Change From iCloud As Default Save Location In Text Edit Mountain Lion

There’s a simple Terminal command which will set the default to your local hard drive instead of the cloud, via iCloud. You can still save to iCloud; it just won’t be the first place that shows up when you hit “Save” while in a Text Edit (or other iCloud-enabled app).

To make this happen, launch Terminal from your Utilities folder, which is in the Applications folder. ONce Terminal app launches, type or paste the following command in:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSDocumentSaveNewDocumentsToCloud -bool false

Cult of Mac

The most important Defaults Write tip you’ll need in Mountain Lion.

Apple, you’ve tried your point. Can we go back to a regular sane OS now?

The History of the Floppy Disk

So, Shugart and company started working on it. According to Massaro, “We designed the 5 1/4″ floppy drive in terms of the overall design, what it should look like, in a car driving up to Herkimer, New York to visit Mohawk Data Systems.” The design team stopped at a stationery store to buy cardboard while trying to figure out what size the diskette should be. “It’s real simple, the reason why it was 5¼,” he said. “5 1/4 was the smallest diskette that you could make that would not fit in your pocket. We didn’t want to put it in a pocket because we didn’t want it bent, okay?”

Shugart also designed the diskette to be that size because an analysis of the cassette tape drives and their bays in microcomputers showed that a 5.25” drive was as big as you could fit into the PCs of the day.

According to another story from Jimmy Adkisson, a Shugart engineer, “Jim Adkisson and Don Massaro were discussing the proposed drive’s size with Wang. The trio just happened to be doing their discussing at a bar. An Wang motioned to a drink napkin and stated ‘about that size’ which happened to be 5 1/4-inches wide.”

Wang wasn’t the most important element in the success of the 5.25-inch floppy. George Sollman, another Shugart engineer, took an early model of the 5.25” drive to a Home Brew Computer Club meeting. “The following Wednesday or so, Don came to my office and said, ‘There’s a bum in the lobby,’” Sollman says. “‘And, in marketing, you’re in charge of cleaning up the lobby. Would you get the bum out of the lobby?’ So I went out to the lobby and this guy is sitting there with holes in both knees. He really needed a shower in a bad way but he had the most dark, intense eyes and he said, ‘I’ve got this thing we can build.’”

The bum’s name was Steve Jobs and the “thing” was the Apple II.

Steven Vaughan-Nichols – Input Output

Great article about those old unreliable floppy disks. I loved how we had to wrap them around tin foil to travel in the subway… I also remember the time where I had an argument with a high-school colleague about computer virus and their spread through floppy disks. According to him, it was just like human virus. If i would let my clean floppy touch his infected floppy, my floppy really could catch the computer virus, just by being too close. Great times! Strange times.

Apple II with two floppy readers

Releasing Outside the App Store

Scary piracy

My perception: Apps will be pirated.

The reality: Yes, that will happen, no matter what you do. Guaranteed. Can’t stop it. Can’t prevent it without (unreasonable, for most cases) amounts of effort. It happens to App Store apps too, all the time.

Suggestion: Seriously, don’t worry about it. Most people don’t pirate stuff unless it’s trivially easy to do so, and/or you make legitimate purchasing unduly difficult or expensive (see The Piracy Threshold).

Just accept that it’s going to happen, and don’t lose any sleep over it. Take it as a compliment that hacknerds want your stuff. As long as enough people do actually pay for your software, what do you really care anyway?

How long it’ll take: To not worry it? Zero minutes. Do something fun instead.

Notes: Maybe read a book? Not a technical book. A novel. Or head to the pub for a while.

Matt Gemmell

This is probably the sanest thing about piracy i’ve heard in a long time. It’s gone happen, you can’t stop it, just make some minimum level of protection so that most honest/regular people can buy it and stop worrying about it.

The whole insane level of protection of big developer house games / software that makes you jump through 99 loops before you can play is not only insulting to honest buyers but mindlessly useless. If it can be built, it can be hacked and it will be. The only persons you’re inconveniencing are the ones that actually bought your game and didn’t got it already cracked from the web. Those who did got it cracked from the web, actually manage to get a better gaming experience, essentially due to the developers efforts to screw its paying customers. Does that make any sense?

For a personal anecdote, let’s say hypothetically that i once managed to get hold of one of those cracked games downloaded from the web somewhere… Let’s say hypothetically, that i loved the game so much that i went and bought the game in a promotion due to me wanting the full experience, the nice box and manual, and also so that i could give back to the developers. Let’s also say hypothetically, that the game had a CD verification system that required that i carried the optical disk all the time with me if i wanted to play. Let’s say hypothetically that this was somewhere in the last 4 years, where laptops are omnipresent and over the internet verification / activation where already the norm. Let’s also say hypothetically that it mainly wasn’t even an online multiplayer game but a regular single player offline game.

See the problem here? If i wanted to play the legitimate legal copy of the game, i had to carry a CD and insert it, and spend battery just spinning the thing so that the game could start. (( also increasing the physical damage to the media disk. )) If i just went and played the illegal downloaded copy, i wouldn’t have such limitation and could just enjoy the game whenever and wherever i wanted. Let’s say hypothetically, that for the first months i didn’t even played the game because every time i remembered and had time to play, i wasn’t even near the physical media. Do you wanna take a wild guess how much time it took me to go back and just download the illegal copy again so that i could play the game when i wanted? (hypothetically, off course…)

Releasing Outside the App Store

Dealing with Xcode. You can only ever love Xcode in the sense that, after visiting the site of an ecological disaster, even your dilapidated, graffiti-covered, urine-soaked local park seems vaguely pleasant by comparison. A relation with Xcode is basically abusive, but I have nowhere else to go

Matt Gemmell

Overreaction and Overly Specific Reactions to Rare Risks

Our greatest recent overreaction to a rare event was our response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. I remember then-Attorney General John Ashcroft giving a speech in Minnesota — where I live — in 2003 in which he claimed that the fact there were no new terrorist attacks since 9/11 was proof that his policies were working. I remember thinking: “There were no terrorist attacks in the two years preceding 9/11, and you didn’t have any policies. What does that prove?”
What it proves is that terrorist attacks are very rare, and perhaps our national response wasn’t worth the enormous expense, loss of liberty, attacks on our Constitution and damage to our credibility on the world stage. Still, overreacting was the natural thing for us to do. Yes, it was security theater and not real security, but it made many of us feel safer.

Bruce Schneier

How One Teacher Built a Computer Lab for Free

The problem? An underfunded school needed computers for the classroom. Budget? $0. Staff involved? Just one: Robert Litt, a sixth-grade teacher.

[…]

With the help of his local LUG, he got Linux up and running on his 18 donated machines. Suddenly, they were fast. They were clean. They worked well in the classroom. Robert was invigorated, as were his students. His principal saw how excited they all were, and decided to give Robert four hours of teaching leave per week to give him time to find more computers for a full lab for ASCEND. And so Robert became a “teacher on special assignment,” as he puts it.

Finding computers was less difficult than he originally anticipated. Most families and businesses have an old computer (or ten) sitting in storage. Robert began to call businesses and ask for donations of equipment they’d otherwise be sending for recycling. People were generally very receptive. Most people would rather their used computers do good than rot in a landfill or get shredded; they just don’t usually know how to get computers to where they are needed. “Underfunded schools are starving in the midst of plenty,” Robert explains. “Discarded computers are our nation’s most wasted educational resource.”

iFixit.org

For old computers, specially old desktops, there’s nothing that comes close to Linux distros. They run on everything, they are fast, they are nimble on resources and they can give you a lot of simple free software for basically everything that you want to do.

I personally recommend and use Linux Mint. It’s not perfect but it’s a great OS, much easier to maintain than Windows and much, much safer too.

A tale of modern times

A 64bit processor with 64bit EFI, (( i can’t have a pure 64bit kernel & extensions because Apple won’t let me. Apparently somebody forgot to write “pro” after “Macbook” on my screen. And OS X is very picky when it comes to what’s written on the PC it runs. )) 8 gigabytes of RAM, Pyhton, Matlab, calendarized tasks with UNIX scripts and Automator, an entire LaTeX suite, R, MS Office, redundant and automatic backups to different destinations, a carefully managed library of almost a thousand scientific papers in Papers2, shared folders and a endless bunch of other “gizmos” and automations and “power-tools” and the only way of finally getting some work done is going back to a black screen with green letters and a green blinking cursor.

Enlightening.

Black screen macbook with writeroom

Extremism normalized

Proposed Logo for the Unmanned Drone Office

Remember when, in the wake of the 9/11 attack, the Patriot Act was controversial, held up as the symbolic face of Bush/Cheney radicalism and widely lamented as a threat to core American liberties and restraints on federal surveillance and detention powers? Yet now, the Patriot Act is quietly renewed every four years by overwhelming majorities in both parties (despite substantial evidence of serious abuse), and almost nobody is bothered by it any longer. That’s how extremist powers become normalized: they just become such a fixture in our political culture that we are trained to take them for granted, to view the warped as normal.

Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com

Anonymous declares war after French firm trademarks its logo

“A French company trying to trademark the Anonymous logo and slogan for commercial purposes has inspired an angry response from a team claiming to be affiliated with the hacking group.

The company Early Flicker, or E-Flicker, has registered the headless man logo and the slogan ‘We are Anonymous, We do not forgive, We do not forget. Expect us’ with the French National Institute of Industrial Property. This would allow the company to produce and sell merchandising bearing the logo, and potentially to take action against others who use it in France.”

The Register

Either this is some sort of plot & honeypot by the French Intelligence or these are the dumbest business owners on Earth. (( I would say the first option but every time i’ve said “nobody is that dumb!” i’ve been proven wrong. ))

You say tomato, I say tomato

John Gruber theorizes about the disparage of Android and iOS usage of mobile browsers:

Not sure how to square the disparity here other than to assume that an awful lot of Android smartphones don’t really get used as smartphones.

Jason Grigsby disagrees and says:

The UI for joining a Wi-Fi network on Android is easy to miss. (( about this check this post ))

[…]

People at lower income levels are less likely to have access to Wi-Fi networks on a regular basis.

So basically they are both saying the same think but while Grigsby focuses on the reasons, Gruber focuses on the consequences which is that Android phones are not really used as smartphones.

That might be for the reasons that Grigsby elaborated but the end result is that as smartphones they pretty much are only used for the typical on-the-road features of a modern “feature phone”: GPS services and mail. Everything else, the “smartphone” things that an iOS user would do at an available wifi network either at home or work, is pretty much not used in Android phones. Which bring us back to the original point.

You can get an Android phone for little more than 75€. At that price most people don’t even realize what they are actually buying and don’t realize that you can do something else with it. Considering the absolute chaos and unfriendly experience that is Google Play (( with apps that don’t download, apps that download but don’t start, apps that just go missing and a random craziness of chaos )) it’s a miracle that they actually use some sort of app that requires internet connection.