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I just stumbled upon a couple of awesome Mac shortcuts that make it extremely easy to take a screenshot.

Without further a due, here they are:

• Command-Shift-4: presents a crosshair cursor so that you can take a screenshot of the selected area (saved to Desktop as a png file).
• Command-Shift-3: Takes a screenshot of the entire desktop (saved to Desktop as a png file).

There are also two variations on the previous commands. Both of these commands capture the same area however, instead of saving an image to the desktop, these commands will save the screenshot to the clipboard so that you can then paste it into another app.

• Control-Command-Shift-3
• Control-Command-Shift-4

Pretty cool hunh? Hat Tip: Apple Pro Tips.

Update: I just read over at MacDevCenter.com that OS X also ships with a utility known as Grab which allows you to take even more advanced screenshots. I’ll give it a try and let you know how it works.

Here’s how to colorize output from the ls command in OS X Terminal.

Edit ~/.bash_profile and add the following two lines:

export CLICOLOR=1
export LSCOLORS=ExFxCxDxBxegedabagacad

This will generate output with the following color scheme:

• directory: bold blue, default foreground or background
• symbolic link: bold magenta, default foreground or background
• socket: bold green, default ” or ”
• pipe: bold brown (usually shows up as yellow), default ” or ”
• executable: bold red, default ” or ”
• block special: blue foreground, cyan background
• character special: blue, brown background or foreground
• executable with setuid bit set: black foreground, red background
• executable with setgid bit set: black foreground, cyan background
• directory writable to others, with sticky bit: black foreground, green background
• directory writable to others, without sticky bit: black foreground, brown background

For those of you who really want to know what this means, here’s some information taken directly from the man page for ls.

LSCOLORS: The value of this variable describes what color to use for which attribute when colors are enabled with CLICOLOR. This string is a concatenation of pairs of the format fb, where f is the foreground color and b is the background color.

The color designators are as follows:
a black
b red
c green
d brown
e blue
f magenta
g cyan
h light grey
A bold black, usually shows up as dark grey
B bold red
C bold green
D bold brown, usually shows up as yellow
E bold blue
F bold magenta
G bold cyan
H bold light grey; looks like bright white
x default foreground or background

The order of the attributes are as follows:
1. directory
2. symbolic link
3. socket
4. pipe
5. executable
6. block special
7. character special
8. executable with setuid bit set
9. executable with setgid bit set
10. directory writable to others, with sticky bit
11. directory writable to others, without sticky bit

For those of you who don’t know, I recently purchased a MacBook with 2GB of RAM. That’s right, I bought a Mac! In just three short days I’ve already learned a lot about OS X and I am actually starting to feel at home. I’m kind of suprised with how comfortable I already feel considering the fact that prior to this laptop my only experience with a Mac was at the Apple store and through everything I’ve read about OS X.

Here’s what I’ve done thus far with my new MacBook:

• Installed several apps including: Office, AppZapper, Taco HTML, VLC, Software for my printer, Firefox and several other applications. Installing software on the Mac is great. No longer do I have to worry about the Windows registry
• Setup my email and several other applications including iChat so that I can communicate with the rest of the world. iChat is pretty sweet but I’m not sure how much I am actually going to use it.
• Connected my camera and a usb thumb drive just to see how well OS X handles other USB devices. Needless to say it worked like a champ.
• Played around with the entire iLife suite including GarageBand and iDVD. I think I might put together a DVD for Alex’s two year.
• Played around with most of the System preferences
• Got connected up to my network. This was the easiest wireless connection I’ve ever made. In fact, I was able to connect directly to the network during the initial setup once I remembered that I had to add my MacBook’s MAC address to my Linksys router (check out my video).

The only complaint I have thus far is in regards to the lack of a two button mouse. As you can imagine, trying to right click with a one button mouse is kind of difficult. Every once and a while I plug in a good old two button mouse just so I don’t have to screw around with the ctrl key. Anybody know why Apple insists on going with a one button mouse? It just seems like it is extremely inefficient to be using only one button. In any case, here’s a video that I took while I unboxed my MacBook. Stay tuned for more Mac/Apple info. I plan on updating this blog often with more informatio on how the switch is going.

Update 1/28: I finally got around to upgrading all of my blogs (TiVoBlog, RaianoFamily) to WP 2.1.  I had one minor problem which was caused by an outdated plugin (Subscribe to Comments).  If I had upgraded to the latest version of this plugin prior to the upgrade I wouldn’t have had a problem.  I guess the moral of the story is that you should check whether or not your plugins will work with WordPress 2.1 prior to upgrading.

I just finished upgrading this blog to WP 2.1. I probably will upgrade RaianoFamily and TiVoBlog later in the week once I am happy with how 2.1 is running on this site. In case you missed it, 2.1 contains a number of new features including the ability to auto save posts as well as a tabbed WYSIWYG editor so that you can switch between “code” view and a “visual” view.

Here’s a more complete list of all the new features taken directly from the WordPress development blog:

• Autosave makes sure you never lose a post again.
• Our new tabbed editor allows you to switch between WYSIWYG and code editing instantly while writing a post.
• The lossless XML import and export makes it easy for you to move your content between WordPress blogs.
• Our completely redone visual editor also now includes spell checking.
• New search engine privacy option allows you take you to indicate your blog shouldn’t ping or be indexed by search engines like Google.
• You can set any “page” to be the front page of your site, and put the latest posts somewhere else, making it much easier to use WordPress as a content management system.
• Much more efficient database code, faster than previous versions. Domas Mituzas from MySQL went over all our queries with a fine-toothed comb.
• Links in your blogroll now support sub-categories and you can add categories on the fly.
• Redesigned login screen from the Shuttle project.
• More AJAX to make custom fields, moderation, deletions, and more all faster. My favorite is the comments page, which new lets you approve or unapprove things instantly.
• Pages can now be drafts, or private.
• Our admin has been refreshed to load faster and be more visually consistent.
• The dashboard now instantly and brings RSS feeds asynchronously in the background.
• Comment feeds now include all the comments, not just the last 10.
• Better internationalization and support for right-to-left languages.
• The upload manager lets you easily manage all your uploads pictures, video, and audio.
• A new version of the Akismet plugin is bundled.

I just noticed that Akismet has caught 48,903 spam comments on TiVoBlog.com. 48,903 is nothing compared to what TechCrunch is up against however, it still is a pretty big number.

I remember back in the days when there really wasn’t a good spam blocking plugin out there. Now with Akismet, I’ve come the conclusion that there truly isn’t a need for anything else. I’ve only had a couple of instances where Aksimet didn’t block a spam message.

How many spam messages has Akismet blocked on your site?

I just finished upgrading this site to WordPress 2.0.6. As usual, it was as easy as can be. The folks over at WordPress.org are awesome! Now I need to head on over to my other blogs and update them…

In case you care, here’s what’s new in this latest release:

• security fixes.
• HTML quicktags now work in Safari browsers.
• Comments are filtered to prevent them from messing up your blog layout.
• Compatibility with PHP/FastCGI setups.

One of my biggest fears is that I will some how loose all the pictures that I’ve taken over the past six years. Many of these pictures are irreplaceable. Like pictures from the birth of my son or pictures from when my wife and I went to Europe. Needless to say, I’d feel horrible if I lost even one picture from my collection. With that being said, I’ve been pretty good about backing things up. In the past I would backup my pictures to an external USB drive. I would also backup to a DVD at the end of each year. Both of these backup techniques have a number of shortfalls. My external hard drive wouldn’t save me if I were to have a fire in my house or if my computer were some how damaged. My DVD backup system was a little better in that I stored offsite at my parents however, backing up to a DVD is a lengthy process which requires me to be proactive. Needless to say, months would go by without me backing up to the DVD simply because I would forget.

Recently my hosting company increased my storage capacity to 55 Gigabytes at the same time, they also increased my bandwidth to 999 Gigabytes of transfer per month. Being the big geek that I am, I immediately saw this as an opportunity for me to backup my pictures to a remote location which is hopefully better protected from power failures and fires then my computer. With the help of SyncBackSE, I now have a safe and secure backup of all 23 GBs of my pictures. SyncBack is great because it allows me to schedule ftp backups while I’m asleep. I currently have Syncback setup so that it copies any new pictures to my hosting account at 1 AM est. It took me nearly a week to get everything transferred (due to my internet connection dropping and slow upload speeds) but now things are going smooth. I really think this process will work out great for me. I’m still backing up to my external hard drive as well as the DVDs but, now I’m not as worried tha I will somehow loose all of my precious data.

PS: In case you can’t tell, I would highly recommend SyncBack to just about anybody. The software has some many features that it makes a geek like me smile. If you’re a cheapskate and you don’t want to spend $25 for the full version, you can even download a copy of the free version which includes most of the features found in the $25 version.

How do you backup your precious data?