iKitchen: the Built-in Mac Mini

Here's a pretty amazing project at Caffeine Junkies by "Lilmuckers", who built a Mac Mini into the wall of his father's kitchen. There are photos for every step of the hacking and subsequent installation, including adding in a USB hub and extending the LED and power button wit a bit of ethernet cable so that everything's on the same side. It's all hooked up to a TV for output and looks very slick. It's one of the more creative (though involved) projects I've seen for the Mini.

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by frank on Jul 31, 05 08:04 PM | TrackBack (0)

Create Gapless Audio from CDs with iTunes

Here's a tutorial from wanderingFocus (via Command-Tab) that shows how to preserve gapless tracks when importing a CD into iTunes, for burning to another CD or for listening on an iPod. The key is to import them all into a single file and make chapters using ChapterTool (Apple's utility to add chapter markers to podcasts). This will allow you to preserve the seamless audio from the original CD, which is great for live music or any other continuous audio.

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by frank on Jul 23, 05 09:32 AM | TrackBack (0)

Tutorial: Install Apache 2.0 on Tiger, part 2 of 2

ApacheIn part one of this tutorial we installed Apache 2 using a pre-built installer package graciously provided by Server Logistics. But if you need the latest version, some more Apache modules, or a little more customization in your installation, you'll have to build and install from source. That always sounds scarier than it actually is, so if you're not uncomfortable with some tinkering in Terminal, you'll have Apache 2 built and installed before you know it -- it really is quite easy!

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by frank on Jul 21, 05 09:23 PM | TrackBack (0)

Use Preview More Effectively

Another great article at MacDevCenter by Giles Turnbull delves into the wealth of lesser-known features of OS X's Preview application. Preview is generally known as Apple's PDF viewer that loads about a thousand times faster than Adobe's own version. But Preview can do a lot more that you probably didn't know:

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by frank on Jul 21, 05 09:33 AM | TrackBack (0)

How to Write a Spotlight Plugin

Here's a good and in-depth tutorial from Matthew Russell at MacDevCenter.com on creating Spotlight plugins. Matthew walks through creating a plugin for Spotlight from scratch that indexes the content database of the Stickies application. He starts with the somewhat arbitrary steps required to give the Stickies database an extension as required by Spotlight, but quickly moves on to the step-by-step instructions using XCode that get the job done. A must-read if you find yourself doing any Spotlight plugin development.

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by frank on Jul 17, 05 07:38 PM | TrackBack (0)