only used on one computer), but it does make the process more user friendly.
Every so often I need to format string in .NET. For whatever reason, the printf formats always stick in my head from years ago, but I don’t use the .NET equivalents frequently enough to drill them into my head. Instead of having to Google the pages I use to refresh my memory, I’m just going to post them here. Way to use the blog as a bookmark tool…
Facebook just released a new plugin for iPhoto that allows you to tag people in pictures and export them to Facebook. The plugin is really well done, and works well. The developers at Facebook have continued to impress me with the quality of work they churn out. These are people with a cohesive vision of what they’re trying to put together. One minor quirk with the plugin, depending on a friend’s privacy settings, it appears that their name won’t appear on the tag list from iPhoto where it might actually appear in the list when you upload to Facebook via the website. If you type in the name correctly, however, it will pick up the tag upon export, though.
To follow up on my previous post, HawkWings.net is a site that’s full of great information about the Apple Mail client. Usability improvements, fun add-ins, and all sorts of other stuff, it’s a really great resource if your on the Mac. The speed up tip I’m mentioned previously has definitely helped make my mail app more zippy. Especially when starting the program.