One Giant Robot After Another » Mac OS X http://kang-chen.com/wp Kang Chen's Online Portfolio and Blog Thu, 18 Mar 2010 02:27:49 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Improving VLC Player load times of .MKV files on Snow Leopard http://kang-chen.com/wp/2009/11/28/improving-vlc-player-load-times-of-mkv-files-on-snow-leopard/ http://kang-chen.com/wp/2009/11/28/improving-vlc-player-load-times-of-mkv-files-on-snow-leopard/#comments Sun, 29 Nov 2009 05:29:19 +0000 Kang http://kang-chen.com/wp/?p=103 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:http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=64302&start=15

The fix is pretty simple assuming you are not scared of entering a command in the terminal:

  1. Open terminal (Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app)
  2. Copy and paste this: ‘sudo chmod a+w /usr/X11/var/cache/fontconfig’ without the quotes
  3. Enter your admin password (for most people, that’s just your current account’s password if you are an admin)
  4. Open a .MKV file and close it after it starts playing
  5. Now open any .MKV file again and things should be as snappy as before!
]]> http://kang-chen.com/wp/2009/11/28/improving-vlc-player-load-times-of-mkv-files-on-snow-leopard/feed/ 28 Enhanced Open Terminal Here, for Leopard at Maururu http://kang-chen.com/wp/2009/07/14/enhanced-open-terminal-here-for-leopard-at-maururu/ http://kang-chen.com/wp/2009/07/14/enhanced-open-terminal-here-for-leopard-at-maururu/#comments Tue, 14 Jul 2009 16:48:34 +0000 Kang http://kang-chen.com/wp/?p=32 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.

To install Open Terminal Here, unzip the downloaded file and store in a place that you won’t accidentally delete. Then right click (or if you don’t have a two button mouse, Ctrl+click) on the toolbar area of a finder window and select “Customize Toolbar…”. This brings up the toolbar customization dropdown. Now drag and drop the Open Terminal Here icon to the existing toolbear area and click done. You can now open a terminal window to the same location as where you are in the finder. For more convenience, cmd+click to open the current folder in a new tab in terminal or alt+click to cd into the current directory on the foremost tab of the foremost window in terminal. You can read up more about this cool script at Enhanced Open Terminal Here, for Leopard at Maururu.

Mac finder window with Open Terminal Here installed

Mac finder window with Open Terminal Here installed

So what about the other way around of going from the current directory in terminal to finder? This is pretty simple, all you need to do is enter: “open .”

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