To quickly find large files to delete if you have filled your startup disk, enter this command on the OSX terminal: sudo find / -size +500000 -print This will find and print out file paths to files over 500MB. You can then go through them and delete them individually by typing rm “”, although there is no undelete so make sure you know you won’t miss them.

You use the ’touch’ command to create two blank files, with a last modified date that you specify - one with a date of the start of the range you want to specify, and the second with a date at the end of the range you want to specify. Then you reference to those two files in your find command: touch /tmp/temp -t 200604141130 touch /tmp/ntemp -t 200604261630 find /data/ -cnewer /tmp/temp -and ! -cnewer /tmp/ntemp

I wrote an email alerter that sends me an email whenever the upcoming temperature may dip below freezing. It uses the Magpie RSS reader to pull down a 3 day weather forecast that is provided for my area in RSS form by the BBC weather site. It then parses this forecast and determines if either today’s or tomorrow’s weather may dip below freezing. If it might, it sends an email to my email address to warn me. ...

If you’ve committed some code into to CVS, and made a mistake on that commit, you will want to know how to revert to a previously saved version. Here is the command line command for CLI versions of CVS: $ cvs update -D '1 week ago' Run this command in the main directory of your checked out working copy. This will revert your working copy to the version of the code that was checked in ‘1 week ago’ from the present date. You also use commands like “1 day ago” and “5 days ago”. ...

I’ve been writing some simple Java GUI applications using the Netbeans IDE. It allows you to quickly make event-driven GUI applications, and generates a lot of skeleton code that you’ll need, but don’t necessarily want to type out. It reminds me of the IDE designer of Visual Basic 6, which allowed you to mock up simple GUIs with code in almost no time at all, although the VB language itself often proved difficult. With Netbeans you are using Java, and so you can make some powerful software with little effort.

Here is some python code I adapted from this stackoverflow post to get the first day of a week specificed by a week number. This method includes leap year and summer time differences. import time def weeknum(num,year): instr = str(year)+" "+str(num-1)+" 1" print time.asctime(time.strptime(instr,'%Y %W %w')) Here is me exectuting the code in Python’s IDLE shell: See that the first week of 2009 actually started in 2008, but by the end of that week we are in 2009.

Quite cool little app that allows you to listen to different BBC Radio programmes from within a standalone application, instead of iPlayer: http://whomwah.github.com/radioaunty/

MediaMonkey is a popular free media player for Windows. It has a great feature that allows you to transfer to and from an iPhone that is not registered with your computer. Normally only one iTunes install can be associated with your iPhone, but MediaMonkey allows you another way to transfer music and audio files with a ‘guest’ iPhone. Check it out, it works: MediaMonkey

Software I use on my macbook & PC: DVDRipper Pro for Mac - DVD ripping, can also rip to ISO Handbrake for Mac - Transcoding from DVD rip to iPhone-playable file iMovie for Mac - Video editing BabasChess for Windows - Best chess client for internet play Hypercam 2 - Best screencapture utility Skype for both - For reliable messaging as well as voice and video chat Virtual Clone Drive for Windows - For mounting ISO images iTunes for Mac - Best music player, and keeps media synced with iPhone VLC Player for both - For watching movies DVD Player for Mac - For watching DVDs ...

This is just a quick note to remind myself how I did this. Hypercam2 is a good, free, video recorder that can cope with recording game videos. It’s freely available from http://www.hyperionics.com/hc/downloads.asp - just make sure when you install it you don’t tick on the spyware toolbar installation options. My motherboard has a 5.1 digital soundcard built in. However the only way I can record off the soundcard is to plug in a standard audio cable from the speaker out (green) to the microphone in (orange). ...