Tao’s Blog

Accesskeys are useful ways to navigate web pages using the keyboard instead of the mouse. For introduction, check the following pages:

Accesskeys: Unlocking Hidden Navigation

Access Keys Wikipedia entry

Fortunately, both Twitter and Facebook use access keys for easy navigation and accessibility:

Twitter accesskeys:

0: Skip Past Navigation

1: Home

2: Skip to Navigation

3: Jump to the sidebar

h: Home

p: Profile

=: Find People

s: Settings Link

?: Help

l (Letter L): Sign out

u: Text area

>: Direct Message

n: New Result Notification

m: Reply

d: Inbox

i: Inbox

o: Send

f: Favorites

r: Retweets

/: Search

Facebook accesskeys:

1: Home

2: Friend Request

3: Messages

4: Notifications

5: Home

6: Profile

7: Account

Six snow photos taken with my cell phone

A really big snow in the city. Commuting was a mess. Hopefully tomorrow will be better, a better tomorrow, that’s a movie’s title, isn’t it?

I have a Panasonic DMP-BD605 Blu-Ray player, which fits my Panasonic TC-42X1 TV perfectly: they share the same remote control codes, so I can use only one remote control for both TV and Blu-ray player. With the Viera Link control mechanism, TV and player can communicate with each other: if I turn on the player, it will automatically turn on the TV via the HDMI interface, etc.

Viera Link

The player has YouTube player, Amazon Video player, Google Picasa, but NO Netflix! That’s the biggest issue. I hope sometime later, they will add the functionality through a software update, but it all depends on the business deals between Panasonic and Netflix. In the time being, I just use my computer to watch Netflix, with HDMI and wireless keyboard and trackpad.

Previously, I never paid much attentions to the YouTube account details: Subscriptions, Channels, Playlists, and Favorites. All I need is to use YouTube to find videos and watch right there.

Now after I played with the Panasonic DMP-BD605’s YouTube player, I realized that the best way to enjoy this feature is to populate my favorites and playlists on my computer, then watch the video content on my Blu-ray player. When I log on to my YouTube account with the Blu-ray player, I can directly jump into my playlists, favorites, and subscriptions; it beats searching YouTube video content with the remote control numeric keypad pants off.

Yesterday, discovered on one of my Tiger laptop, the search box of the System Preferences behaved funny.

Usually, when you type something in the search box of the System Preferences window, the spotlight will highlight the relevant items, so one can easily open the preference with arrow keys and enter key.

However, in my case, I typed something, the whole window darkened, but nothing was highlighted. Very strange. I created a new user, logged on, no such problem, must be my account settings. Logically, I went to the ~/Library folder to have a look.

The first thing I noticed was the whole ~/Library folder is rather big, more than 500 MB. The Caches occupied the lion’s share, more than 400 MB. Searched the internet, many suggested that it can be safely removed. I made a copy, trashed the ~/Library/Caches folder.

Tested, the System Preferences search box is back to normal.

Earlier last year, I started to use the first version of Google Chrome as my main web browser on Windows PC. It is sleek, fast, and behaves well with the accesskey HTML attributes. Also, it conforms with my minimalistic UI philosophy perfectly.

However, with the advent of the very next version, Chrome 2, the accesskey support was unceremoniously broken. It is a big deal for me to use the accesskey attributes, since my customized GTD PHP and other online applications use a ton of them. I cannot image myself using the web apps without keyboard shortcuts. Life is too short for mousing around, also, screens are too big nowadays.

I promptly switched to Firefox. It supported accesskey attributes exquisitely, with the about:config options, one can easily change the default accesskey from Alt-Shift to a more convenient single Alt key.

Last month, the much anticipated Firefox 3.6 came out. It is faster, better looking, and more Chrome look-like. The new tab opens next to the originating tab, similar to Chrome. Persona is just another moniker for Chrome Theme. The accesskey functionality is intact. I like this new version.

In the mean time, Chrome underwent two more incarnations, version 3 and 4. Both restored the accesskey support, but with some variations. With Chrome 3, one can use the accesskey D, E, F, but with Chrome 4, those keys are used by the browser itself.

Normally, I expect the accesskey overrides the default browser keyboard shortcuts, for example, if Alt-A is used by both web page and browser, the browser should honor the web page first. But a lot of browser treats them differently and inconsistently. For example, Alt-D always put focus on the address bar in Internet Explorer, and Chrome, but Firefox honors the web page accesskey first.

In Internet Explorer, Alt-A goes to the favorite menu, but when web page uses accesskey A, it honors the web page first. But Alt-D is a different story. Maybe Alt-D is too important to mess around, since it puts keyboard focus right to the address bar? By the way, in Chrome and Firefox, Ctrl-L does the same in addition to Alt-D.

Anyway, Chrome 4 chose to ignore the Alt-D, E, F in the web pages. Instead, Alt-D goes to the address bar, Alt-E opens the page icon, and Alt-F to opens the tool icon. If the web page happens to contain D, E, F accesskey links, one must use Shift-Alt-D, Shift-Alt-E, and Shift-Alt-F to access them.

For now, Firefox 3.6 is my main browser on Mac OS X and Windows. Consistency is always good.

There is a command line program called file, here are some examples:

Cocoa Application:

$ file /Applications/Fetch.app/Contents/MacOS/Fetch
/Applications/Fetch.app/Contents/MacOS/Fetch: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures
/Applications/Fetch.app/Contents/MacOS/Fetch (for architecture ppc): Mach-O executable ppc
/Applications/Fetch.app/Contents/MacOS/Fetch (for architecture i386): Mach-O executable i386

Carbon Application:

$ file /Applications/Adobe\ Photoshop\ 7/Adobe\ Photoshop\ 7.0/Contents/MacOS/Adobe\ Photoshop\ 7.0
/Applications/Adobe Photoshop 7/Adobe Photoshop 7.0/Contents/MacOS/Adobe Photoshop 7.0: header for PowerPC PEF executable


I am still using a 2005 PowerBook G4. Last night, while wakening the machine from standing by mode, I heard some noise in the CD/DVD drive, and it didn’t sound normal.

Out of curiosity, I took a DVD, trying to insert into the slot. Oops, it seemed there was something already inside, and got stuck. Maybe another disc got stuck? But I was sure that I would never leave a disc inside the drive before shutting down the computer.

First, I tried to open the machine up to have a peek. But before doing anything drastic, I’d better check out what people say online. A Google search led me to Apple’s official support site:

Apple Computers: Troubleshooting the slot load optical disc drive

At first sight, it was not helpful. It asked me to reset my PMU, if not working, then contact Apple support. Not now.

Reset PMU

Checked another discussion forum article, a user reported that he succeeded by power off the machine, and restart, during the restarting, he managed to load the disc successfully.

I tried, but it didn’t work. Then, I reset the PMU according to Apple’s instruction, then restarted the machine. At first, it did not work. However, I heard some noise, as if the drive trying to eject a disc. So, I repeated the PMU resetting and restarting routine, as soon as I heard the drive noise, I pushed a disc into the drive. It worked!

So I suppose that the drive mechanism got stuck for some reason. After resetting the PMU and start, the drive tried to un-stick itself, but cannot without some external push.

Anyway, I am glad my superdrive is back.

A lot very good (and bad) content is on the internet. Unfortunately, many web site publishers decided to use weird layout and strange color themes to publish their content.

For example, the following article on the T9 text input method:

T9: Text on 9 keys

For some reason, the white text on blue background makes the reading very uncomfortable and tedious for me. Fortunately, the good people at Arc90 lab made a very good tool to deal with this problem:

Readability Bookmarklet

As indicated on the page, the easiest way to use this wonderful tool is to drag the button to the bookmark toolbar. Of course, you can also put it in your bookmark menu, invoking its function by pulling down the menu. Why one want to do this? Screen space. On my smallish 12-inch PowerBook, I hide all the toolbars, but I activate the full keyboard access within Tiger OS. So I can easily use the keyboard to invoke the readability bookmarklet function.

The default OS X 10.4 Finder window has both sidebar and toolbar. Which is good, unless you are using a small screen, like me, using a 12-inch PowerBook. A toolbar and a sidebar can waste a lot of valuable screen real estate.

Two keyboard commands can relieve the pain:

Cmd-Option-T will remove both the toolbar and sidebar, make a Finder window much smaller. However, when you open a folder inside the Finder window, a new Finder window is opened, instead of opening inside the same Finder window as with the toolbar is present. To avoid the resultant screen clutter, press the option key when opening the new window (Cmd-Option-O). The current parent window will automatically close. To return to the parent window, press Cmd-Up arrow. To return to the parent window and close the current one, Cmd-Option-Up arrow.

Cmd-Option-Ctrl-T to collapse the sidebar only, the toolbar is intact. Opening an inside folder with not open a new Finder window.

I use both Mac OS X and Windows XP, both old versions. On Mac OS X side, I use the venerable Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4), and XP is even older. No plan for purchasing new hardware for the near future, so I am stuck with those two old OSes.

Constantly switched between these two OSes, some observations noted here, just in case I need to revisit them.

1. Multiple file properties

With Windows Explorer in Windows XP, the multiple files are selected, use Alt-Enter (Property command) to show the properties, the result property window will show in a single dialog the summary information of all the selected files. With OS X Finder, Cmd-I (Get Info command) will open one info dialog for each file. If you happen to have 100 files selected, Cmd-I will get you mad pretty quick. To show the summary info in a single dialog as in the case of XP, one need to use the Cmd-Ctrl-I (Get Summary Info command).

Actually, it is better to summarize the following three commands in Tiger Finder:

Cmd-I (Get Info command) to show a static info window for the selected file(s). It will display the same information even when a different file is selected in Finder. When multiple files are selected, this command will display one info window for each selected file.

Cmd-Option-I (Show Inspector command) similar to Get Info command, but the info window is a floating window, which dynamically displays the currently selected file info. Choose a different file, the inspector display changes with the selection.

Cmd-Ctrl-I (Get Summary Info command) will display only one dialog, even when multiple files are selected. It will sum up the size of all the selected files.

With XP, Alt-Enter (Property command) is like Cmd-I and Cmd-Ctrl-I combined.

2. Spotlight Comments & XP comments

When showing the Get Info (or Show Inspector) window is open, there is a Spotlight Comments text box. One can tag the selected file, which is very useful for audio and video files, since they usually don’t have text content for the Spotlight to search. Spotlight Comments provide a convenient way to tag the audio and video files.

Although it is not well know, there is a similar text field for XP files:

Select a file, Alt-Enter to open the properties window, click the Summary tab, you will be able to enter the comments for the selected file. You can also display the comments in Windows Explorer Window by select the “comments” when right-click on the column header inside Windows Explorer window.

However, unlike Spotlight in OS X, it is not guaranteed that this filed will be searched in XP. The following link, summarized the difference between OS X and XP very well:

Indexing File Contents & Metadata - XvsXP.com, Mac OS X vs. Windows XP