Macbook Pro file browser replacement

My little Lenovo netbook died of old age, so I picked up one of the new Apple Macbooks with a so called retina display. The high resolution screen is absolutely worth the money.

My main gripe with a Mac is the horrid excuse for a file browser called Finder. A file browser that doesn't allow you to browse all files, is really not a terribly bright idea - it doesn't do much of anything really and is quite useless. Even Microsoft Windows Explorer works better than Finder.

Fortunately some kind souls have coded up a few alternatives including one called Macintosh Explorer (by Rage). You can get it here: http://www.ragesw.com/products/explorer.html

Mac Explorer is free and it works - a good combination of features - although I like the Linux file browsers such as Dolphin and Thunar better.

Another well kept secret, is to extend the Finder with a plug-in called Xtrafinder (by Tran Ky Nam), which makes Finder a whole lot more useful:
http://www.trankynam.com/xtrafinder/

The Mac keyboard is a bit crummy - the Carriage Return key is too small and there is no Delete key, only a Backspace. The Ctrl-D combination usually works as delete. The X-Windows highlight and middle click also doesn't work - instead it is highlight drag and drop, but you can only drag and drop to something that is already visible. Some mindless things to get used to again - fortunately there is a configuration button for the mouse to make it scroll the 'correct' way.

The desktop user experience of a Mac is OK, it just feels a bit 20th century. I prefer KDE - I want my virtual desktops and wobbly windows! Yeah, I know, "Small Things..."

Comments

OpenEMS with Octave and SciLAB

I wanted to do some advanced RF antenna development work and needed an electromagnetic field solver that is a bit more up to date than NEC2 . Commercial solvers from Matlab , Ansys and others are hideously expensive (in the order of $20,000 to $50,000) and do not fit in the wallet of a hobbyist or a small consulting company. Recently, openEMS became available and it fills the niche with a capable free tool. In general, openEMS is a solver - a Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) numerical engine. You interact with it through Octave , which is almost identical to Matlab . You can watch a good video by Thorsten Liebig here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=ThMLf0d5gaE Getting it to work is a little painful, but it is free, so bear with it - then save a backup clone, or a zipped copy of the whole virtual machine directory and NEVER update it, to ensure that it keeps going and doesn't get broken by future updates, right when you are ...

Parasitic Quadrifilar Helical Antenna

This article was reprinted in OSCAR News, March 2018: http://www.amsat-uk.org If you want to receive Satellite Weather Pictures , then you need a decent antenna, otherwise you will receive more noise than picture. For polar orbit satellites, one needs an antenna with a mushroom shaped radiation pattern . It needs to have strong gain towards the horizon where the satellites are distant, less gain upwards where they are close and as little as possible downwards, which would be wasted and a source of noise. Most satellites are spin stabilized and therefore the antenna also needs circular polarization, otherwise the received signal will flutter as the antennas rotate through nulls. The helical antenna, first proposed by Kraus in 1948, is the natural solution to circular polarized satellite communications. It is a simple twisted wire - there seems to be nothing to it. Various papers have been published on helix antennas, so the operation is pretty well ...

Yagi Antenna for 900 MHz ISM Band

I like tinkering with wire antenna designs, since they are simple and cheap to make. Mr Yagi invented his antenna about 100 years ago, but there are still some things left to learn about it. 900 MHz ISM Band Yagi The 900 MHz ISM band ranges from 902 to 928 MHz. Covering the whole band with a single Yagi antenna is difficult, since they are inherently narrow band devices. Consequently some tweaking is required and the result below is a desensitized design that can be built and replicated quite easily, but you need a network analyzer - "To Measure, is to Know!" A Yagi generally consists of a Reflector, Radiator and one or more Director elements, arranged on a boom. For a small Yagi, a wooden ruler works a treat, since one can easily mark the position of the wires. The wire elements are fastened to the bottom of the ruler with hot glue. The wire elements are made from straightened out jumbo size paper clips. The balun, is tw...

Aeronetworks sro - Airborne Linux

Search This Blog