monline

The question at superuser.com sounds a bit differently from what I chose for my post. It's: "How do I pass command line arguments to Dock items?". However the point is the same: how to launch an app with a commandline that is a bit different from what the app's developers had in mind.

DiffMerge is an application to visually compare and merge files within Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

• Graphically shows the changes between two files. Includes intra-line highlighting and full support for editing.
• Graphically shows the changes between 3 files. Allows automatic merging (when safe to do so) and full control over editing the resulting file.
• Performs a side-by-side comparison of 2 folders, showing which files are only present in one file or the other, as well as file pairs which are identical or different.
• Right-click on any two files in Windows Explorer to diff them immediately.
• Rulesets and options provide for customized appearance and behavior.
• Compatible with 42 different character encodings.
• Identical feature set on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

I've found that in certain cases Firefox can "hang" (wait for something and not respond ) while loading a site after a click. It turns out that another possible issue is with DNS lookups.

Apple has added TRIM support for SSD drives in the 10.6.8 patch for Snow Leopard and of course 10.7.* (Lion) has TRIM support too. Unfortunately Apple decided to enable TRIM support only for Apple shipped SSD drives, so people buying an SSD from any other manufacturer have to enable this support themselves.

Using a torrent client with lots of connections my (Snow) Leopard used to get stalled (it just hangs and no app seems to be responding, but the GUI remains mostly functional though). The solution seems to be a bit of a network tweaking.

"The Porting Team is a small community that specializes in porting Windows games and applications to the Mac with some tools we like to call wrappers (Cider, CrossOver, Wine)."

"Wineskin is a tool used to make ports of Windows software to Mac OS X. The ports are in the form of normal Mac application bundle wrappers. It works like a wrapper around the Windows software, and you can share just the wrappers if you choose. Best of all, its free! Make ports/wrappers to share with others, make ports of your own open source, free, or commercial software, or just make a port for yourself! Why install and use Windows if you don’t need to?"

Working with MKV (Matroska) video files you'll pretty soon hit on Mkvtoolnix. Using it you can easily extract any track (audio, video, subtitle) from an MKV file.

It's a bit tricky:

After that you can mount the disk device as usually:
(where n is the id of the disk device you got from the first command)

The available methods are:

• To start up in 32-bit mode, press the keys "3" and "2" during boot. To start in 64-bit mode, press the keys "6" and "4" during boot.
• To make your system boot in a specific mode persistently, use one of these commands:
  
  sudo systemsetup -setkernelbootarchitecture x86_64
  or
  
  sudo systemsetup -setkernelbootarchitecture i386