I wanted to know what was the last date of the preceding month to now… regardless of when now is… The UNIX/Linux cal command came to the rescue: cal -3 | cut -c1-16 | grep -v “^ *$” | tail -1 | sed -e ‘s/^..* \([23][0-9]\)/\1/’ It turns out you need a fairly modern version [...]
Clearly I have been a little overwhelmed by life lately, and that has been both good and bad… Trivial little updates and one liners are so easy on that mixed blessing/curse of Facebook that I am afraid I have neglected more thoughtful writing here. I will try to catch up a little for those who [...]
I noticed a pretty nifty feature of the Airport Utility app on my iOS 5.0.1 based iPad. When I have multiple Apple branded Airport devices wired to the same network, they appear side by side on the Airport Utility’s topology map: When I have one Airport device daisy chained off another, both setting up private [...]
Tagged Airport Utiity, iOS, ipad, networksI am replacing (finally) my venerable Palm Tungsten C and Palm Desktop Software on my Macs with Evernote… and it may replace some other things too – initial impression is: amazing! The driver to get off Palm Desktop (which I admit to using less and less lately) is that it is a PowerPC app on [...]
Tagged cloud, Evernote, Lion, Palm DesktopThis is an interesting trend, and with the availability of thin clients and server hosted desktops (eg: VMware OpenView) it is possible to let employees use their own laptops yet never have any corporate data on them, as the data can stay on the desktop server in the data center. More Offices Let Workers Choose [...]
Tagged Bring Your Own Device Policy, IT, Thin Client, Virtual DesktopFor those of you with Numbers ’09 (usually part of iWork ’09) who want the functionality of Excel Pivot-Tables in your Numbers spreadsheets, check out Table Categories in Numbers: MacMost Now 478: Pivot Tables in iWork 09 Numbers Gary has perhaps the best layman’s explanation of Pivot Tables and how you can effectively accomplish the [...]
Tagged Excel, Numbers, Pivot-Tables, spreadsheets, Table CategoriesA beloved relative recently asked me for help setting up their new iPad 2, and I responded initially with a long email that detailed how to first update iTunes on their Mac and then plug in and update the iPad itself. I went on to have them grab three free apps and a free book [...]
Tagged App Store, ipad, iTunes, iTunes Music StoreFound an undocumented “feature” of iCal – it is possible to get it to behave correctly by setting iCal/Preferences/General as follows: Days per week: 7 Start week on: Wednesday Scroll in week view by: Days What is interesting is that this does NOT do what you would think, it actually does The Right Thing(tm) and [...]
Tagged iCalThank you Apple and Steve Jobs for keeping Adobe Flash off my iOS devices and making it easy for me to remove it from my Mac OS X gear. The stability, security, performance, and battery life I am enjoying now were not possible on a Flash-enabled machine.
Hannes Schmidt has an excellent little write up of why Mac OS X DNS seems a little unpredictable at times when using DHCP or VPN assigned name services; this helps one understand why the results are a surprise or why dig in a terminal window delivers different results from your browser on the same host. [...]
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