You know, we don't grow most of the food we eat. We wear clothes other people make. We speak a language that other people developed. We use a mathematics that other people evolved... I mean, we're constantly taking things. It's a wonderful, ecstatic feeling to create something that puts it back in the pool of human experience and knowledge.
— Steve Jobs

How-to Guides

GSM Phone as Mac OS X Modem and CDMA Phone as Mac OS X Modem
Popular guides on how to use your cell phone as a wireless modem with a Mac.

Rancilio Silvia Espresso HOWTO
Everything you need to know to use your Rancilio Silvia machine.


Software - Mac OS X

SafariPlus
Manage cookies and disable animated images in Safari.

Genius
Award-winning application that helps you memorize things.

Lexikon
The online Lexin Swedish dictionary, on your Mac.

Pandora widget
A Dashboard widget for Pandora, the personalized streaming music service.

Dopewars
An addictive little game, ported from Palm OS.


Source Code - Cocoa Foundation

NSStringRegEx addition. A category of NSString that adds support for matching regular expressions.

NSString+Similiarity addition. A category of NSString that adds a method to compare strings fuzzily.

NSDictionaryCaseInsensitive addition. A category of NSDictionary that adds support for case-insensitive keys.

NSStream sample code. There's very little documentation or code for Cocoa-based networking. This is a sample implementation of a server using NSInputStream and NSOutputStream. Specifically, it makes it possible to use Foundation, not CFNetwork, for listening to a TCP port.


Source Code - Cocoa AppKit

TableColumnDateFormatter. A subclass of NSFormatter that provides Finder-like dynamic formatting behavior when resizing a column of dates in a NSTableView. Localizable.

French, Japanese, German, Spanish localizations contributed by Intego.

CollapsableSplitView widget. A subclass of NSSplitView that adds a method to programmatically collapse a subview safely.

IconTextFieldCell widget. A subclass of NSTextFieldCell that displays both an image and text. Good for use in a table view, to make it look like the Finder's list view.

LevelIndicator widget. A subclass of NSView that draws a level indicator for displaying free disk space, etc. [Obsoleted by NSLevelIndicator in Tiger!]

SimpleProgressIndicator sample code. A subclass of NSView that draws a flat, non-animating progress indicator.


Source Code - Darwin / Mac OS X

LastEmailed
Queries Spotlight for email messages and updates your Address Book with a "last emailed" date for each person. Requires Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger.

dumpicon
Writes out a TIFF file of the icon for a specified file type.
usage: dumpicon -t type -o outPath

SetInvisible.c
usage: SetInvisible (-v|-V) path
/Developer/Tools/SetFile -a V doesn't seem to always work. This thing does.

extract.c
usage: extract [-n length] [-s offset] file
A friend asked me if there was any Unix command-line tool to extract portions of large files. head, tail, cut, perl, awk, hexdump don't exactly fit the bill. Amazed that there was no such tool, I wrote one for Mac OS X / Darwin.

Update: Toby W. points me to the dd command, e.g. dd if=file bs=1 skip=offset count=length.


Older Software

Mozilla for Mac OS X
I helped with the Carbon port of Mozilla in 1999. I also single-handedly ported much of the Unix M12 code base and returned the resulting patches to the Mozilla project. Look for me on http://www.mozilla.org/credits/!

CleverKeys
A tiny utility that I originally conceived and wrote for myself one day. A company liked it, so they created a web site and trademark for it.


Community

Late Night Food in Silicon Valley
Food for central Silicon Valley night owls. [old!]

My Favorite Restaurants
My favorite restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area (mostly Silicon Valley)

Primitive Camping Near Palo Alto
Family, Environmental, Hike-In public campsites in the San Francisco Bay Area, within an hour of Palo Alto, California.

The Indiana Academy Class of 1995
One of my pet projects is helping my high school class stay together. This includes creating a popular Yahoo! Group and coordinating Class of 1995 reunions.


Links

Silicon Valley Lunchtime Dives
The Bose FAQ
Two excellent examples (not by me) of giving back to the Internet.

Self-evolution and self-evolving systems by Michael Webb
Freality by Pablo Mayrgundter

Creative Commons - flexible copyright licenses for creative works