Tag Archives: OSx

Turn Off the built in apache on OSx

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There are a handful of reasons why you would want to turn off the built in apache on OSx, you might have installed your own version, maybe you don’t use apache and it is interfering with something else, whatever the reason there is one command you need to run to turn it off.

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.apache.httpd.plist

You should run that from Terminal.app

I wanted to take a second to explain what is going on because too often people (myself included) will post a code snippet without explaining what it is, the worrying this is so many people run them without checking what is happening.

sudo tells your computer to run the following command as the root (administrator) account.
launchctl is an OSx program that interfaces with launchd, which is a daemon manager. Daemons are small programs that run as background processes (like what would setup Apache).
unload tells launchctl to unload a specified configuration file.
-w tells launchctl to override a disabled key, basically this will force the file to be marked as disabled.
/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.apache.httpd.plist is the file that we are unloading.

Hopefully that helps!

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Review: Wunderlist

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For the last month or so I have been using Wunderlist as my to-do app of choice and I wanted to pen a quick review on it.

Before I start, I know you are going to start groaning about *another* to-do app, I get it, there are a load of them, shut up, I don’t care.

That is a lie, I do care a bit, if you are 100% happy with the to-do app you use or you don’t have a need for one then then of course this review probably isn’t for you and I would leave now.

I would take a second though to make sure that you don’t need some type of list system in your life, because it is very liberating being able to set it and forget it, but that is for another blog post, onto my review:

Wunderlist Review

Wunderlist is a cross platform to-do list app in the truest sense of the term in that not only does it have an app for all the major desktop operating systems and devices but it also has a web app that you can log into from any machine that has an internet connection. As a result I will be reviewing the app based on my experiences with the Android version, the OS X version and the web version, but first let me give you my overall thoughts on the product.

I think Wunderlist is a gorgeous application, it has an incredibly nice feel to it and manages to contain powerful functionality without cluttering the interface. Of course at its core it simply lets us store and categorise to-do items, but there are some other worthwhile features that really make this stick out;

  • It syncs automatically to an online service.
  • You can set alarms that will use whatever system the operating system uses for alarms.
  • You can create groups of to-do items and share these with other people. 
  • It retains items you have completed in a non-annoying way.
  • You can add notes, attachments and sub-tasks to to-do items.

All of the above are massively handy although I must confess I haven’t really played about with sharing items with people.

The only thing I would love to see is a really easy way to import an email into Wunderlist with the subject as the task and the content as the notes for the task, currently I don’t think there is a way to do that.

The only other negative I would say is that this is a free service, normally this is a good thing but I want this app to be available for as long as possible and I am unsure how this can be sustained unless they have a paying userbase, Wunderlist if you are reading this I would happily pay for use of your application!

Now I want to take some time to talk about the different ways I have worked with Wunderlist;

Wunderlist Android App

More often than not companies rush out an Android app so that they can appease a small but growing amount of users, and normally it will be some hacked together clone of the iPhone app, not with Wunderlist, this app has certainly been created with Android in mind, or at least appears to be.

They are one of the surprisingly small amount of apps that have embraced Android widgets, which for a to-do app is crucial in my opinion and I get a lot of use from just having the widget sit on things I need to get done today or this week.

They have also made it incredibly easy to add a task in this app, once you click on the shortcut you are in an area where you can quickly type something, hit enter to save it and close out of the app. I just timed myself at less than 4 seconds to open the app and log something in, which is perfect for on the go set it and forget it style tasks.

One absolutely killer feature is that you can send a text message to Wunderlist, again this is just super handy for setting something and then not having to think about it all day.

Wunderlist OS X App

Just like the Android app feels like it has been considered for Android, the OS X app feels like it has been considered with OS X in mind, it has a very Apple feel to it and works incredibly smoothly.

One great feature about the OS X App is that it has embraced a growing trend for responsive applications, that is to say that if you have the app sitting only taking up a quarter of your screens width then you will just see a list of items and nothing else, if you have it a bit bigger you will see the items and the groups you have created, even larger and you will see a couple of extra options. Things like this just make it abundantly clear how much thought and effort has went into this app.

I used Alfred to make a global hotkey to be able to access my to-do items immediately with a quick keystroke, this is not a feature of Wunderlist but I would recommend everyone do it.

Wunderlist Web App

Finally I want to mention the Wunderlist web app, which as I am now using a Chromebook at least part of the time (read my initial thoughts here) will be something I will be using more and more and to be honest even when I was using my Mac most of the time I had considered ditching the native application in favour of the web app as it functions as far as I can tell nearly identically to the native OS X app.

Again, responsive, gorgeous and built to the strengths of the web.

I maybe have a few concerns about how tabbing functions, I don’t feel it is intuitive and I would imagine there would be some accessibility concerns about how it currently works but apart from that it is brilliant.

Round Up

So as you have read, I really like this app, and it is free for an account and all the native applications are free so the only thing you would be wasting by giving it a go would be your time and I honestly don’t think you will. Check it out!

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OSx Screenshot Cleaner

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If, like me, you are prone to taking one too many screenshots using cmd+shift+3 and cmd+shift+4 then you are probably used to your desktop being littered with screenshot image files.

Normally they mount up on me something fierce because I take the screenshot then do something with it immediately but never go back to delete/move/rename the file.

Don’t worry though, help is at hand! I have created a very small Ruby script that you can tie in with a crontab to move screenshots into a screenshot folder on a regular basis!

Please check out the OSx Screenshot Cleaner on Github.

This could have been done in pretty much any language, but I am going through a Ruby phase right now, here was the first version of my code (I say first because this could change based on feedback);

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
require ‘FileUtils’
homepath = File.expand_path “~”
desktop_files = Dir.entries homepath + “/Desktop”
desktop_files.to_a
screen_shot_folder = homepath + “/Desktop/Screenshots”
Dir::mkdir(screen_shot_folder) unless File.exists?(screen_shot_folder)
desktop_files.each {
    |the_file|
    if the_file.include? “Screen Shot”
        old_file = homepath + “/Desktop/” + the_file
        new_file = screen_shot_folder + “/” + the_file
        FileUtils.mv(old_file,new_file, :force => true)
    end
}
view raw gistfile1.rb This Gist brought to you by GitHub.

Line 1:  We include the FileUtils package because we will be using parts of it later.
Line 2: I find the home directory, expand it out and save it to a variable.
Line 3: I grab all the files held within the Desktop folder of the home directory.
Line 4: I convert all these files to an array so that I can later loop through them.
Line 5: I create a string that shows where I want my screenshots to be placed later.
Line 6: If the screenshot folder doesn’t exist create it.
Line 7: Loop through each of the desktop files.
Line 9: Check to make sure they include the term “Screen Shot”
Line 10: Create a string to represent the old file.
Line 11: Create a string to represent the new file.
Line 12: Move the old file to the new file.

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Installing PEAR for PHP on OSx

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Along your PHP travels you will hear noises relating to installing something from PEAR to help you with some PHP snizz.

PEAR is simply a code repository, in fact PEAR stands for PHP Extension and Application Repository.

Installing it is a breeze assuming you already have php installed (you can verify this by typing php -v into your command line).

The first thing to check is that it isn’t already installed — a quick command will verify; pear version. If this brings back version information then you are good to go, if it reports Command not found then follow these simple steps.

Download the phar file at this location: http://pear.php.net/go-pear.phar

Run PHP on the file, so if you downloaded it to your Downloads folder then run sudo php go-pear.phar.

You will be asked some installation questions, I quite like the defaults but feel free to change whatever you want.

Next if you have accepted the defaults you will probably want to add PEAR to your path so that you can call it easily from the command line. I like to do this in vi but there are several ways to achieve it;

I run sudo vi ~/.profile and add in my PATH to the bottom of the document; export PATH=/Users/YOUR_USER_NAME/pear/bin:$PATH, I then reload my profile with . ~/.profile and that is me, now if I run pear version I get version information.

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Finding email to delete if you are over quota in mail.app on OSx

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At work I use mail.app on my machine which pulls email from an Exchange server. For some reason we have relatively small mail limits and I don’t think they are going to be increased anytime soon, so occasionally old email needs to be purged. This should be a best practice anyway because I am sure 60%+ of your email has no need to be stored after one month.

An issue with mail.app is that there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to view an entire mailbox (all folders listed in one view), if I was able to view this I could easily sort by size and delete the worst offenders.

The workaround is to target the folder that is the largest and then find the largest emails within it.

To do this right click on the mailbox that is full and click get account info.

The first time you run this it might take a minute or two to calculate all the folders but once it has you can sort by size and use that as the basis for your email hunt.

A more permanent solution would be to think about the email you are saving when you process your email and only keep mail that you think you will need – especially if people are sending files.

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