This one is funny, following MacSaber, here’s another short game to be played on Mac
Book’ s featuring the embedded acceleration/motion sensor.
In this case, to play the old Atari classic Pong, of course via
wireless networking, but at least monochrome.
NetPong:

If for some reason you don’t want to
use your iTunes account to fetch cover art for your music
collection, maybe this is for you.

Aric Friesen has written an iTunes script called Fetch Art to fetch cover art for your songs from
Amazon.
Unfortunately it will only work on powerpc Macs, as it uses some
compiled perl modules which are not yet universal/intel.
Although the author stated that he is willing to build an universal
application if he would get donations (which according to some
guestbook entries, he already received), there is still no updated
application for intel Macs available, and the application will
crash, when it comes to downloading the cover art.”holy me”

Now don’t panic….
…so what we need to do is to call the perl module in Rosetta
mode.

What calls the perl module ?
– Perl.

Lets check perl:
kobaans-computer: kobaan$
which perl
/usr/bin/perl

kobaans-computer: kobaan$ file /usr/bin/perl
/usr/bin/perl: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures
/usr/bin/perl (for architecture i386): Mach-O executable i386
/usr/bin/perl (for architecture ppc): Mach-O executable
ppc

So, perl, is actually a universal binary, that means an intel
platform Mac will call the intel code natively.
Let’s correct this for the runtime of Fetch Art.

FIRST: make a backup of your original perl binary
kobaans-computer: kobaan$
sudo cp /usr/bin/perl /Users/kobaan/perl

SECOND: strip the intel code from the perl binary
kobaans-computer: kobaan$
sudo lipo -remove i386 /usr/bin/perl -o
/Users/kobaan/perl-ppc

THIRD: copy the stripped ppc-only binary of perl over the original
“location” of perl
kobaans-computer: kobaan$
sudo cp /Users/kobaan/perl-ppc /usr/bin/perl

What have we done:
kobaans-computer: kobaan$
file /usr/bin/perl
/usr/bin/perl: Mach-O universal binary with 1 architecture
/usr/bin/perl (for architecture ppc): Mach-O executable
ppc

What will happen if we call the Fetch Art script from within iTunes now….
… select your files, (choose your amazon store in preferences), and fetch the cover
art,
WOOOO its working using Rosetta, not fast, but working.

NOW, THE IMPORTANT LAST THING TO DO !!!
After using the script for your collection, quit Fetch Art, and copy back your original “universal” perl
binary.
kobaans-computer: kobaan$
sudo cp /Users/kobaan/perl /usr/bin/perl
Done . Everything back to normal.

Save your donations,
Kobaan.

Since I had to search a bit hard on
this one, you might be interested in HOW TO CHANGE A DEFAULT
APPLICATION that is called when you open a file within your
browser.I just wanted to click on a link, that proofed to be a
mms-video-stream, to open in my favorite video player VLC, instead it ended up
opening in the rosetta-translated ages old windows media player for
mac. That was simply a no go.

“was”

Searching through various preferences in Mac OS and its
applications, even within Firefox as
it is done on Windows…
…I found this entry (already fixed):

kobaans-computer:~ kobaan$
defaults find mms

Found 1 keys in domain ‘com.apple.LaunchServices’: {
LSHandlers = (
{LSHandlerRoleAll = “org.videolan.vlc”; LSHandlerURLScheme = mms;
}

Since modifying plist files can be tricky for some people (not
using developer tools, or being familiar with “vi” and/or
“defaults” class syntax) I found that great application (actually a
preferences panel) called RCDefaultApp, which can be used to change and inspect
almost every file/mime/uri/… handling on Mac OS easily.

Enjoy.
Kobaan.

The next generation of Jefferson Y.
Han’s Interactive Multitouch Display presentation has
arrived.
Compared to the older video of Multitouch in
January 2006, this one is amazingly advanced:

Get me one immediately…
Kobaan.