Throughout the day I find myself typing the same things over and over when responding to people. Because of this I have been looking for ways to spend less time when doing so, since I type the same thing over and over, I initially tried TextExpander which worked great for testing but just seemed like it was missing something. Yesterday I came across DashExpander, within a matter of minutes I knew this was better and I instantly made the switch.
DashExpander has quite a few perks, first off its a lot cheaper than TextExpander … at least right now it is (They are running a sale if you decide to purchase). As you would expect it comes with what seem to be the standard set of features which I am not going to get into since if you are looking at this type of software you already have an idea of what it does and how it does it. The first feature that I will mention is the ability auto insert information that is currently in your clipboard right into the macro. Giving the user the ability to do this saves a few keystrokes if you have macros that require you to paste some details into them. The other really neat feature is the ability to add variables to the macros, this is really cool as it pops up a heads up display that lets you fill in the blanks before the macro is inserted. I am still playing with DashExpander and think that it was a great purchase given the two features I mentioned.
Archives For os-x
I have been using OS X Mountain Lion Preview 4 for a while now, actually just upgraded to the GM build. Figured I should finally publish this post. The install was flawless much like installing Lion was directly from the App store.
Once installed it seemed to be a bit more snappy than Lion was, which is nice seeing that I personally feel on my Macbook Pro that Lion was a step up in speed from the previous OS as well.
A few things I noticed is that X11 is no longer included with this build, instead you have to use XQuartz which is no biggie. Info on this can be found at their wiki and the newest XQuartz that was available when I did the install was X112.7.2 – XQuartz 2.7.2.
One thing that was not really clear during the install was getting my Twitter account setup within Mountain Lion. I found the following information on how to set up my Twitter account within Mountain Lion here.
Once you have installed Mountain Lion you might notice installing 3rd party programs that were downloaded outside of the App store wont install. Its a little annoying but it does help with the security of the operating system, especially for new users. On the other hand for power users and others that need applications found outside of the apps store you need to disable Gatekeeper. I came across the following article that detailed out the steps of doing so, its actually quite painless.
My only gripe so far with Mountain Lion is the notification center, while I love the idea of it I hate that its not very configurable. I love Growl and have it themed just to my liking etc, you just dont have that ability with the Notification center. The Notification centeris either just on or off, I hope that some tweaks come out to adjust the overall look of the popups or that Apple comes out with a Growl type preferences pane for the notification center.
So Google Chrome has recently stopped playing nicely with Little Snitch, mainly because there is an issue with Chrome that it creates a temp file to check for updates every X hours. Since its making a new temp file for some reason it sets off Little Snitch, which is quite annoying.
Entering the following code into your terminal will make it check once a week rather than every few hours:
| 1 | defaults write com.google.Keystone.Agent checkInterval 604800 |
Hopefully one of the next version of Chrome they will address this, as it is very annoying having to click allow/deny every X hours.
Recently I was in search of some ways to speed up my SSH connections as I spend a lot of my days within the terminal. I came across this handy little gem which can help you connect faster to a server that you already have a connection to. There is a feature within OpenSSH called connection sharing and its really easy to enable, and requires no edits to the server.
To enable OpenSSH connection sharing, edit your SSH config file:
| 1 | ~/.ssh/config |
Add the following lines of code to it:
| 1 2 | ControlMaster auto ControlPath /tmp/ssh_mux_%h_%p_%r |
Once you have made the modification to the SSH config file, disconnect from the current connection and for good measure close out of your terminal. Now you can open up your terminal and connect to a server, open up a new tab and connect to the same server. The new connection should connect much quicker than the first one.
