Stop ACTA & TPP: Tell your country's officials: NEVER use secretive trade agreements to meddle with the Internet. Our freedoms depend on it!

Write Them Now! I urge you to vote no on ACTA and to communicate its severe problems to your colleagues. ACTA's vague language locks us into obsolete copyright and patent laws, preventing democracies from updating their laws to unlock new economic and social opportunities.It criminalizes harmless remixes by ordinary users if they achieve 'a commercial scale' (art 2.14.1) which many amateur videos do on sites like Youtube. And it criminalizes legitimate websites by making them responsible for user behavior ('aiding and abetting' art 2.14.4).Worse, it permanently bypasses the democratic process by empowering the 'ACTA Committee' to 'propose amendments to [ACTA]' without your approval. (art 6.4) In other words, it's impossible to know what you're voting for.The global movement against the US law SOPA showed that internet freedom is a crucial issue which belongs in the legislative process of each country. You should view ACTA as an attempt by a handful of companies to circumvent the democratic process, and you should vote against it.Thank you. Please reply if you have any questions.

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I've just finished migrating to my new MacBook Air (new for me) from my Pro. I had a lot of files, such as certain preferences, etc. that were important to me, but wouldn't have been migrated with Migration Assistant. I also didn't just want to clone the HD, since

1. The MBA SSD capacity is smaller than the MBP capacity and I needed more space. I managed to solve this by not transferring my whole iTunes library, which was 110 GB, mostly podcasts, followed by a few movies and TV shows.
2. I didn't want to transfer a MBP-specific installation of OS X onto a MBA. This would probably just have caused problems in the future.

I didn't migrate perfectly. There were a few things I forgot, but not much and they weren't very important (just the position of Dashboard widgets, as well as the notes that were saved in the Stickies widget, plus some other stuff). All in all though, I'm enjoying the speed of the SSD and the light-weight. Plus, the higher resolution display is awesome for fitting more apps in my menu bar.

One tip for migrating without Migration Assistant is to not. Try a Dropbox 100 GB account.

For people who like to mess with system files or install command line apps like me, learn from my mistake. Make a note of any changes you make/apps you install, or install something which does that for you automatically. You'll need that list when you upgrade to a new computer and you want to start without moving all your cruft across, but also need important files in hidden folders. For example, I installed a bunch of command line apps in the '/usr/local/bin' directory. When it came time to migrate my stuff, I just copied them over to my new computer. This means I miss the man pages and documentation for them. Easier just to list them all, then reinstall the first chance you get, that way you'll get the binaries, plus the other stuff that comes with them.

1. Automator - an awesome application to automate repetitive tasks. The icon is of a robot, which I don't understand why people don't click this awesome looking icon. It's surprising how little this is used, considering how awesome it is. Use this! It can save so much time.
2. Emacs games - this is quite hidden, but if you thought Chess was the only game available in OS X, you're wrong. Just open Terminal (in /Applications/Utilities/Terminal) and type in "emacs" without quotes. Then, press enter, then Esc and X at the same time. Yes, Esc. Type "tetris", press enter and enjoy. There are loads of other games included in the Emacs program.
3. Archives.prefPane - just a simple prefPane to change settings of Archive Utility.app in the System Preferences. You can change this by navigating to /System/Library/CoreServices, then opening Archive Utility.app, but this prefPane should really be included in the System Preferences app. But just navigate to /System/Library/CoreServices, right click Archive Utility.app and select "Show Package Contents". Navigate into Contents/Resources and double click Archives.prefpane.

Enjoy!

Burn - an application to burn data, audio or video onto optical media, or you can copy disk images.

Caffeine - App Store - a menu application to prevent your Mac from going to sleep or initiating a screensaver while you do a task that the Mac doesn't consider as user-activity, e.g. watching a movie.

Mactracker - App Store - an application that lists all models of Apple computers/devices from 1984 to the present day.

Paparazzi! - a useful tool to capture webpages

Transmission - an open source, cross-platform, yet platform-native (in terms of looks) torrent client which consumes less resources than some CLI torrent clients.

Perian - a QuickTime component and prefPane which allows QuickTime to play many more formats, while also extending QuickLook (so I guess it's also a QLGenerator).

Bean - a free, light word processor which has just the right features and doesn't overload on features, yet doesn't skimp either.

There are loads of websites which list more apps like this. If you're a switcher and you're left with a budget of 0 for downloading apps for your new platform, this list can be so helpful. I consider these to be unmatched in their beauty and functionality too, so there are no paid apps which offer the same functionality with a better experience. These are apps you will keep, not free alternatives to tide you over while you save up for superior apps.

I hope you enjoy this list of free and open source software for OS X!

Don't understand SOPA? Check out the infographic: http://americancensorship.org/infographic.html

Or check out this video: http://vimeo.com/31100268

http://americancensorship.org/

"No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it, and that is how it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new." - Steve Jobs

Download this app at: http://totalterminal.binaryage.com/

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B004645B0U/

They claim it is an SSD RAID. 2 SSDs packed in a USB 3.0 enclosure for speeds of up to 300MB/s. All I'm waiting for now are Thunderbolt memory sticks to catch on. Imagine a Thunderbolt RAID of 2 or more SSDs in a tiny, rugged, waterproof, anything-proof enclosure. Now that would be awesome!

Speaking of waterproof, there was a waterproof USB drive that looked like the one I was getting, except silver. When I was looking for it to show in this post, I found this:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pretec-i-Disk-Bulletproof-Flash-Drive/dp/B002RB689C/

I wanted to share a story that I found on Cult of Mac about Steve's attention to detail.

This was apparently before Macworld SF January 2008, when Steve called Vic Gundotra on a Sunday to fix Google's logo. Before native apps, Google saved as a web app had the wrong shade of yellow on one of its letters.

“Hey Steve – this is Vic”, I said. “I’m sorry I didn’t answer your call earlier. I was in religious services, and the caller ID said unknown, so I didn’t pick up”.

Steve laughed. He said, “Vic, unless the Caller ID said ‘GOD’, you should never pick up during services”.

I laughed nervously. After all, while it was customary for Steve to call during the week upset about something, it was unusual for him to call me on Sunday and ask me to call his home. I wondered what was so important?

“So Vic, we have an urgent issue, one that I need addressed right away. I’ve already assigned someone from my team to help you, and I hope you can fix this tomorrow” said Steve. “I’ve been looking at the Google logo on the iPhone and I’m not happy with the icon. The second O in Google doesn’t have the right yellow gradient. It’s just wrong and I’m going to have Greg fix it tomorrow. Is that okay with you?”

I think the author of that post sums this up nicely: "It’s kind of funny that as the CEO of what is now one of the world’s largest companies, Steve still had time to worry about the littlest things. You and I probably wouldn’t have ever noticed that the second ‘O’ in the Google icon wasn’t the right gradient of yellow, but Steve did, and he made sure it was fixed."

Via Cult of Mac