Being Mark Cohen

Ahoy me harty

Mark Cohen — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 12:31:22 +0000

Jolly Roger fridge magnet. More iPhone macro photography. Arrrr.

Macro photography with an iPhone

Mark Cohen — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 11:48:44 +0000

Friends at work told me about this neat trick where you extract the lens from a CD drive and you “mount” the lens on a mobile phone to make a macro lens. I thought it sounded interesting, and after a lot of scrounging I got a drive off my neighbour. It’s not as easy as it sounds to get the lens out, you really have to dig for it. But once it’s out it works brilliantly. Of course the focal length is fixed so you have to move forwards and backwards until the focal plane is where you want it in the picture. Here are a few pictures I took with my phone tonight. I have an incase slider case on my iphone, and I mounted the lens inside the case. if you keep the lens intact when you remove it, it will have protruding bits on opposite edges. these fit neatly into the lens hole in the slider case. Yet another example of photography being fun without an SLR

See the full gallery on my Posterous here

The Beach – Queenstown Style

Mark Cohen — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 05:31:23 +0000

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New Zealand Summer Day

Mark Cohen — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 04:55:53 +0000

Hangin’ at the pool, sitting in the shade. In three minutes there’ll be a cold beer in my hand.

As spectacular as they claim New Zealand is in the tourist ads on tv, it is. And then some. One thing I don’t understand is why so many kiwis are in Australia. But then maybe I should come back in winter to get my head around that

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Busy day at Maroubra Beach

Mark Cohen — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 01:35:47 +0000

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How to migrate your calendar to Exchange in Entourage

Mark Cohen — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 08:25:39 +0000

If you’re using Entourage this is how you move your appointments to Exchange from local folders:

1. Fire up Entourage

2. Click on Calendar in the toolbar

3. Click on “All events” under Calendar Views

4. Click on an event, and then click the edit menu, then “select all”:

4. Then right-click on a highlighted appointment and on the popup menu choose “move to” and then choose your Exchange Calendar:

NOTE this may look like it’s frozen as it moves the meetings across. Leave it to run for as long as it takes.

Mark

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My before-I-even-start setup on a Mac

Mark Cohen — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:13:17 +0000

We’re rolling out new Macs at work in my team, and so I’m revisiting my must-have-done-before-I-start list. This is a list of things I’ve picked up from a lot of helpful and friendly mac users along the way:

Setup:

An up-to-date setup of Rails, Subversion and MySQL. Dan Benjamin has great guides on Hivelogic. He does local builds off the source which mean tidier upgrades. Gets a bit tricky with the original bundled mac bits though.
Set up php. It’s already on a new mac, but you need to configure it. Here are instructions to set it up but I substitute Textmate (as below) as my weapon of choice for editing text files.
I haven’t actually got this working but it’s a must-have for work macs if you have a massive NAS. Set up Time Machine on a NAS. That way if your laptop gets run over you know you have everything backed up.
Get rid of the iDisk crap in the sidebar
- Open a finder window (set focus on Finder)
- Click “Finder” menu then “Preferences…”
- Then click on the toolbar icon for “Sidebar”
- Uncheck “iDisk” – fourth one down
- Close “Preferences pane”
I also like to show the full path in the status bar - go to View, then “Show Path Bar”

Free:

Firefox with a bunch of handy add-ons
- FireBug for web page development and debugging
- YSlow – for web page optimisation
- Web Developer Toolbar – handy for disabling js, images, css, etc
- Talon – Screen grab long, scrolling screens in their entirety.
http://www.sequelpro.com/ – desktop mysql client
Skitch – great tool for grabbing screenshots and annotating them. Also has online hosting and websharing capabilites
xcode – Install off the OS/X disk
Remote Desktop for Mac – Connect to your Windows machines using remote desktop.
Microsoft Messenger for Mac – Chat with your Windows Live buddies. We run a corporate chat server using Jabber, which I use iChat for.
Skype for long distance telephony
Tweetdeck for twittering away. Although since twitter got lists I use this less
Stuffit Expander – expander utility for rar files and more (OSS Alternative I don’t use but you might like: UnArchiver)
Virtual Box – To run any virtuals you need. Alternative to vmware fusion or parallels
Quicksilver 2 – quick-launcher, use the mouse less. Like Spotlight on steroids. Run it, press ctrl-space, and have access to launch any app or take a bunch of actions
chmox – a chm reader for Apple. (Microsoft Help file format)
DivX – divx video player for Mac
Dropbox – storage in the cloud with mac, windows, web and iphone clients, and sharing with friends. use this referral link to get extra storage.
http://cyberduck.ch/ – FTP client with nifty features like double-click to rerun past jobs.

Commercial

http://macromates.com/ – TextMate
1Password – Secure password storage. A gift form a friend, I couldn’t live without
http://www.panic.com/coda/ – Coda is a great web page editor for editing rails, php or static files like css / html. Includes syntax highlighting and all the usual bells and whistles. Integrated support for subversion is nice too.
- Joe Bergantine’s .seestyle Coda theme styled to look like the editor that stars in Railscasts (easy on the eyes, light on dark)
AppZapper – described as the uninstaller Apple forgot. Worth the $13.
Microsoft Office for Mac – I bought and tried iWork, and I’ve been playing with Google Docs. I tried NeoOffice a while ago. Microsoft Office is worth it. I have Professional, which includes Entourage with support for Exchange.

Things I haven’t bought yet but want in future:

Omnigraffle – A mac equivalent of Visio. A little pricey but hey, cheaper than Visio.
Balsamiq desktop – an adobe air app, which is a really handy and high tech way of producing hand-drawn-esque IA in an Adobe Air App
Versions – a really nice GUI Subversion client

Thoughts on #tech23

Mark Cohen — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 10:22:37 +0000

I spent the day at the Tech23 event in Surry Hills today, seeing some of what the Australian startup scene has to offer. There were a wide array of startups – some pitching to get started and some already off the ground, pitching to get equity to try fire up the business and take it to the next level. One or two who didn’t need investors at all, who were looking for relationships.

The key take-aways for me were that (possibly a massive and cruel generalisation) the success indicators can really be summed up as two points:

The crew working on a project should have significant experience in the target market between them.
The team are led by someone who is at least a little charismatic, and is visibly passionate about their space.

If you can’t do an elevator pitch you’ll lose what little attention you attract. As an extension of that, if you can’t explain your idea in an elevator pitch you’re not going to be able to sell it to the person you’re pitching. That doesn’t make it wrong, but it does tell you you’re selling it wrong – or maybe just to the wrong target audience.

For more info on who presented and what they showed off, search Twitter for #tech23 and check out the site at http://www.tech23.com.au

Reset print queues on a mac

Mark Cohen — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 11:13:00 +0000

Slightly dangerous mactip only for the Mac techies

Go system preferences / Printers. Right-click any printer installed. Choose Reset printing system and all printers get wiped, all queues deleted, etc

#WDS09 jQuery – Session notes

Mark Cohen — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 10:11:29 +0000

My notes from the presentation:

Sprites are cool, they were cool before and they’re still cool. Pillage ideas from late 80’s sci fi. Oh look, a bird. Forty two. Oh and don’t diss 8 bit. It’s also way cool.

That was the Pulp Fiction of Tech sessions. And I loved every minute of it