JollysFastVNC Expiring for you? Here's how to run it

I used to use the nice JollysFastVNC every once in a while. It would occasionally pop up a message to upgrade to the newest version.

Today, however, I noticed that my version (98.50) expired and that the newest version is no longer free.

You can easily get your older version running by adjusting your system date back to late October and after launching it setting the date correctly again.

Or, you can use these instructions to do all of that automatically for you:

1. Run the following command from you Terminal, just once on each Mac you want the workaround to function, and enter your password:

sudo chmod u+s /bin/date

2. Save the following into a file named jf.cmd in your home folder:

jfvncdate=`date "+%m%d%H%M%y"`

date 1015160009

/Applications/JollysFastVNC.app/Contents/MacOS/JollysFastVNC &

sleep 2
date $jfvncdate

3. Run this Terminal command just once, and enter your password:

sudo chmod 700 ~/jf.cmd

That's it. From now on, to run JollysFastVNC simply run in your Terminal:

jf.cmd

Lumosity getting better

I've been trying out Lumosity for a while. Seems to have definite positive effects on the psyche, along with adverse effects on both my RSI and certain non-cognitive parts of the psyche..

I quickly reached the most advanced levels of most of the games there (there are a few which I seem to be quite average in though.) But then I noticed a substantial stress getting built up concerning pushing my limits higher and substantial disappointments when I happen to regress in some mental aspects. So this in fact ads a psychological/emotional part that if you bother to observe and appease in yourself, can help you really improve yourself.

Take it for a free trial:

Testing your website's visibility from other countries

I've been looking for a while for a way to test how different aspects of my websites, e.g. their search ranking, differ from country to country. Normal proxy servers, such as those you can get at xroxy.com, are more often than not slow, unreliable, and worst of all -- tend to get blacklisted by Google and others.

Meet Hide-My-IP: It let's you choose specific countries through which to route your browsing, and does that through private high-performance proxy servers. I'm referring to their paid version ($29) with the "premium subscription" ($7/month) -- the free trial is practically useless.

Give it a try: http://www.hide-my-ip.com/

MacSpeech !!

I've recently been trying to reduce the strain on my hands by offloading much of my typing to speech recognition software. I gave a shot for a while to the built in speech recognition in Windows Vista but the level of accuracy left me frustrated much of the time. Perhaps if I were to spend patiently several months training it it would have become acceptable, but it unfortunately doesn't have a way to export and import users speech profiles.

Not to mention that I had to use a secondary laptop with Vista installed, plus a clip board sharing program in order to use the dictated text on my Mac.

At last, MacSpeech came to the help! Try it out for yourself and, oh, get a 10% discount by using the code DICTATE10

"Entire Message" search disabled / grayed-out in Mail.app

The Apple discussion forums are full of people complaining about
Mail.app being naughty and not allowing to search by "Entire Message".

I've also wasted some hours trying to work around this when it
inflicted me, with no luck.

Until, finally, I tried merely restarting the machine and vóila! It
was back...

Solution for launchd not running scripts without any apparent reason

After many weeks of frustration and research we've finally found the solution for launchd mysteriously not running scripts (and not showing any errors).

The solution:

Simply use an absolute path to your script file in the launchd plist file.

Mac Ports Troubleshooting: "error: command '-DNDEBUG' failed with exit status 1"

Several different port installation attempts have been throwing this error for me lately:

error: command '-DNDEBUG' failed with exit status 1

I researched a workaround but to no avail.

Finally the solution presented itself:

Simply run the same port installation command again!

If this tip saved you some time, feel free to leave a comment.