Installing OS X 10.11 El Capitan inside Parallels Desktop

This is actually surprisingly straightforward, once you know the hoops to jump through. Essentially there are 4 main things we need to do: Download El Capitan from the App Store Prepare an install image Create a virtual machine Install El Capitan So let’s take a look at those, one by one… Step 1: Download El Capitan […]

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shareit: Simple FTP-based file sharing from the command line

File sharing websites tend to have ads everywhere, and long running HTTP uploads of large files can be a pain in the backside, so I stopped using them a while back. Whenever I needed to share a file with someone, I’d figure out the file’s MD5 sum (to avoid naming collisions), fire up Transmit (the nicest Mac […]

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Thoughts on switching from Chrome to Safari 5.2 [updated]

I’ve used Google Chrome almost exclusively as my main browser since 2009, but after seeing Apple’s WWDC keynote last week I decided to give Safari another try, because being able to send a tab from one device to another (without using Pastebot to just copy/paste the URL across devices),  is one of my most-wanted features. […]

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Switching between Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Server

It’s easy enough to start out with an Ubuntu Server machine and install the desktop packages, leaving you with an Ubuntu Desktop machine. Just run: sudo aptitude install ubuntu-desktop …and you’re done. Unfortunately, going the other way isn’t so easy. Just removing the ubuntu-desktop package doesn’t remove all the other packages for me, I had […]

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FaceTime missing on your iPhone 4? Here’s how to fix it.

I discovered today that FaceTime didn’t work on my iPhone 4: people couldn’t start FaceTime calls with me and I didn’t have any of the FaceTime buttons present. Turns out that this problem is caused when restoring from an iPhone 3G running iOS 4 — it seems the FaceTime on/off setting is imported from the […]

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YouTube vs Viacom: things get ridiculous

It seems that things have progressed into the ridiculous in the YouTube vs Viacom spat: For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately “roughed up” the […]

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