Tag archive for ‘tips’ at bioneural.net

Tag archive for 'tips'

Find which application is using a file

Published by Bruce on March 13, 2010 in Mac. 1 response

Not infrequently during my use of Apple's OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) I have been seeing a dialogue upon emptying the Trash telling me that 'This operation can't be completed because the item "xxx" is in use'. The culprit has been Mail.app, and the scenario seems to occur when I attempt to delete a file after having sent it as an attachment (and some time after the event at that).
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Add a geo field to iPhone and Address Book

Published by Bruce on February 9, 2009 in Mobile. 5 responses

Both the Mac OSX Address Book and Contacts/ Phone apps on the Apple iPhone support a custom "geo" field. You can use this field to store GPS coordinates that will open a Google Map when right-clicked on Mac or tapped on iPhone. The reverse geocoding in Google Maps isn't always perfect; this gives you the option to store a more accurate location alongside a human-readable address.
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Personal productivity on Mac and iPhone

Published by Bruce on June 11, 2008 in Mac. 4 responses

As mentioned in an earlier post on using faux Contacts for collecting, managing, and synching tasks offline on the iPhone, I've been reading Getting things done (GTD) by David Allen. I have to say I found the book a difficult, overly repetitive and non-engaging read, despite my motivation to learn from it. If you could get a lot of things done in the time it takes to read 267 anecdote-heavy pages, here's my somewhat condensed take on the bits worth sharing, along with a few Mac-specific embellishments.
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Using faux Contacts for GTD on the iPhone

Published by Bruce on April 24, 2008 in Mobile. 4 responses

Despite strong indications of an imminent second generation 3G iPhone, the recent £100 price drop on the 8GB iPhone proved too tempting. I had hesitated because the iPhone failed to meet my minimum requirements for basic PDA functionality. With 1Password mostly overcoming the secure data exchange obstacle, the remaining challenge was to find a network-independent way of managing and synchronising tasks ("to do" items). I've also been wading through David Allen's book Getting Things Done in a search for ways to improve my personal productivity. Could I cherry-pick the key principles of the GTD religion and apply them on the iPhone using only the built-in apps?
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Customizing WordPress feed content

Published by Bruce on April 13, 2008 in Internet. 11 responses

When I last looked at customizing feeds in WordPress, it was all to do with being able to offer a summary and full text feed simultaneously—making use of WordPress' flexible feed URL syntax and a .htaccess file. In this post I look at modifying the actual contents of the feed using a functions.php file (which may already exist as part of your current theme).
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Pages and searching in WordPress 2.5

Published by Bruce on April 4, 2008 in Internet. 1 response

WordPress 2.5 lets you search across pages (non-blog entries) as well as posts. This is undoubtedly a good thing, but if your pages are liable to turn up in site searches you might want to make a couple of changes to stop page content from swamping your results screen and improve appearances if you use category icons.
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