Software (Windows/Mac)

A software which has both a Windows and a Mac version:

• Audio recorder (voice recorder). Audacity.
  

ThinkPad T40-T43 maintenance

A few tips on thinkpad maintenance (T-series):

• Replacing key in keyboard, see here.
  

I am a doctor (well, sort of).

Yes, yes, the senate of Tel Aviv University just ratified my PhD in Computer Science!

Mac Maintenance and tweaks

Tricks and tips on how to clean/tweak mac:

• Remove unwanted services from menue: Service Scrubber or look in "/System/Library/Services" and "~/Library/Services".
• Remove unwanted apps from contextual menu (right click, also from More! menu): Go to "~Library/Contextual Menu Items" or "/System/Library/Contextual Menu Items" and put unwanted plugins in a subdirectory (which will not be shown). See also here and a video.
• Useful context menus can be found here. (also has a shortcut in the dmg to restart Finder - a nifty util :))
• Copy/Change icons: go get info and copy/paste to the icon on the upper left corner. See here.
• FTP client for MAC: cyberduck.
• Text editor: TextWrangler.
• Delete locked files in Trash: Use TrashIt! or Onyx.
  

PowerPoint on Mac

Power point on mac does not have custom motion paths.
(Either in Office 2004 or Office 2008).
Builds (read animation) in Keynote'08 do not get exported to ppt.
I tired to look into NeoOffice - but it looks like a very poor imitation of PowerPoint - was not able to figure out how to draw the path of the object.

OCaml IDE

Looking for an IDE for OCaml on Mac.

(Obviously, I was not the first, see, e.g., here).

• Emacs (Aquaemacs)
• Download Tuareg
• Config Aquaemacs (see)
1. place both tuareg.el and camldebug.el somewhere in
   

   ~/Library/Preferences/Aquamacs Emacs/

2. Add to ~/Library/Preferences/Aquamacs Emacs/Preferences.el (from append-tuareg.el): 
   (setq auto-mode-alist (cons '("\\.ml\\w?" . tuareg-mode) auto-mode-alist))
   (autoload 'tuareg-mode "tuareg" "Major mode for editing Caml code" t)
   (autoload 'camldebug "camldebug" "Run the Caml debugger" t)

3. Append custom-tuaerg.el at the end of (the modified)
   ~/Library/Preferences/Aquamacs Emacs/Preferences.el
   

• Camelia (for students going from scheme to ocaml)
• Eclispe (a few plugins)

Font Smoothing Moaning

Font smoothing (aka anti-aliasing) is supposed to make fonts look nicer.

It does.

However, Apple and Microsoft differ in the way they do it.

Microsoft optimizes visibility on screen.

Apple optimizes similarity of on-screen font and printed font.

Thus, with a mac you get a better WYSIWYG experience, with the price of more blurry fonts.

I prefer to read on screen for short-medium documents, and print out long ones (unless I just need to browse them). I found that ever since I started working with a Mac (which I like more and more), I print more often because the on-screen font looks too blurry and gives me an headache. Thus, I prefer, in this case, Microsoft approach. I wish that both option would be available. I feel bad that I became "less green" ever since I started working with a mac.

Thus, I call to apple:

Reduce the blurriness: Give us an option to optimize on-screen visibility, and help save trees!

(I will try to ue Vista fonts on mac. Maybe it will help).