Dragonsreach

The Apple remote is a pretty simplistic device with limited features, it does what it does nothing more , nothing less. First impressions are that it's thin , really thin , its not only the thinnest remote I've ever held in my hand , but im pretty sure its one of the thinnest things produced by Apple that I have held in my hand. How does it work? When it comes to getting it to work , all I had to do was pull it out, point it at my Mac Mini and click play , you could say that "It Just Works". If iTunes isn't open when you click play , then it will be opened to the relavent place for you. This feature however has a downside ,if you have more than one Mac in the room this thing will control both , so when I had my laptop open and used the device ,musical chaos ensued. iTunes For the home user who wants to use it for iTunes the relevance of the device is questionable ,though it is handy to quickly grab and turn down the volume or change a song, the...

Every now and then(like every 2 nano-seconds) , a user will come onto a forum and ask: "What programming language should I learn?" Not long afterwards ,somebody will whip out their snake( python ) followed by everybody's own personal favorite language. The whole process is a mess and can leave a newcomer confused. An important thing to note is that the language you start with is probably not the language you will end up using. I personally started programming by messing around in Visual Basic 6 , Got my diploma in C# and C++(half lang). I now mainly work in Objective-C , but also implement PHP services among other things. Become a language agnostic programmer Once you have learned the basics of programming in any language , learning another language is much quicker. The part that takes time when learning a new language is not really the syntax, but the libraries that are used to get specific tasks done.  Knowing a full language and most of its ...

Earlier this week Valve advertised Half-Life 2 for the Mac with the best advert I have ever seen. They took the old 1984 Mac advert and re-created it using the source engine and characters from the game. As if the awesome(albeit 35 second) entertainment wasn't enough they offered the game at $3.40 for a limited period. It was not shortly afterwards that I made my first ever purchase on Steam(its kind of strange buying a game and not getting a box with it). The game purchase actually allows you to download the OSX or Windows version of the game , depending on the platform you are logged in to .This is great , because I have a PC with some decent gaming power and my Mac Mini (which I naturally wanted to test on) and wow ,the OSX version runs pretty darn well,especially considering that my mac mini is running only an intel HD3000. The current specs of my Mac Mini, the only non standard thing here is that I installed 8GB of Transcend Memory Performance I was ...

You may have realised that when you try use ssh -Y on another Mac from Mountain Lion you get the following error : Warning: No xauth data; using fake authentication data for X11 forwarding.X11 forwarding request failed on channel 0 Fixing this error only takes some simple configuration. All you have to do is add these lines to the following files on both machines: /etc/sshd_config X11Forwarding yes XauthLocation /opt/X11/bin/xauth XauthLocation /usr/X11R6/bin/xauth /etc/ssh_config XauthLocation /opt/X11/bin/xauth XauthLocation /usr/X11R6/bin/xauth That should be all you need to get rid of the authentication error. Hope this was helpful.

Like normal , when something new comes out that I want , I read up about it (a lot) and the release of Mountain Lion was no different. However I was shocked to see how heavily opinionated and therefore unprofessional a lot of the reviews are , the particular one that shocked me was the review by G izmodo  . It's not exactly a new thing for journalists to be completely biased,sensationalist scoundrels but to me , this kind of thing is crazy for a tech review.  The general consensus is that you should give your opinion but not let it set the tone for your entire review and keep in mind that different users have different preferences. A key example of this idea being violated is the general opinion from journalists that the textured OSX apps like iCal(now Calender) , Notes,Reminders etc Look stupid and gimmicky. I on the other hand , like the look of the textured apps, so when I read a review that insults them ,I feel like the writer is insulting my preferences ....

If you were a user of Web Sharing in OSX then you may have realised that the option for web sharing in Preferences is now gone in Mountain Lion. However the apache2 background is still there ,but all of your configs have been reset(you may find the old backed up ones lying around somewhere) and you will need to bring them back before starting up apache from the terminal. First things first though, I use php for my web stuff so I want to bring that back first. So I need to edit the file /etc/apache2/httpd.conf and uncomment the line that loads the php module:   LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so Save the file and we should be done(remember we need root permission to save changes to this file). Next I want to set up my php.ini. Go to /etc in the terminal and sudo cp php.ini.default php.ini Now edit the php.ini (don't forget the root permissions) to your preferences , I wont provide details on this because it depends whether you are using this machine for the...

So I have Mountain Lion running one Mac , and I have already learnt something the hard way. Once you download , BACK UP the installer somewhere , after installing ,the Mountain Lion installer disappears without a trace so if you own more than one mac you are going to have to do the download again. Thats a pain I am sitting through right now. However , thanks to the existence of the new OS on one Mac I can still give some first Impression Opinions. I have only had the OS for a couple of hours and on first look you notice that the dock has changed , In my opinion for the better , the dock no longer has a glossy reflective finish that creates an annoying center line across the entire thing when a window is   maximized. The reduced reflections make it appear   a lot less cluttered and it just seems newer and fresher. The indicator light for open applications has become more subtle though and can be harder to detect when your brightness is turned up to the max...