Improving VLC Player load times of .MKV files on Snow Leopard

Ever notice that MKV files load significantly slower than before in VLC on Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard)? I did, and for someone who has a lot of media files encoded in the format, it’s almost unusable to have to wait a minute while seeing the CPU on one core maxed out. The version of VLC player I have is 1.0.3, the latest as of this post. However, the issue seems to be around since at least 1.0.1 as discussed on this page:

Updating Your Ruby on Rails Application Custom Environment via Passenger Pane

If you are working with a relatively up-to-date Ruby on Rails stack, chances are you would be using Phusion Passenger to deploy your application. Although passenger makes it extremely easy to deploy and restart your app, it also added a bit more complication when managing the Apache configuration files. The Passenger Pane (for Mac only) helped alleviate this problem by providing a nice little visual panel in your Mac’s Preference Pane:

Enhanced Open Terminal Here, for Leopard at Maururu

Ever find it annoying that you can’t go from the terminal to the same directory in the finder or vice versa on the Mac? So am I! It just seems terribly inefficient for power users who are proficient with the terminal to have to open up the terminal app and then manually cd into the current directory. Aside from just a waste of time and extra keystrokes (yes, tab to auto-complete does help a lot), it’s not easy to remember the exact path to the current directory. On top of that, OS X likes to make it harder for regular users to access root folders and it becomes a pain to use. I finally gave up and googled for solutions to go from finder to terminal today and found a great time-saver: Enhanced Open Terminal Here.

Inserting new line in echo command

Out of curiosity and the perfectionist in me, I “had” to print a line of text in the output inside a BASH shell script. I didn’t really want to split them into multiple echo statements since it’s a waste of space and actually harder to read for me. The first thing I tried was:

> echo “Line1\nLine2″ # Line1\nLine2

That clearly didn’t work out so well… so I thought maybe my Mac (OS X 10.5.7) likes ‘\r\n’ more:

Manually Downgrading iPhone OS

If for some reason you’ve ran into a situation where you want to downgrade your iPhone’s OS but iTunes just won’t comply with your command, I’ve found that there’s an easy way to force the action:

1. Connect your iPhone to the computer and have iTunes opened
2. Hold down both the power and home buttons until the iPhone disappeared from the devices list in iTunes
3. Release the power button but continue to hold down the home button until iTunes detects there’s a device in recovery mode
4. Hold down shift on Windows or option key on the Mac while pressing Restore in the iPhone screen in iTunes to initiate a restore to the desired version of firmware