http://www.cneophytou.com Things programmers do that they know shouldn't work but they try anyway, and which sometimes actually work, such as recompiling everything. Thu, 29 May 2008 04:22:24 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I first came up with this idea after reading a post on HackerMoJo.com about getting an RSS feed of images as a Screen Saver using a python script. The idea is simple: Take a feed, parse it, and save the photos it links to as numbered images in a folder ... http://www.cneophytou.com/2008/04/17/photo-feed-as-desktop-background/ I've started using Google's App Engine since it launched, mostly playing around with Python (always wanted to learn), and setting up a small app to deal with my Desktop Photo Feed script. One irritation I had was that I wanted to share my code with a friend, but the app ... http://www.cneophytou.com/2008/04/17/downloading-your-code-from-google-app-engine/ This post first appeared on the Voodoo Finance blog which is maintained by my friend Constantinos Michael, and I'm recreating it here with some extensions so I can find the code more easily when I need it. Using computers remotely is a big part of what I do. Whether I'm at ... http://www.cneophytou.com/2008/02/05/smooth-ssh-passwordless-authentication/ I've always wanted to do this: have my personal files on a memory stick, encrypted, and when I insert the memory stick in a USB port then OS X asks me for a password to decrypt the files. Unfortunately, this functionality isn't offered directly as you can't (at least from ... http://www.cneophytou.com/2008/01/30/simulating-encrypted-physical-disk-in-os-x/ There are many legitimate reasons why someone would want to spoof a system's MAC address. In my case, my University binds our network ports to a specific computer's MAC address, and only allows you to reset that address once a week. My problems start when I want to switch my ... http://www.cneophytou.com/2008/01/19/spoofing-leopards-mac-address/ It's been a while since my last post, and that's because I've been busy with coursework, so I haven't had time to mess around with OS X. However there was one feature I needed to figure out out of necessity if anything else. I have certain files I wish to ... http://www.cneophytou.com/2008/01/19/bandwidth-throttling-in-os-x/ I love Quicksilver. If I ever sit on a machine without it, I feel handicapped, like something extremely important is missing. My major gripe with Quicksilver (and, this might just be my setup, I'm not sure), is that it likes to crash a lot. At least 2-3 times a week. ... http://www.cneophytou.com/2007/10/14/automatically-restart-crashed-applications/ Google is awesome. I don't even know where to start with all the features they've got packed in that tiny little searchbox of theirs. There's a lot of sites that explain some of these advanced features [google.com], but I'm more interested in the ones I use regularly, or ones that ... http://www.cneophytou.com/2007/09/18/searching-google-the-way-you-want/ I have few obsessions in my life, and one of those happens to be keeping my iTunes library in some form (and definition) of 'order', without having me go completely insane. This involves keeping the ID3 data as accurate as I can make it (very tedious process as I had ... http://www.cneophytou.com/2007/07/24/itunes-scripts-i-cant-live-without/ Since my first installation of Boot Camp and Parallels, I've kept two separate Windows XP installations on my drive. One on Boot Camp, used for gaming and other resource-intensive tasks, and the other exclusively on Parallels, used for running some random software I come across and also to test the ... http://www.cneophytou.com/2007/07/18/share-windows-xp-license-between-parallels-and-boot-camp/