WozWas

Hey folks, time for a few Mac tips, one old and one new and both from MacOSXHints.com.  And of course, the above image of Chewbacca fighting Nazi’s while riding a squirrel…bow before his glory!

First the oldie:

Freeeeeeddddooommm…for Dashboard Widgets.

You know those awesome Dashboard widgets, so niche and fun and useful (they’re going a bit by the wayside, but some of us still love them), well it turns out you can have them on your Desktop too!  

The tip is designed to used by developers for testing, but it’s available to you now, just because you’re special.  The jist is, you run a simple Terminal command, then restart the Dock, and voila!

Get the full scoop and instructions here.

Once it’s done, just open Dashboard, select a widget, and close Dashboard.  Then you’re free to drag them around your Desktop.  My favorite use of this is the Mac OS Server widget, which gives me vital status information.  Now I just keep it on the Desktop, rather than having to open the Dashboard.

Now the new(ish) tip:

Quickly!  To the VNC!

You’ve got shortcuts to all your favorite stuff: folders, applications, websites, even servers.  So why not to your prime VNC locales?  This tip shows you the simple process for creating .vncloc (short for VNC location) files.  It’s easy, and once you’re done, you can drag them anywhere (your Desktop, Dock, Finder Sidebar, etc.).

Get all the goods on it here.

That’s all for now, enjoy!  Comments, Questions, Suggestions?  I’m here to help and always looking for feedback!

I’ve been writing a script to parse some information from Terminal Man pages, but found that a basic output command produced duplicate letters, and other odd formatting errors.  I couldn’t seem to find any reason for the error, but happened upon the following solution.

Simply putting a col -b command after calling up the man page removed any formatting errors, and gave me a clean block of text to work with.  The col command basically cleans up line feed output, making sure that all the information is in the right order, and doesn’t contain unnecessary information.

So now, to get a sweet bit of Unix command definition into a variable, I simply set the following:

set manPage to (do shell script “man ” & cmd & ” | col -b”)

“cmd” is the variable assigned to whatever command the user wants to input.

Thanks to Erics Sadun over at TUAW for the tip, which you can read in full here.