After I read this macosxhints.com post, I decided to have a go at something slightly different. The orginal hint showed how to set up an AppleScript droplet to modify the creation date of a file. But what if you want to sync the modified date and Creation dates instead? This script has been created to do just that. It has evolved from one Daniel A. Shockley provided in a macosxhints comment to the previous hint, and has been extended to fit this purpose.

With my recent loss, I had thought about, and seen other people, decentralising data. Luckily I’ve already got an email and RSS feed backup in place. As soon as my Laptop was out of order, I jumped onto my pobox.com account and redirected email to Gmail. Gmail will keep my mail flow going for a week or two. Next I went over to Google reader and reset all my feeds. Previously I had exported all my subscribed Newsfire RSS subscriptions to OPML format, and imported it into google reader.

Last Friday at work my Mac (OS X 10.4) laptop HDD died. After the purchase of an extra external HDD and some custom recovery software, Data Rescue II, I tried to recover as much as I could. The bad news is the Hard drive had not just gotten corrupted, but failed. After an attempt to clone it to a second drive for analysis, and during my recovery attempt it developed the click of death.

Daniel Miessler discusses the benefit of using Quicksilver, one of the mandatory mac applications, for searching the web – instead of using your browser. So you are in any app and you want to search for something online? Use Quicksilver. I blog from Textmate, so if I need to search for something on google (or elsewhere) – Quicksilver does it for me. Its a very simple process to use as described by Daniel on his blog entry.

You’ve got a household full of PC’s and you’ve stopped yourself from getting a Mac because you don’t want to deal with incompatibilities. Eight years ago that would’ve been understandable, but today Mac OS and Windows can work together in harmony on the same home network. Here’s a primer on how the two systems inter-operate. I have been using Macs now for 5 years, and the compatibility issues that one would have been there are practically gone.

Growl has been updated to V1.1.1. This is a MUST HAVE application for any Mac user, and without any further hesitation you can download it from the growl homepage. Growl provides notifications, which “… are a way for your applications to provide you with new information, without you having to switch from the application you’re already in.”

macosxhints.com has a hint on how to run your MacBook with its lid closed. They link to this apple technote, but its not just for your MacBook. Powerbook G4 and MacBook Pro owners are just as capable, and can have the joy of their portable beasts plugged into an external monitor as a “faux desktop”. You just have to have an external keyboard or mouse plugged in. Bluetooth keyboard users get their own technote.

I’ve started blogging from textmate. And this is one of my recent posts using this app. A friend uses Textmate and swears by it as his main text editor, so here I am using it more often (Thanks Tim). I’m still a dab hand at vim, BUT now that I can blog from textmate, then its looking like my licence will finally get some use. From where I stand using the Mac is soooo much more than just jumping on a computer to bang out some email.

I know it has been blogged to death by now, but Mac OSX, my desktop OS of choice, is now officially a standard UNIX. Specifically to the UNIX 03 Product Standard. This confirms it conforms to Version 3 of the Single UNIX Specification. This makes Apple Inc. an official UNIX vendor along with all the other big boys. On the serverside, I will stick with OpenBSD as my personal server OS of choice, with Solaris following close behind.

Of interest to most “Tech” people out there would be the chat between Steve Jobs (of Apple fame if you are from under a rock) and Bill Gates (of Microsoft fame if you are not in the know). This occurred at the All Things Digital conference, and is now available for your aural or visual pleasure on the iTunes Music Store in the form of an audio and video podcast.