After only a few weeks of waiting, I finally recieved my iPhone case from Grove.

I had quite a few things to protect my iPhone 4 over time. Starting with the Apple Bumper, iPod socks and a sleeve by Hardgraft.

The Grove is quite different from what I had before.

Pros:

• Real bamboo
• Custom made. The engravings look great and you can get your own illustrations engraved.
• Wraps the whole iPhone
• Lightweight
• Delicious smell (wood & lime, great combination)
• Feels great in your hand

Cons:

• It's made of wood, which basically means it protects your iPhone from exactly one drop, which will then most likely destroy the case.
• long waiting until you get your case

Since I haven't dropped my iPhone (yet), I think it's a really sweet case and well worth its price and the waiting. I'm really impressed by the quality of the whole thing and looking forward to their iPad case which will hopefully arrive in time when I visit San Francisco.

So long.

I just had to try some things with the new Photoshop CS6 beta and I like messing with Torbens pictures and the result turned out to be an interesting picture. Head to his blog to get it there.

Excellent.

Also: great domain. Reminds me of another NoMore thing* I made, which is of course completely unrelated.

I wish to see this book become the Typographers' Bible. — Hermann Zapf

For me this book is a masterpiece on typography and one of the few I'm really happy to own as a printed edition. If you're a least a tiny bit interested in typography this should be on your shelf already.

In case you're wondering: I was talking quite a lot about typography in the last weeks so I simply had to put this somewhere.

It's UI is excellent and it just works great.

It helps to have a stylus and I'm quite happy with my Cosmonaut by Studio Neat that arrived earlier this week. In fact, I prefer it over the Wacom Bamboo they suggest.

I can you, this thing is amazing. Super fast and super easy. In fact, this website is now running on it, too. It took me less than three hours to set this thing up, including some rough design.

This is only a beginning, so please be kind. I'll add missing pieces (like post dates and stuff) when I have time to.

So long.

Brent Simmons adds:

• Make sure the static analyzer shows no issues with your code.
• Turn on the same warnings that Peter Hosey uses, and make sure there are no warnings.
• Use ARC.

I want to add: Do it. Release your code, let it fly. It will come back and show you new tricks.

So long.

My work at Anfema GmbH is still a lot of fun, but the projects are big and will take some time to be released to the public. There are many new things for me and buying a new suit and ties was one of the easiest and I still have to get used to wearing them.

On the other side I'm still trying to study at UoAS Augsburg. I'll also hold four workshops this semester, so you might actually find something new here pretty soon.

So long.

I'm not good at this so I'll leave it here with a quote from Bill Gates.

The world rarely sees someone who has had the profound impact Steve has had, the effects of which will be felt for many generations to come. For those of us lucky enough to get to work with him, it's been an insanely great honor. I will miss Steve immensely.

You might also check WIRED and interestingly The Onion and you should listen to the speech Jobs gave in 2005 at Stanford University

Update: You should read the touching eulogy by Mona Simpson about her brother.

So long.

defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser BrowseAllInterfaces 1

So Klaus threw me a bone: Tell about an application for Linux you like.

This is quite a touch challenge for me. I never used Linux as a desktop OS, but all my servers are running Linux and there are many command line tools which started to grow on me. Klaus suggested that the bone is about desktop applications, so don't tell anyone I'm writing about my favorite command line tool.

So what is SSH?

Secure Shell or SSH is a network protocol that allows users to open a window on a local computer and connect to a remote computer as if they were sitting there - Wikipedia

It's basically the fasted and easiest way to mess with work on a remote machine. For me it's also (nearly) the only way to control and operate most of my servers.

SSH is a really versatile tool as it brings quite a few extra features like Tunneling, Forwarding & File Transfers. But let's start with something I like most.

Login with Keys instead of Passwords

Using a tool called ssh-keygen on your local machine, which is preinstalled on Mac OS X and Linux systems and also available for Windows, you generate a pair of keyfiles. A private one which acts as your personal key and should never be shared with anyone and a public key which basically acts as a lock for your private key. You can share this with anyone who want's to give you access to something.

Once you generated the public key (which ends in .pub), just copy it's content to a file named authorized_keys the folder .ssh in your remote users home directory. If the file doesn't exist, just create it.

From now on SSH will use the public key to check it against your private and if everything works out as expected, you can log in without entering any password.

For more detailed instructions you should visit the Ubuntu documentation which helped me a lot.

File Transfers

Some of you might already use SFTP, which is basically the file transfer protocol of SSH. If you do so, you can use the same key files! For example Transmit on Mac OS X supports login with keys out of the box. Yay!

Why use SFTP over FTP? I had no clue (except for the support for key files). But this guy has.

Tunneling and Forwarding

I don't use these features as much as the others, but they can be really useful. They allow you to re-route and securely wrap protocols, ports and transfers, which will help you in places where e.g. a firewall blocks your traffic on a specific port (like in a hotel or an office). Learn more about it at the Ubuntu documentation on Port Forwarding and Advanced features of (Open-)SSH

So what? I'm not using Linux.

These features work on any Unix machine, so also on your Mac! Windows users are not left alone. You can use PuTTY for most things SSH can do.

Back to the bone

I'm throwing this bone to Andreas who I know likes Linux and will hopefully have a more UI-Orientented hint for you.

So long.

Personally, I like it the same way I liked the good old brushed metal look in earlier versions: It doesn't bother me.

Since others some people don't agree with me and Lucy asked me if there is a way to change or remove that texture I started digging. The first place I started looking was the Dock.app as the Dock handled Expose and Dashboard in previous versions. It turned out I was right, Dock.app also handles Mission Control and contains the tile image I was looking for.

If you want to change that image, just replace defaultdesktop.png in

System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/Resources/ 

with an image of your liking and the same dimensions as the original.

Step by step using Terminal.app

Attention: If you don't know how to use the Terminal and don't know how to fix thing if you mess it up, please wait until someone writes a little application which allows you to do this without turning your Mac into an unusable block of aluminum. The chances this could happen are pretty low, and I'll try to keep the explanation simple.

So let's start.

1. Create a replacement image and save it to your Desktop as defaultdesktop.png It must be 256px*256px and a standard PNG file.

2. Switch to the directory the original is stored.

   cd /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/Resources/

3. Rename the original to have a backup (you will have to enter your password as we have to use sudo to modify system files)

   sudo mv defaultdesktop.png defaultdesktop_backup.png

4. Move your new image from step 1 from your desktop to the correct location

   sudo mv ~/Desktop/defaultdesktop.png .

5. Restart the Dock to apply the changes

   killall Dock

Wait until the Dock is loaded again, launch Mission Control and enjoy your very own background.

Again, I'm not responsible for any damage made by incorrect or inexperienced usage of Terminal.app or any other steps described here.

Extra

As always, I searched the web after I started to poke around myself and so it didn't surprise me that others have found the same solution to the problem and I'm definitely not the first one. They also found the location of the texture from the login screen which can be replaced in the same way (with adjusted pahts/names of course) as described above and is located here:

/System/Library/Frameworks/AppKit.framework/Versions/C/Resources/NSTexturedFullScreenBackgroundColor.png

Found on Quora. You will have to log out and in or even restart to change that image.

Small update

Out of curiosity I tried using a bigger tile (in my case: 512*512px) to replace defaultdesktop.png and it worked fine for me.

So long

1. This post is about the German hosting service Uberspace, so I'll continue in German.
2. Das hier ist keine Werbung, ich bekomme kein Geld oder sonstige Vorteile dafür.
3. Möglicherweise fällt dieser Post sehr technisch aus.

Als ich das erste Mal über Uberspace gestolpert bin, konnte ich nicht glauben was dort zu lesen ist. Jetzt bin ich seit etwas mehr als drei Monaten Kunde und kann es eigentlich noch immer nicht glauben.

Warum? Achtung, ab jetzt wird's für Leute die nur normale Web-Hoster kennen unrealistisch.

Nicht nur das Angebot an unterstützer Software, die detaillierte Dokumentation und der Datenschutz sind traumhaft. Nein, es geht direkt weiter. Der Preis ist frei bestimmbar und egal wie man ihn wählt, der Support ist immer persönlich, kompetent und so schnell im Antworten, dass man einfach an ein Wunder glauben muss.

Ist es aber nicht. Obwohl alles viel zu schön um wahr zu sein scheint, steckt hinter dem ganzen ein bodenständiges Team mit technischem Know-How und der Verantwortung die man sich für einen Hoster wünscht.

Ich habe einen Space für mich und schon zwei für Kunden im Einsatz und hatte noch nie so wenig Probleme beim Einrichten und Verwalten.

Kneift euch im Notfall einmal am Tag, aber wenn ihr das nächste Mal Web-Hosting für einen Kunden oder euch selbst braucht, schlagt Uberspace vor und ihr habt eine Sorge weniger.

Es gibt nur eine Sache die zu beachten wäre: Solltet ihr aus welchem Grund auch immer einen eigene Server (egal ob virtual oder dedicated) brauchen, seid ihr bei Uberspace an der falschen Adresse. Uberspace kann viele Dinge für die man sonst einen Server brauchen würde, aber eben nicht alles.

So long.

ln -s is a really useful feature of Unix and therefore Mac OS X. Reminder: If you work in Terminal.app, be sure you understand what's happening. There might be no undo.

Or more precisely: A small collection of applications which helped me coding.

First of all, a small disclaimer: I started programming with Basic and stopped. Later I discovered JavaScript (still awesome) and PHP (well, it did what it has to do back then). Much later I learned real programming with Java and discovered Python. Anyway, I never coded as much as now for our current project. And this time, it's all Objective-C and iOS. So be nice with me, it's a new land for me.

Some of these tools actually became part of my daily workflow, even when I'm working on web projects. You should give them a try.

Xcode 4

It looks like the current version of the IDE Apple provides for developing software for their OS isn't really popular, but aside from some weird crashes it's a quite nice environment.

GIT

When you start writing code for bigger projects and have some coworkers, it will get messy unless you start using a version control system. My choice was Git as it's supported (well, somehow at least) by Xcode. After some initial struggling with the general concept it turned out the a really good decision. We haven't lost a single line of code.

Also it makes you feel like a pro when you start hacking around in your terminal. And if you don't feel very save there, there is solution, too and it is called:

Tower

Tower is a nice GUI which makes using git very easy, even for people who are not used to the command line. It was a big surprise for me to find out it's actually developed in Germany. It is no big surprise that it is really stable and does a great job.

Kaleidoscope.app

You might think, it's not worth paying for a app that can only view differences between files and doesn't help you merging them. You're probably right. Until you have tried Kaleidoscope. It's really beautiful and makes comparing a less painful process.

Others

I use TexturePacker, Tiled and

A tale of bad rendering

When I found Solarized while working on my Mac Pro, I just had to share it with you, as it looked really good. Today I installed it on my MacBook Air aswell and realized that even if the author put a lot of work in it and tested it very well: Solarized doesn't work well on all my Macs. In fact, the dark version looks really bad on my MacBook Air.

My first solution (and the reason for this post, which was previously titled differently) was to use another great theme I found on GitHub called Tomorrow. It has bigger contrast than Solarized, looks beautiful and works very well. Except for the dark version which renders the code unreadable just like Solarized does.

I began to realize that it's not the new theme which brings the problems (I tried Twilight and others with similar results) and began looking for a solution. After looking through some posts bashing the font smoothing of OS X (which I will alway prefer over Windows ClearType) I remembered of something I did when I got my Eizo display for my Mac Pro: I changed the FontSmoothing to a value which is no longer available via the System Preferences in Snow Leopard.

The solution

Just put this in your Terminal and log out and back in to see the result:

defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 1

Source and detailed explanation: hints.macworld.com In case you want to revert: Just open the Appereance panel in System Preferences and check Font Smoothing there.

This won't work for everyone and you might have to find the perfect value for your display by try and error but for me it increased overall readability not only in TextMate but everywhere else too, so you might want to try it at least.

Now I can enjoy Solarized and Tomorrow and the only trouble left is to decide which one to use.

So long.

Solarized is a sixteen color palette (eight monotones, eight accent colors) designed for use with terminal and gui applications.

And it works great.