To configure a mirrored folder in a virtual machine:

1. Launch VMware Fusion and run the desired VM
2. From Fusion’s menu bar, click Virtual Machine > Settings.
3. Click Sharing.
4. Enable each folder you would like to mirror (Desktop, Documents, and Downloads)
5. Close the Settings window.
6. Restart your virtual machine for these changes to take effect.

I’d wager that all third-party clients will be forced to display the trends and ads within a year, and what we know as Twitter today — or at least what we knew until yesterday morning — will be a distant, quaint memory: Remember when it was just people you followed?

I really hope this doesn’t happen. I use and value Twitter way more than Facebook, the other social audience platform I currently use. I understand the need to monetize Twitter, but there has got to be a better way than forcing users to see tweets or threads for things they have no interest in. Thankfully, right now in the present, I can use Tweetbot and avoid all this nonsense.

This list of fonts supported by iOS 5 devices is growing compared to what was originally installed on the first iPad. 

Music by:

Pretty Lights – Hot Like Sauce
Phantogram – Mouthful Of Diamonds
The Doors – The End

“You cannot update because WordPress 3.2 requires PHP version 5.2.4 or higher. You are running version 5.1.6″

I thought to myself, that’s odd, as I keep all my servers updated. Well it turns out to be slightly more complicated than “yum update all”. Instructions to easily upgrade PHP to version 5.3.x on your CentOS server to allow WordPress 3.2 to install properly.

/via Daniel Howard

• Purchase and download Lion from the Mac App Store on any Lion compatible Mac running Snow Leopard.
• Right click on “Mac OS X Lion” installer and choose the option to “Show Package Contents.”
• Inside the Contents folder that appears you will find a SharedSupport folder and inside the SharedSupport folder you will find the “InstallESD.dmg.” This is the Lion boot disc image we have all been waiting for.
• Copy “InstallESD.dmg” to another folder like the Desktop.
• Launch Disk Utility and click the burn button.
• Select the copied “InstallESD.dmg” as the image to burn, insert a standard sized 4.7 GB DVD, and wait for your new Lion Boot Disc to come out toasty hot.

You can now use Disk Utility’s Restore function to image your Lion boot disc image onto an external drive or partition suitable for performing a clean install on a optical-drive-less MacBook Air, or Mac mini server. Clean installs with Lion are easy once you find where Apple has hidden the boot disk.

Google is right: Windows is an old, creaky, virus-ridden product that deserves to be replaced by something better.  But to displace an established computing platform you need to do a lot of things right, and Google hasn’t shown the focus and coordination needed to pull it off.  Unless there are dramatic changes in Google’s Chromebook plans, I think they are likely to fail.

Well said.

This also absolves Apple of responsibility for the distribution of Flash Player security updates. Recall the controversy last year when Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) shipped with a slightly older version of Flash Player, with a few known security vulnerabilities. Henceforth, Flash Player security updates for Mac OS X are Adobe’s problem, not Apple’s.

This is precisely the point of them removing it. Having Flash preinstalled means a default installation of Mac OS X could potentially be remotely exploited using nothing more than having a user visit a malicious site. I agree with this removal and I support their decision. I surf the web with Safari’s ClickToFlash extension enabled by default which prevents Flash from loading on pages unless I specifically want it to load.

“Investors punished Apple for its gangbusters quarter,” Wilcox writes. No actually, they didn’t. They ramped Apple’s stock up from $245 last month to todays $309. Hardly punishment. The stock hit a peak before the conference call of $318, followed by rampant profit taking. That’s not punishment, that’s rolling in money appreciatively. Stop passively lying about how investors are spooked about Apple’s “falling margins,” because even you know that’s wrong.

It’s really sad that more investors don’t understand this. I am bummed I missed out on a tiny bit of money by not selling the day before earnings, but I’m still flush with profits from the run-up before the earnings announcement. I can’t complain and neither should the whiny analysts.

Apple has always implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) asserted you should use their products because they’re better than the competition in the ways that matter to users. Apple’s products frequently don’t win on a feature-by-feature comparison, to which Apple fans tend to reply that sealed batteries have turned out to be not so bad in practice, that we can actually find all the software we want for our iOS devices no matter how philosophically objectionable the App Store is, and that we really don’t care that the iPad has no USB port and that the iPhone cannot be used as a wifi hotspot, HD projector and five-speed blender. There is a large subset of tech users who go into apoplectic fits at that, seeing it as proof that we’re brainwashed morons. So be it.

Brilliantly put.

That fact that people are taking this personally is ridiculous. It’s a damn phone, which works fine. Works great in my experience. They will give you a free case if you want it. If it doesn’t work where you live, don’t buy it, or take it back.

One final note. Dear tech pundits, Get a life. Spend some energy about something that matters, like the oil spill in the Gulf.

1. The phone feels great in my hand. The stainless steel frame is very elegant and rigid.
2. It feels a tiny bit heavier even though its a bit thinner and narrower. Thats a good thing.
3. The retina display is amazing. Words can’t do it justice. It’s flat out breathtaking. Immediately makes previous iPhones (2G, 3G, 3GS) feel dated.
4. The battery life is better than expected. I got 11 hours of near constant use.
5. The interface (iOS4) is crisp, fast, and not overly burdened with superfluous animations. The A4 chip is terrific.
6. The dont-hold-it-in-your-left-hand reception issue is slightly annoying and frustrating. Hopefully there will be a fix.

Once again, I’ll actually enjoy using my iPhone. I’ll be up in Green Bay this weekend for a wedding, so I’ll give my full report after a few days of typical use.

Google wants to make sure that every part of your life happens under their searchlight. They don’t want you to use desktop apps; they want you to use apps on the Web, so that they can observe how much time you spend at each task, and get at least a vague sense of the data you work with.

They want you to use their mail service, so that they can better understand your relationships with other people.

They don’t want you to send data to your phone via a secure, user-controlled cable. They want you to do it through the Internet, so that they can note the sort of music you like, the locations you’re interested in, the places you’ve been.

They also want to be able to “push” apps onto your device that you might not want, and let websites push data into specific apps. They want the ads they push onto your device to have an unusually close level of interaction with your phone hardware and the data therein.

And Google wants to know what you do in your living room. What shows do you watch? What shows do you record? Once you’ve recorded them, how long until you watch them? Do you watch them all the way through? Did you pause during a commercial? What did you do during that pause? Did you visit a site or search for a keyword? What was that keyword?

Very interesting take from the Google I/O conference.

Divvy is an entirely new way of managing your workspace. It allows you to quickly and efficiently “divvy up” your screen into exact portions.

With Divvy, it is as simple as calling up the interface, clicking and dragging. When you let go, your window will be resized and moved to the relative position on the screen. If that seems like too much work, you can go ahead and create as many different shortcuts as you’d like that resize and move your windows in exactly the same way.

Installed and almost immediately became part of my normal daily workflow.

iPad supports over 40 fonts and font families which can be used with iWork for iPad apps. When importing a presentation that uses a font not available on iPad, iWork attempts to replace an unsupported font with one that is a close match. If a close match is not found, the Helvetica font will be used instead. After the import process, fonts that were replaced are listed for review by the user.

Fonts available on the iPad include:

• American Typewriter
• AppleGothic
• Arial
• Baskerville
• Bodoni 72
• Bradley Hand
• Chalkduster
• Cochin
• Copperplate
• Courier
• Courier New
• Didot
• Futura
• Geeza Pro
• Georgia
• Gill Sans
• Heiti J
• Helvetica
• Hoefler Text
• Marker Felt
• Optima
• Palatino
• Papyrus
• Party LET
• Snell Roundhand
• Thonburi
• Times New Roman
• Trebuchet MS
• Verdana
• Zapf Dingbats
• Zapfino

I’m embarrassed to actually use the iPad for anything. I’m leaving it under my seat because I don’t want to attract any attention. This reminds me a lot of when I bought my iPhone. When the iPhone first came out they were so rare and exotic for the six months or so that every time I’d pull it out people would be like, ‘Woah! Is that an iPhone?!’ And so using my iPhone in public felt like bragging.

I feel the exact same way. Without question, the moment I bring out my iPad in public, people walk up to me and say “Can I see it?” or “What do you think, is it really better than the kindle?”

Yes…  Sigh

Compared to the simplicity of this Mac-to-Mac transfer, the iPad-to-Mac transfer is a labyrinth of restrictions and complications. If you expect to transfer the same document between an iPad and a Mac multiple times, I can guarantee you will be grumbling before too long.

Disappointing. I’ll stick with editing docs on my Mac until this becomes polished.

After briefly trying some, I’m not using any pixel-doubled iPhone apps. I’m going iPad-native or nothing. I suspect that a lot of people will make the same choice, so I strongly advise that developers get iPad-native apps out as quickly as possible (although I recognize that you don’t need me to tell you that). It’s a wide-open land grab right now.

I completely agree.

While this DRM is intended to protect the media owners’ rights and prevent the illegal distribution of perfect digital copies of their content, it actually has no effect on piracy. Every piece of digital media that is in demand is supplied for free, whether by cracking the DRM, copying an unprotected digital source, or synthesizing a new digital copy from an unprotected analog source. What the DRM does do is frustrate legitimate users and stifle the fledgeling market for digital distribution.

I could not agree more. Until the media distributors realize this, the content creators will suffer.

LSOs can be used by web sites to collect information on how people navigate those web sites even if people believe they’ve restricted the data collection. More than half of the internet’s top websites use LSOs to track users and store information about them. There is relatively little public awareness of LSOs, and they can usually not be deleted by the cookie privacy controls in a web browser. This may lead a web user to believe a computer is cleared of tracking objects, when it is not.

Several services even use LSOs as surreptitious data storage to reinstate traditional cookies that a user deleted, which is called ‘re-spawning’ in homage to video games where adversaries come back to life even after being “killed,” the report found. So even if a user gets rid of a website’s tracking cookie, that cookie’s unique ID will be assigned back to a new cookie again using the Flash data as the “backup.”

Flash cookies are located in two directories in OS X:

~/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/Flash Player/#SharedObjects

~/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/Flash Player/macromedia.com/support/flashplayer/sys/

Close all your browsers and then open the Finder and navigate to

~/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/Flash Player/

and you will see the following (Yours will have considerably more listed, some of which may shock you)

Delete all directories inside the “Flash Player” folder and empty your trash. Then select the “Flash Player” folder and “Get Info” by right-clicking and selecting “Get Info” or pressing Command + I and you will see the following:

Check the box next to “Locked” and then close the window. The “Flash Player” folder will be locked, which means the directory cannot be modified. Safari/Firefox/Camino will go on working just fine, and Flash will not be able to store any cookies.

My 2010 Resolutions

1. Get full body check-up, including full blood work panel
2. See more live music
3. Travel more
4. Finally get in shape
5. Drink less alcohol
6. Save money

That’s it for now.

In the permanent logs, we don’t keep personally identifiable information or IP information.

I’ll take their word for it until I read otherwise. I’m going to start using Google DNS and see if it’s a better alternative.

“When a customer leaves a business, there is generally only one physical thing they take with them as a reminder of the experience: the receipt. But most companies treat the receipt as a wasted expense — and buy the shittiest and crappiest paper and ink possible — instead of as a marketing expense. This is a huge mistake.”

The little things matter. I was shopping around for business cards. I was interested in letterpressed cards, for obvious reasons, and I came across The Mandate Press. They sent me samples, which blew me away, and included a hand written note on heavy cotton paper. I was amazed at the personal touch and attention to detail and even though we went with another company (sigh), I’ll definitely recommend them and may get my personal cards from them.

THE LITTLE THINGS MATTER!

“Whatever anyone says about Apple, if it wasn’t for Steve Jobs there would be no legitimate music online.

Everybody was lost. The record labels were frozen. When he came up with iTunes, it gave us a [legal] way to get the license ready to go online.

Before iTunes, Napster was out of business for two or three years, and then Kazaa and other file sharing started. There was no legitimate way to buy music. I think his impact on music has been extraordinary.”

Powerful. I couldn’t agree more.

Gotta love 

Directions:
In large pot, add the garlic and onion and sauté until translucent, about 3 minutes. Add the tomatoes, sugar, red pepper flakes and marjoram. Bring to a simmer and add the rice. To provide enough liquid for cooking the rice, add 1 to 2 cups water, depending on the juiciness of the tomatoes. Cook until the rice is tender, about 20 minutes. Stir in the cream. You can use a hand mixer or a food processor to puree, I prefer hand mixer since you can leave the soup in the pot while blending.
Season with salt and pepper to taste.

I was first introduced to this recipe by my friends Becky and Scott. I modified the recipe a bit by removing the pancetta because I didn’t have it the first time I made this, and it turned out amazing. Thanks guys for making dinner!

Serves 6-8 people or provides lunch for a few days. Enjoy.

After reading the blog post, I got to thinking of other ways to use brace expansion. I already knew to use it for quick file backups:

mv -v /some/path/somefile.conf{,.backup-$(date +'%Y-%m-%d')}

Which quickly renames /some/path/somefile.conf to /some/path/somefile.conf.backup-2009-05-21. I never knew brace expansion could be used to generate seqeunce expressions between a pair of braces. I’ve been using the GNU tool ‘seq’ to generate sequences of numbers.

Here is a quick example I currently use:

for i in `seq 178 190`; do nslookup 69.65.115.${i}|grep "name "; done

Which will display the reverse dns name for a group of IP’s. It’s simple, fast and I have created a bash function ‘reverse_dns’ which will let me quickly get a glimpse of these names. They don’t change often, but when they do, its nice to have a quick command to display the full list.

Now after reading that blog post, I’ve since converted all my scripts to use brace expansion:

for i in {178..190}; do nslookup 69.65.115.${i}|grep "name "; done

It’s nice to know this is cross platform (provided the version of bash installed supports brace expansion) and I no longer need to worry about running this on my Mac (Darwin) since ‘seq’ doesn’t exist there.

I am sure you will find some interesting ways to use brace expansion.

1. Create an Safari bookmark called “Send to Tweetie” and enter this as the address:

javascript:void(location.href='tweetie:'+location.href)

2. Sync the bookmark to your iPhone.

3. Now when you are viewing a site in mobile Safari, just visit that bookmark. It will send the current url to Tweetie, shorten using Bit.ly and post as a new Tweet. It’s so awesome.

I absolutely love this site. My friends enjoy it so much, we usually send each other clips that represent how we feel each morning. The site could use a little makeover, but the content is still top notch.  Even Jim Davis was intrigued by—and pleased with—the concept. Bravo!

1. Add keyboard shortcut to the Services menu for Send File. You must choose “All Applications”  then assign it whatever shortcut you like. Mine is below. This way, you can select a file in Finder, activate the shortcut, and you instantly get a new mail message opened with the file attached ready to send. I needed this after I moved away from Quicksilver.

2. I was used to how Firefox maps the Google search, so I made it the same in Safari. You must use the ellipsis character, which can be found from the Character Palette  (search ellipsis).

These are just a few examples. This really is an awesome feature of OS X. Enjoy!

Leave a comment with some of your favorites.

UPDATE:  Snow Leoapard makes this even easier. The steps are very similar and the new features allow for even greater control of your keyboard shortcuts. I love OS X