If for some reason you don’t want to
use your iTunes account to fetch cover art for your music
collection, maybe this is for you.

Aric Friesen has written an iTunes script called Fetch Art to fetch cover art for your songs from
Amazon.
Unfortunately it will only work on powerpc Macs, as it uses some
compiled perl modules which are not yet universal/intel.
Although the author stated that he is willing to build an universal
application if he would get donations (which according to some
guestbook entries, he already received), there is still no updated
application for intel Macs available, and the application will
crash, when it comes to downloading the cover art.”holy me”

Now don’t panic….
…so what we need to do is to call the perl module in Rosetta
mode.

What calls the perl module ?
– Perl.

Lets check perl:
kobaans-computer: kobaan$
which perl
/usr/bin/perl

kobaans-computer: kobaan$ file /usr/bin/perl
/usr/bin/perl: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures
/usr/bin/perl (for architecture i386): Mach-O executable i386
/usr/bin/perl (for architecture ppc): Mach-O executable
ppc

So, perl, is actually a universal binary, that means an intel
platform Mac will call the intel code natively.
Let’s correct this for the runtime of Fetch Art.

FIRST: make a backup of your original perl binary
kobaans-computer: kobaan$
sudo cp /usr/bin/perl /Users/kobaan/perl

SECOND: strip the intel code from the perl binary
kobaans-computer: kobaan$
sudo lipo -remove i386 /usr/bin/perl -o
/Users/kobaan/perl-ppc

THIRD: copy the stripped ppc-only binary of perl over the original
“location” of perl
kobaans-computer: kobaan$
sudo cp /Users/kobaan/perl-ppc /usr/bin/perl

What have we done:
kobaans-computer: kobaan$
file /usr/bin/perl
/usr/bin/perl: Mach-O universal binary with 1 architecture
/usr/bin/perl (for architecture ppc): Mach-O executable
ppc

What will happen if we call the Fetch Art script from within iTunes now….
… select your files, (choose your amazon store in preferences), and fetch the cover
art,
WOOOO its working using Rosetta, not fast, but working.

NOW, THE IMPORTANT LAST THING TO DO !!!
After using the script for your collection, quit Fetch Art, and copy back your original “universal” perl
binary.
kobaans-computer: kobaan$
sudo cp /Users/kobaan/perl /usr/bin/perl
Done . Everything back to normal.

Save your donations,
Kobaan.

Since I had to search a bit hard on
this one, you might be interested in HOW TO CHANGE A DEFAULT
APPLICATION that is called when you open a file within your
browser.I just wanted to click on a link, that proofed to be a
mms-video-stream, to open in my favorite video player VLC, instead it ended up
opening in the rosetta-translated ages old windows media player for
mac. That was simply a no go.

“was”

Searching through various preferences in Mac OS and its
applications, even within Firefox as
it is done on Windows…
…I found this entry (already fixed):

kobaans-computer:~ kobaan$
defaults find mms

Found 1 keys in domain ‘com.apple.LaunchServices’: {
LSHandlers = (
{LSHandlerRoleAll = “org.videolan.vlc”; LSHandlerURLScheme = mms;
}

Since modifying plist files can be tricky for some people (not
using developer tools, or being familiar with “vi” and/or
“defaults” class syntax) I found that great application (actually a
preferences panel) called RCDefaultApp, which can be used to change and inspect
almost every file/mime/uri/… handling on Mac OS easily.

Enjoy.
Kobaan.

The next generation of Jefferson Y.
Han’s Interactive Multitouch Display presentation has
arrived.
Compared to the older video of Multitouch in
January 2006, this one is amazingly advanced:

Get me one immediately…
Kobaan.

For those of you experiencing
slowdowns on Mac OS’s Mail application over some time, this might
be a cheap trick for you to get back speed and disk-space.
Mail, is keeping track of mail message subjects in a database, to
quickly scan, search and organize threading in your
mailboxes.The good thing is: once you delete a mail, it is also gets deleted
in the database…
The bad thing is: a database needs to be maintained, and this is
not done automatically…

What does this mean now….
…your database deletes items by reference, but it does not free
up the allocated disk-space, thus blowing up your overall database
size which leads to longer access times as more (empty) data needs
to be parsed through.

The solution:

While your Mail application is NOT running…
…use a terminal and go into “cd ~/Library/Mail”…
…open the database with: “sqlite3 Envelope Index”…
…and free up the already deleted database disk-space using:
“vacuum subjects;”…
…et voila, quit sqlite3 and you’re done.

Mail will be quite fast again, and your disk capacity should show a
few more free blocks.

We already know that the Nintendo
Wii controller can also be used on the Mac platform, but can it
be used on PC too ?

Yes, it can….
And for the more romantic types of you, just try to replace the
infrared bar on your TV with two candles to the left and right. It
will work.

Yeah, me again, and again 3D desktops,
I’m sure you’ll ask yourself where’s the difference between compiz
and beryl.See it this way, what options do you have if you want to check
something on your desktop or another window, if a window is already
placed on top of it.Sure, you can minimize the window, move the window or even close
it. You may use taskwitching, window transparency might work as
well.
But how about, just taking a quick look behind a window border or
corner, like what you would do if it’s just a piece of paper. Watch
this:

Beryl is a fork of the compiz 3D
desktop composition manger for Linux.

Yeah, me again, and again 3D desktops,
I’m sure you’ll ask yourself where’s the difference between compiz
and beryl.See it this way, what options do you have if you want to check
something on your desktop or another window, if a window is already
placed on top of it.

Sure, you can minimize the window, move the window or even close
it. You may use taskwitching, window transparency might work as
well.
But how about, just taking a quick look behind a window border or
corner, like what you would do if it’s just a piece of paper. Watch
this:

Beryl is a fork of the compiz 3D
desktop composition manger for Linux.

Yeah, me again, and again 3D desktops,
I’m sure you’ll ask yourself where’s the difference between compiz
and beryl.