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As I’ve written here before, I have a passion for filesharing, either within a LAN or over the Internet to whomever I choose. Well, here’s ge.tt which is a great free, very simple app that allows you to do both.
Lifehacker has written an article on ge.tt which is worth a look.
To use ge.tt, just click on the ge.tt site, click Select Files and choose whatever you want to share. Then send the generated url to where you want to share your files, be it on the other side of the world or on another computer on your own network. I really couldn’t be easier.
It’s well worthwhile creating a free account as your files stay sharable for three months and your shares are organized and easily inspected.
I think finally I’ve come across a facility that rivals the Python SimpleHTTPServer for sharing files across a LAN. Of course, ge.tt does a lot more as you can also share files across the Internet.
I had this problem where I took over a computer running Windows XP which had been owned by, and still contained many documents owned by, a previous user. Getting access to these files was not easy and required, IIRC, opening them as administrator. Then I came across this post from the HowToGeek which relates to a registry hack to add a “Take Ownership” option to the context menu in Windows Explorer.
The post says that the hack applies only to Vista and Windows 7, but I used it in Windows XP and it worked perfectly.
I got both of these from Lifehacker so they must be good. No crap in there.
The first applies only to the Terminal in OS X. Nevertheless, I had indeed found that my terminal was starting to take some time not just to appear after clicking on the dock icon, but for the command prompt to show up. And this was even after running Onyx. Then I came across this post which suggested eliminating the *.asl files which are apparently logs. As I wasn’t even aware of their existence I really didn’t think I’d miss them so I ran the following command
sudo rm -f /private/var/log/asl/*.asl
and, sure enough, the terminal and command prompt opened almost instantaneously for me. Not sure, however, how often this needs to be done but looks like a useful tip.
The second tip seems like something that could be very useful if you’re used to busily writing long commands and may not notice a typo until you’re just about to hit enter. Well, you don’t have to move the cursor all the way back. Instead you can use the carat symbol (^) to correct the error. Read this post for details. This works in all platforms (that I’m aware of although I haven’t yet tried it in Haiku).
Maybe I’m obsessed with time but I always like to have a clock or a watch very close to me — and I mean always. Today I came across a very nice clock screen saver for OS X which works great on my MacBook.
It’s the third app down in this list. Actually, dragging the download to the Screen Saver folder, as advised by the installer, actually puts it into /Users/=username=/Library/Screen Savers while the Desktop/Screen Saver configurator in System Preferences only lists screen savers in /System/Library/Screen Savers. Of course, it’s a simple matter to copy or move the download over.
While I’m not a big video user, I do have an occasional need to convert .avi movies to .m4v (or mp4) format so that I can play them on my iPad or iPod Touch. I’ve posted here and here about this before where I’ve mentioned some three free apps available to do just this job.
Now, Lifehacker has come up with a list of 13 further options (although Lifehacker says these are free apps, the only one that I tried turned out not to be free) for conversion from many formats to many others. So far I’ve only tried AVS4You (which is not free) and it worked very well taking just 13 minutes to cleanly convert a 700 MB .avi file to .m4v format.
