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Browsing All Posts filed under »Tips & Tricks«
Drobo Saved My Day for the Third Time
A few hours ago, I went home to see one of the lights on my Drobo blinking in red color: one of my hard drives in the Drobo has died. For those who don’t know, a Drobo is an external hard drive enclosure which houses five (in my model) 3.5-inch hard drives. Drobo offers protection […]
How I Name My Printers
May 23, 2013
At home, we have two printers that I set up so the whole family can print. Their names were HP LaserJet xxx and Epson xxx, the default my OS gave them. Things were fine until my wife and kids start asking me which one is the color printer. What? Don’t they know that the Epson […]
Easy Way to Create Colorful Bash Prompt
May 23, 2013
The Problem I often want to fiddle with the bash prompt, but don’t want to deal with bash prompt escape sequences. I wish for a utility which simplify setting a bash prompt. I finally wrote that utility myself: mkprompt Install Copy mkprompt to a directory in the path. Using mkprompt The best way to show […]
Charging iPhone/iPod with iPad Adapter
August 15, 2011
When I travel, I don’t want to bring chargers for both my iPhone and iPad. So, the question is, can the iPad charger charges my iPhone without damaging it? The verdict is yes, see the following article: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4327
Squeeze Multiple Blank Lines within vim
March 10, 2011
The Problem I want to squeeze multiple blank lines into just one while editing in vim. I often receive source code which the author used multiple blank lines to separate functions. I don’t mind if functions or code block are one or two lines apart, but I have seen sources where functions are four or […]
Upgrade My Mac’s Hard Drive
March 5, 2011
My 4.5 year-old MacBook is getting slower every day due to its age against the new OS and applications. To give it a new lease in life, I replaced its 500GB hard drive with a 120GB SSD from OWC. This post discusses the upgrade process. Before the Upgrade Unwind Applications This step disconnects the applications […]
Use subst to Deal with Long Path Names
January 20, 2011
The Problem I want to shorten the paths to a directory that is buried deep in the file system. In my daily work, I often need to cd into such directory as long as: C:\projects\tests\utilities\fileutil Although Windows command line has file name completion, it is still a long and tedious process to change into and […]
OverDrive Audio Books to iTunes
May 11, 2010
I often download OverDrive Media audio books to my Mac and transfer them to my iPod via iTunes (yes, I can do that legally). Here are the steps to do that, assuming the downloaded media is in MP3 and not WMA format. Download I browse to my library’s download page, select the book I like […]
Replacing My Laptop’s Hard Drive
August 20, 2009
I purchased my MacBook in the second half of 2007 with a relatively large hard drive of 60GB. Remember, 60GB is sizable in 2007. I then replaced it with a 160GB drive and even that drive now is full. My hard drive du jour is a 500BG, which should last me a couple of months […]
View Stock Price Using Command Line
May 6, 2009
I live on command line all day, so it is convenience to perform many tasks using the command line. One of those is to check stock price: curl -s 'http://download.finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s=csco&f=l1' The above command check for the last price (with some delay) of Cisco Systems. If you want to check the price for other tickers, replace […]
May 23, 2013
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