I wanted a handy way to convert a feed url to the redirected url. For example, Reeder puts this url on the clipboard:

“http://feeds.harvardbusiness.org/~r/harvardbusiness/~3/_folqII9-_8/beware-of-the-short-term-opera.html”

But when I make a post, I want this url:

“http://blogs.hbr.org/hbsfaculty/2011/12/beware-of-the-short-term-opera.html”

There are a number of reasonable ways to do this, but I like Python so that’s what I went with.

If you deal with customers and need to collect information about their environment, you need to enter "man sysdiagnose" into a Terminal.

Managing windows on Mac OS X can be frustrating, requiring precision control of your mouse or trackpad for clicking, dragging, pushing and pulling your windows to the size and position you desire. Even with all this work, it’s very difficult to get windows exactly where you want them, so most of the time windows are left scattered all over the screen. The solution? Divvy.

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’s as simple as a single click and drag in the Divvy interface and your window will be resized and moved to a relative portion of 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.

Divvy is designed to be quick, simple and elegant. We want it to stay out of your way as much as possible while providing the most powerful window management available today.

Take a look at the screencast over there to the right to get a better idea of what we're talking about, then go ahead and download the demo to try it out for yourself. Or you could buy it right away. That's fine too.

Who are you, what do you do, etc…?

I’m Duncan Davidson and I am a photographer, writer, and recovering software developer. Possibly my most recognizable affiliation is as the main stage photographer for TED. I’ve been exploring video and learning all I can, including bridging between stills and motion with a lot of time-lapse work, such as my recent Tribute in Light project. Finally, I’m a partner in Luma Labs which makes some awesome camera slings.

What is your current setup?

My desktop is an eight-core, early-2008 Mac Pro with 14GB of RAM, an upgraded ATI 4870 video card, an SSD boot drive in the bottom DVD drive bay, and 24TB of online storage across several arrays, both internal and external.

My primary display is a late-2008 24″ LED Cinema display. Tunes are pumped out through a set of old school USB Harman Kardon SoundSticks. Input is handed using an Apple Bluetooth Keyboard and Magic Trackpad and a Wacom Intous 4 tablet. For voice input, I use an Audio Technica AT2050 microphone hooked up to an Apogee One, and I monitor on a pair of Audio Technica ATH-M40fs headphones.

Document scanning is handed with a Fujitsu SnapScan. Photographs are scanned with an Epson v500 flatbed scanner. Most of my print needs are handled by an Epson 3880 printer, but for bigger jobs I also have a 24″ HP Z3200.

My primary laptop unless I’m in the throes of heavy photo or video work is a mid-2011, 13″ MacBook Air with 4GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. I went with the i5 instead of the i7 in the hope of getting the maximum battery life possible.

My secondary laptop which I pull out when I need to use FireWire drives on the road or when I know that the GPU will come in handy is a late-2008, 15″ MacBook Pro that I’ve upgraded to 4GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. This laptop is almost effectively retired, but not quite.

An iPhone 4 keeps me connected most of the time. A first generation iPad is what you’ll find me using on the couch or in seat 6A when I’m traveling.

Why this rig?

A desktop-plus-portable strategy is the only one that can satisfy my need for power, speed, and storage at home while also keeping things as light as possible for when I’m traveling fast. If I could go with a simpler setup, I would in a heartbeat. So far, however, the trend has been that my storage needs are ramping up quickly over time and dealing with over a TB a year of new data is the big challenge.

On the other hand, nothing beats being able to throw my MacBook Air and a Fuji X100 into a small bag and head out the door for a day or a weekend.

What software do you use and for what do you use it?

I manage my photographs using a combination of Aperture, Lightroom and Bridge. Aperture is taking over my primary catalog needs from Lightroom. I use Bridge when I need to scour through the archives of photographs that aren’t in my active catalog.

When I need more in the way of photo editing tools than I get from Aperture, I use Photoshop. When I need less, I use Acorn and sometimes even Preview.

For video, I use Final Cut Pro X and love it. I also use Compressor and After Effects for various tasks, including stitching together still frames into video clips.

When I’m in code mode, I use BBEdit or Xcode depending on the task at hand. For straight ahead writing—including all of my blog entries as well as the writing that currently isn’t seeing the light of day—I’ve become a huge fan of iA Writer.

To get things done, I use OmniFocus. At least I try. Sometimes I do better than others. Keeping all of my non-media data in sync between machines in handled by Dropbox. 1Password is essential for passwords. Mail, iCal, Safari, Numbers, and Pages are all open on my computer right now.

How does this setup help you do your best creative work?

For the most part, it lets me do what I need to do in the kinds of environments I like to be in.

At home, I’ve arranged my desk so that when I’m working on my desktop, I can look up across my living room and out my huge living room windows across downtown Portland. Watching the weather go by is therapeutic to me. The MacBook Air lets me work in cafés near home and as well as anywhere in the world. It’s even useful for the kinds of light photo editing I do on the road.

How would your ideal setup look and function?

I’m pretty close to my ideal right now. If I could change anything, I’d have a view of midtown Manhattan out my window from 25 floors up and I’d have a 15″ MacBook Pro that wasn’t much heavier than my current Air but which did have a GPU. The former is a pipe dream right now. The latter might happen any month now. Hopefully.

I used to use two screens on my desktop, and I might consider do so again. However, I’ve found that using one screen increases my ability to glance up and look outside my window. A second screen cuts that down quite a bit. As well, I’ve discovered that parking my laptop on one side lets me keep various websites or other reference material in easy view while I work on the desktop.

Finally, a closer-to-ideal setup would include a data solution for my media files that was a bit less maintenance intensive. I think the best I’ll be able to do in the near future is consolidate my various hard drive arrays into two Promise Thunderbolt R6 arrays when I upgrade my desktop machine. That jump will probably happen sometime in the next six months.

More Sweet Setups

Duncan’s setup is just one in a series of sweet Mac Setups.

Tijdens het surfen op een website met behulp van Safari wordt automatisch de hiërarchische structuur van de webpagina opgeslagen.

Wanneer je bijvoorbeeld start op de startpagina van een website en daarna enkele andere pagina’s op deze website bezoekt dan kun je heel eenvoudig terugkeren naar een bepaald niveau in de website structuur.

Dit doe je door de cmd⌘ toets ingedrukt te houden en op de titelbalk van safari te klikken. Na het klikken verschijnt de structuur van de website in een pulldown menu en kun je direct naar een bepaald punt gaan door erop te klikken. De structuur van de huidige pagina tot aan de startpagina wordt weergegeven.

A new Site Specific Browser. Looks interesting...

A great thread of the improvements in Lion that really make it shine. There are more than a few that I hadn’t noticed/didn’t know about.
[via Daniel Jalkut]∞

nvALT 2 is a fork of the original Notational Velocity with some additional features and interface modifications, including MultiMarkdown functionality.

During the day, computer screens look good—they're designed to look like the sun. But, at 9PM, 10PM, or 3AM, you probably shouldn't be looking at the sun.

F.lux fixes this: it makes the color of your computer's display adapt to the time of day, warm at night and like sunlight during the day.

It's even possible that you're staying up too late because of your computer. You could use f.lux because it makes you sleep better, or you could just use it just because it makes your computer look better.

Using Hype, you can create beautiful HTML5 web content. Animations and interactive content made with Hype work on desktops, smartphones and iPads.

This open-source application maps the information that your iPhone is recording about your movements. It doesn't record anything itself, it only displays files that are already hidden on your computer.

An iOS like OS X application for quickly applying presets to photos. Nice feature: you can edit applied effects, and new presets are available for download from the Flare website.

PGMail is an open source plugin for Apple Mail. It brings the functionality to sign, verify, encrypt and decrypt mails using the OpenPGP standard.
Please have a look at the getting started and FAQ section. It would be nice to tell Apple to support bundles for Mail.app officially.

Pure Reader and Pure Flickr extensions.

Share the stuff you like: Facebook, Twitter, blogging, emailing - now built right in! Go read the announcement on the Vienna blog! Click here for the English-Only version.

there are quite a few ways to break into a Mac, but many of them are variations on the same thing, so we're going to highlight the two easiest ways—one with a Mac OS X installer CD and one without—and show you how to keep yourself protected.

Alfred is a productivity application for Mac OS X, which aims to save you time in searching your local computer and the web. Whether it's maps, Amazon, eBay, Wikipedia, you can feed your web addiction quicker than ever before.

* Increase your productivity by launching apps with shortcuts
* Instant access to web searches, bookmarks & more
* Browse and play music from your iTunes library quickly
* Perform actions – copy, move & email files & folders
* Ward off RSI – skip using the mouse with easy shortcuts

Welcome to OmniOutliner 3, an amazingly flexible program for creating, collecting, and organizing information. Use OmniOutliner's document structure to brainstorm new ideas, drill out specifics, and line up the steps needed to get everything done. It's more than just an outlining tool—you've got multiple columns, smart checkboxes, customizable popup lists, and an über-innovative styles system at your disposal. Use OmniOutliner to draft to-do lists, create agendas, manage tasks, track expenses, take notes, plan events, write screenplays . . . and just about anything else you can think of.

Do you access your email in a browser? Then you'll love Notify. Notify is an awesome email notifier for Mac OS X. It fits seamlessly into your menubar, only vying for your attention when you have new mail. Notify supports mutliple accounts, including Gmail/Google Apps, MobileMe, and Rackspace Email.

Yammer is great. So is Mac OS X. Wouldn't it be even greater if there was a native Yammer client for Mac OS X? Well now there is!

Introducing Gabble, the first (and only) Yammer desktop client

TwoUp allows you to quickly position a window to fill exactly half the screen (splitscreen) via the menu bar or configurable system-wide shortcuts (hotkeys). Similar to "tiled windows" functionality available on other operating systems.

NOTATIONAL VELOCITY is an application that stores and retrieves notes. It is an attempt to loosen the mental blockages to recording information and to scrape away the tartar of convention that handicaps its retrieval. The solution is by nature nonconformist.

A simple, beautiful and powerful notes app. The nice user interface lets you focus on the important things - taking notes. And it syncs with Simplenote webapp!

Freedom is an application that disables networking on an Apple computer for up to eight hours at a time. Freedom will free you from the distractions of the internet, allowing you time to code, write, or create. At the end of your selected offline period, Freedom re-enables your network, restoring everything as normal. Freedom enforces freedom; a reboot is the only circumvention of the Freedom time limit you specify. The hassle of rebooting means you're less likely to cheat, and you'll enjoy enhanced productivity.

Two months ago I mentioned that I was considering a switch from Quicksilver to LaunchBar. The motivation for the change was Alcor’s discouraging comments about Quicksilver’s future—and future stability—in this interview. I’ve now been using LaunchBar exclusively for the past couple of months and have never even been tempted to go back.

If you ever think about switching to a Mac, read this first: - I totally agree.

Cocktail is an award winning general purpose utility for Mac OS X. It is a smooth and powerful digital toolset with a variety of practical features that simplifies the use of advanced UNIX functions and helps Mac users around the world to get the most out of their computers. Cocktail is installed at more than 200 000 computers world wide. The largest part being private individuals, but Cocktail can also be found at large international companies (Puma, Sony), educational institutions (Harvard University, University of Texas) or newspapers (The New York Times, Business Week). The application serves up a scrumptious mix of maintenance tools and interface tweaks, all accessible via a comprehensive graphical interface. Most of Cocktail's major features are arranged in five basic categories. In addition, a Pilot lets you clean, repair and optimize your system with one click of the button.

Skim is a PDF reader and note-taker for OS X. It is designed to help you read and annotate scientific papers in PDF, but is also great for viewing any PDF file.

VoodooPad is a place to write down your notes and thoughts. Plant ideas, images, lists and anything else you need to keep track of and VoodooPad will grow with you, without getting in the way. You can even drag and drop folders, images, applications, or URLs into VoodooPad — they're linked up just like on the web. And with powerful search, nothing will be lost or out of reach. Do you ever have a bit of information that you're not sure where to file? Put it in VoodooPad, it won't mind. Because the more you put into it, the more useful VoodooPad becomes.

I'm thinking about buying a Mac. I've done a lot of Googling about what the Mac equivalents are for Windows programs, but I want to know the opposite. What are some unique, interesting, or innovative Mac programs that have no real equivalent on Windows? Are there any that are so awesome that they're worth switching to Apple?

Monolingual is a program for removing unnecessary language resources from Mac OS X, in order to reclaim several hundred megabytes of disk space. It requires at least Mac OS X 10.3.9 (Panther) and also works on Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) and Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard).

Snow Leopard’s release is just around the corner, so here are some quick and easy steps to make sure that you are ready to upgrade.

Path Finder is a standalone application that leverages what you already know about working with your files. It takes the Finder's familiar interface and adds numerous powerful features and interface innovations to help anyone be more productive on Mac OS X.

MercuryMover reduces the friction you feel when you use your Mac. With MercuryMover, you can move and resize windows on your Mac from the keyboard, positioning them precisely where you want. By shunning the slow and imprecise mouse, MercuryMover empowers you to work faster and play more.

ExpanDrive acts just like a USB drive plugged into your Mac. Open, edit, and save files to remote computers from within your favorite programs—even when they are on a server half a world away. ExpanDrive enhances every single application on your computer by transparently connecting it to remote data.

Add a little eye candy to your most frequently used folders on your Mac by assigning a background image to the window. To do so, from the View menu, choose "As Icons." Then again from the View menu, choose "Show View Options." Under Background, choose Picture, and select the image you want to set as the background. This setting is folder-specific, so you can theme multiple folders separately.

An Automator action that toggles the visibility of hidden files in the Finder. This restarts the Finder everytime you activate it.

Powerful script management utility. Instant access to your scripts, by keyboard shortcut or menubar.

It's disappointing that Snow Leopard doesn't promise many major new Finder features, but with the right tweaks and plug-ins, you can make browsing files on your Mac significantly better.

Forget the default browser, Choosy opens links in the right browser. When you click on a link Choosy will do the right thing, whether that's something simple (like using whatever browser is already running) or something complex (like prompting you to pick a browser, but only when you hold down the shift key and click on a link to google.com).

We've featured countless apps or all sorts over the years, but if you just want a quick look at the best free downloads for your Mac, this post's for you. This is the 2009 Lifehacker Pack for Mac OS X.

Versie 0.2 van de Uitzending Gemist plug-in, Ik ben de afgelopen (twee) weken weer wat bezig geweest met de plug-in. Onder andere zie je nu informatie over het programma wat je wilt gaan kijken en je ziet thumbnails (helaas niet bij het populair vandaag en top 50 gedeelte, omdat die informatie vanaf deze pagina's niet makkelijk te bereiken is, dit komt misschien later nog).

DragThing is the original dock designed to tidy up your Macintosh desktop. It puts all your documents, folders, and applications just a single click away. Highly flexible, it allows multiple docks, each customised to suit your exact needs.

If you’ve just got yourself a new Mac and totally clueless what to install, this article is for you. If you are looking for alternatives for some applications you are currently using in your Mac, the following list might come in handy too. This week, we’d like to showcase you a list of useful yet free applications you can install for your Mac. Full list after jump.

"How to get proper HD out of iMovie 09, which is something it makes surprisingly difficult."

Have a file up on the Mac’s screen and want to know where it’s stored on the hard drive? Hold down the Command key (the one with the Apple logo next to the space bar) and click on the file name in the title bar to see the full path.

TextExpander saves you countless keystrokes with customized abbreviations for your frequently-used text strings and images.

Voor wie de website nog niet kent, Appletips.nl biedt de gebruiker een catalogus aan van een groot aantal, Nederlandstalige, tips voor het gebruik van je Apple. De tips zijn onderverdeeld in beginners, gevorderden, Apple TV en de iPhone. MacVandaag zoekt vandaag de 10 leukste tips uit in de categorie beginners!

Plex bridges the gap between your Mac and your home theater, doing so with a visually appealing user interface that provides instant access to your media. Plex can play a wide range of video, audio and photo formats as well as online streaming audio and video. The real power of Plex is found in its library features: Organize your media into versatile libraries, automatically retrieve metadata from the Internet, and display your libraries using one of the visually stunning skins.

Apple first sold all of us on the digital music revolution using the slogan "Rip, Mix, Burn." Indeed, thanks to Apple software, it was suddenly dead simple to copy and burn music CDs using your Mac. But what about video DVDs? It turns out there are a few hoops to jump through, but in the end, it's pretty easy, even though you may need to invest in some additional software.

Organize: Manage your photos in one place, and find photos you forgot you had. Edit: Eliminate scratches & blemishes, fix red-eye, crop and more Create: Turn photos into movies, collages, slideshows and more

The Battle for Wesnoth is a free, turn-based strategy game with a fantasy theme. Build up a great army of humans, elves, dwarves, orcs, trolls or any of the other races and beat those who dare to oppose you. Fight a desperate battle to reclaim the throne of Wesnoth, or take hand in any number of other adventures...

These are instructions on how to make a duplicate copy of CD or DVD using Mac OS X Leopard Disk Utility.

PodWorks is a Mac OS X application that compensates for the iPod's only downside: Apple only allows you to copy songs to your iPod. If you have two Macs and want to use your iPod to transfer music from one to the other, or you only store your music and videos on your iPod and need to copy them back onto your hard drive after a disk failure, you are out of luck! This is where PodWorks comes in: it allows you to copy songs and videos from any iPod or iPhone to any Mac running OS X 10.4 or higher.

You can also see what’s in use on any volume by launching Terminal and typing: lsof | grep volume-name (where volume-name is the name of the disk that you’re trying to eject).

So, especially for those of you using computers, instead of Windows, here’s some key combos and other built-in helper applications you might not already know about.

The Unarchiver is a much more capable replacement for "BOMArchiveHelper.app", the built-in archive unpacker program in Mac OS X. The Unarchiver is designed to handle many more formats than BOMArchiveHelper, and to better fit in with the design of the Finder. It can also handle filenames in foreign character sets, created with non-English versions of other operating systems.

A database of hidden settings for Mac OS X

Wordpress Notifier is a freeware application that alerts you when new unapproved comments are posted on your Wordpress blog. It lives in the Mac OS X Status Bar and displays the current unapproved comment count.

MyMind is a combination of an outliner an a mind mapping application. Or a mind mapper with built-in outlining functionality. Whatever way you see it, it’s a unique application, you won’t find anything similar.

MindNode Pro is an elegant and simple-to-use mindmapping application for the Macintosh. It was created with the user in mind and features a very simple and intuitive user interface that lets the user focus on expressing and developing ideas. Nearly no time is required to learn the interface.

Surveys iTunes for tracks whose files are no longer available (as indicated by a "!" next to their names) and removes them. Any playlists that subsequently contain no tracks will then be deleted. Progress is displayed every 500 tracks.

MarcoPolo brings context-aware computing to your portable Mac computer. It allows your computer to determine its context through gathering evidence from your environment (evidence sources), using flexible rule-based fuzzy matching to make an educated guess (rules), and then performing arbitrary actions upon changing context (actions).