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As you might know, I am a big fan of using EyeTV as well as Plex on my mac mini hooked to my telly. Plex is the best mediacentre for the mac, EyeTV a way to view live TV on your Mac with EPG and much more.

Sometime ago I posted about integrating them, watching live or timeshifted TV on your mac within Plex on this post. Though the code is very rough and far from finished and seems to be orphaned already, I would like to suggest a cool feature.

Wath EyeTV in Plex and have Plex look in to the EGP and searches for tweets about the program you are watching, live or timeshifted. I do not watch much TV let alone live TV, but part of the joy of watching TV is seeing what others have to say about this via twitter. And watching this on a TV with live tweets updates about the program you are watching sure sounds something that TV's will have in half a decade.

BTW: follow me on twitter on @bertboerland.

24, lost, house. Sure good tv. But nothing compared to Dexter. Dexter, By far the best American serie I have ever seen. Consider me a fan.

So when I saw that Dexter (wiki) had a mac with a bloody screensaver and found out it was available for the Mac, I had to get this as well.

On http://www.sho.com/site/dexter/downloads.do you can download the Mac and Windows version. The mac verson is zip with and .app in it. Howerver, double clicking the application does not give you anything.

So if you want to install this screensaver (not that good by the way) on your mac, here is the workaround:

Download,
unzip,
right click on the file (control-click),
go to "show package contents,
go contents>resources>dexter screen saver.saver

This will open system preferences with a dialog box prompting an install. Say yes and the screen saver will show up in the left hand navigation menu in screen savers. Select it and you are good to go.

And in case you want to become the "dark Defender" yourself, learn from this video series.

I love my iPhone and I love Google. And the combination of these to leads to a nice user experience; when an iPhone user visits Google with Mobile Safari. Google reads the user-agent string and gives the user a page optimized for the user experience on the phone. As stated before, it is not the user that should change and go to m..example.com but the site that adepts to the user('s browser).

This leads to an optimized situation, one can swipe through images in Google images and has the least HTML overhead when visiting Google.com. There is however one thing google can do better. Spelling. Okay, there is also one thing I could do better, but that is not my point :-)

If google reads a search string and a user-agent, they could guess if the user/iPhone made a small error on the keyboard and hint to that word, just like the iPhone itself most of the times does.

So when I would search for "Ftupal" Google should see this and even though the word Drupal has only a few characters the same, changes are that I wanted to press the D next to the F and the R next to the T.

Doing this makes Google smarter then the iPhones' OS. And better at spelling and syntax as me are. For sure.

Today I had a nasty reboot of my iMac. Nothing too bad but I hate to bring all applications up and try to bring shutdown times to the bare minimum. Unfortunately the most used function on my mac (spotlight, command, space) was not working.

If this is the case with you as well, try this:

• Problem #1) Spotlight menu icon highlights, but no search form appears
• Problem #2) Spotlight search form appears, but no results are shown
• Problem #3) Spotlight search works, but results are poor and incomplete

While not entirely sure what causes any of these problems, try these troubleshooting methods that frequently work to repair Spotlight:

The Solutions: Troubleshooting Spotlight

Solution #1: Kill SystemUIServer

• Launch ‘Activity Monitor’ (located in /Applications/Utilities/)
• Locate the process ‘SystemUIServer’, highlight it, and click the red button “Quit Process”
• Within a few seconds the menubar will rebuild itself and often Spotlight will magically work

Solution #2: Rebuild the Spotlight Index manually

• Launch ‘Terminal’ (located in /Applications/Utilities/)
• At the command prompt, type this exactly: sudo mdutil -E /
• You will be asked for your password, provide it, as this command requires administrator privelages to run
• You will receive a confirmation message saying that index will be rebuilt
• Wait until index is finished rebuilding, this can take a while depending on the size of your hard drive, amount of files, etc.
• Note: You can also rebuild the Spotlight index with MainMenu, mentioned in Solution #4

Solution #3: Change Desktop Resolution

• This is a strange fix but it works everytime for me when my Spotlight menu icon highlights but the search form doesn’t appear
• Open “System Preferences” via the Apple Menu
• Click ‘Displays’ and select a resolution smaller than what you are currently using, 640×480 seems to always work
• Select your native resolution again, changing your screen resolution back to normal
• The Spotlight search tray will magically become available again

Solution #4: Clear caches and preferences

• Clear caches and preferences relating to Spotlight, this is best done through either the free tool OnyX, or the free tool MainMenu, we recommend MainMenu because it’s easier for novices
• Download MainMenu here
• Download OnyX here
• Install MainMenu
• a little Hammer and Wrench icon will appear in your menubar
• navigate down to ‘Cleaning’ and clean out User Cache, System Cache, and Font Caches
• Note: Some users discover that just cleaning the Font caches is adequate to repair a screwy Spotlight, but it won’t hurt to clear them all

Solution #5: Reboot your Mac

• This should almost be listed as #1 just because sometimes a simple reboot will fix Spotlight, but if I can avoid a reboot I will, and often, a reboot isn’t good enough

Hopefully that covers it, and Spotlight should be working good as new again. If we missed something, feel free to contribute in the comments below.

Happy Spotlighting!

And watch for the spotlight icon when you do a change, it should have a small fading dot in the middle so you can see it is rebuilding.

(from OSX Daily)

There is a hidden shortcut in Mac OSX 10.5 and higer, when you press control/command/d in anay cocoa application, it will popup a dictory entry about the word you are hovering. As stated, it only works in cocoa apps like Safari, iWorks and iLife and not in firefox, word or chrome.