Archive for the 'How To' Category

Show/ Hide Hidden Files In Mac Finder

Published
by
Dilantha
on January 16, 2010
in How To and Mac
. 0 Comments

The first thing you notice in Mac Finder is there is no way to show hidden files. In Windows Explorer or Gnome this is in the menus. On mac you need to set a environment variable called “com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles” to toggle the state of hidden files.

I manually changed this a couple of times, but its annoying to do all the time. So I thought of adding it to a bash script to make things easier.

#!/bin/bash
 
SHOW_FILES=`defaults read com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles`
 
if [ $SHOW_FILES = "FALSE" ]; then
	defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
else
	defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE
fi
killall Finder

References
Mac OS X – Show / Hide Hidden Files in Finder

BlackBerry Shortcuts

Published
by
Dilantha
on January 6, 2010
in How To and Mobile
. 0 Comments

I’m not that savvy on the BlackBerry yet but I’ve discovered these few shortcuts on the BlackBerry Curve 8900 which are super useful.

  • alt + left shift gets you into number mode
  • shift + scroll selects messages
  • alt + scroll scrolls pages

Back to Ubuntu

Published
by
Dilantha
on November 8, 2009
in How To, Linux, Technology and Tools
. 0 Comments

I’m moving to Ubuntu (9.10 Karmic Koala) on my home pc. Its a big honking DELL Studio 1555 compared to my work MacBook 13. But hey it sits at home most of the time and grinds away at anything you give it.

It came with Vista. Hmm ya that wasn’t going to last. Within a few weeks of purchase DELL announced they would give a free upgrade to Windows 7. Ya I missed that. Within about a 1 1/2 months after buying it Vista got stuck and didn’t boot. I booted with a Ubuntu 9.04 cd got my files out and tested if it was worth moving to Ubuntu then. At the time the web cam didn’t work and I really couldn’t spend a lot of time hacking it back into existence. I did a DELL factory restore back to Vista and just waited.

Windows 7 came out. The upgrade was too expensive for a Vista user. If it was 50AUD or so I wouldn’t have minded. But 160-180AUD just for a upgrade was out. In the early stages there were not enough info about doing a clean install from an upgrade cd as well.

I didn’t want to do a in-place Vista upgrade and bring all that crap along, so that was out at the time, so I waited.

Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala came out. Got it, put it on a flash drive, booted and loved it. The web cam works now. Only thing I noticed was that it didn’t power down when it was shut down.

So I waited a few more weeks, backed up everything and installed Ubuntu 9.10 dual-boot. I applied the latest updates and that fixed the previous shut-down issue.

So far so good, moved my Firefox profile over and installed a bunch of apps I needed.

KeePass – password manager

sudo aptitude install keepassx

FileZilla – FTP client

sudo aptitude install filezilla

F-Spot is okay but I had some meta data on my photos with Picasa so I’m going to use that.

Skype sees my web cam it should work fine.

Moving to Australia – Part 2

Published
by
Dilantha
on October 30, 2009
in How To, Life and Sri Lanka
. 0 Comments

Catch up and read part 1 of this guide where I’m documenting my experience of moving to Gold Coast Australia from Sri Lanka.

Now that you are settling in you need stuff for your place. eBay and IKEA are your friends. Also keep an eye out for weekend garage sales.

The Gold Coast City Council website has a ton of information about parks, markets, events etc.

When you get tired of popping burgers those markets come in handy to find curry leaves etc ;) Also its much cheaper than supermarkets for fruits and veggies.

Daily needs is a great online shop for buying Sri Lankan food.

One critical thing I should have mentioned in the first post was getting a mobile phone. I recommend Virgin Mobile pre-paid. If you bought a GSM mobile from Sri Lanka just buy a SIM from almost any phone or news stand and top-up on the site.

Virgin Mobile is the only operator that will let you use all your bonus minutes to talk to Sri Lanka. Everyone else has a limit before the full cap amount.

If you are looking to buy a phone try All Phones. There are cheap pre-paid phones you can unlock later or just buy one outright.

Moving to Australia – Part 1

Published
by
Dilantha
on October 25, 2009
in How To, Life and Sri Lanka
. 4 Comments

I moved to Aussie just over an year ago from Sri Lanka. Since then I’ve had quite a few Sri Lankans ask me about the move and other information about this place. I’ve tried to help them out where I can. I thought of sharing this information here so it might help out some newly migrating folks.

There was a very real-world blog post on Kottu sometime back about moving here and how it really was as opposed to what migration seems like from a Sri Lankan perspective. If you know about it please comment with the link and I’ll add it as a related post.

Here goes nothing, as with any advice take it with a pinch of salt. Some things are more relevant to the Gold Coast where I live.

Australia is definitely a good place to move to if you are planning to move somewhere. I’ve considered Canada and New Zealand and I think this was the better bet.

Continue reading ‘Moving to Australia – Part 1′