I would gladly pay more than $20 a year to have full access to my 150+ gig library of music. Until then, I guess I’m not allowed to play

Mac OS X Lion (10.7), introduced a bunch of new features to the Mac platform. At the same time it’s taken away some things that experienced Mac users are used to. The idea was to remove things that the average user doesn’t need.

If your like me, you might have yelled “Hey! Where is the Library folder in OS X Lion?”, when trying to access data from the iPhone simulator.

After doing some research, I found that the folder was not gone, it had simply been hidden. Running the following command from the terminal, I was able to make my Library folder visible once again.

chflags nohidden ~/Library/

You may also need to restart finder by using this command

killall Finder && open /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app

If for some strange reason you want to go back to being a n00b and hide the Library folder again, you can use the following command

chflags hidden ~/Library

Just like my last post, I was working with a directory of about 1000 files. There was all sorts of problems with the way they were named. Anyone whos used a *nix type system will know that “.jpg”, “.Jpg”, “.JPG” are all very separate things. To solve the issue I was having I needed to rename all of the files in the directory to lowercase.

I fired up my friend the Mac terminal and ran the following command:

for i in *; do mv "$i" "$(echo $i|tr A-Z a-z)"; done

The code loops through each of the files in the current directory and renames it to the lowercase equivalent. fast, simple, elegant. Major time saver.

Recently I was presented with a problem where I had a directory of about 1000 graphic files of mixed formats (png, gif, bmp, jpg), and I needed to convert them all to jpg files.

I tried various solutions but I ended using the following command in my Mac’s terminal.

mkdir jpegs; sips -s format jpeg *.* --out jpgs

This command creates directory called “jpgs”, and converts all of the files in the current directory into .jpg format, and moves them into the newly created “jpgs” direcotry.

It truly saved the day.

That’s right, I’m speaking at the 2011 Orange County WordCamp, May 14th.

What is a WordCamp? WordCamp is a conference that focuses on everything WordPress. WordCamps are informal, community-organized events that are put together by WordPress users. Everyone from casual users to core developers participate, share ideas, and get to know each other.

I’m going to be presenting the topic, “Optimizing WordPress: Speed Matters”

By itself, WordPress is fast and snappy application but over time your site may become sluggish and laggy. A slow site is not good for your readers, or your search engine rankings. In a one hour presentation, I’m going to show some practical ways to optimize your WordPress sites content and configuration. The presentation will cover best practices, helpful plugins and real life optimization examples.

I’m excited to check out the other topics that are being presented. The OC WordCamp has three distinct tracks of sessions, beginners, advanced, and business minded users.

If you’re free on May 14th 2011 and love WordPress, you should come and hang out with some fellow WordPress users. http://2011.oc.wordcamp.org

Instagram is one of my favorite iPhone apps. It’s sort of a visual twitter. People post images instead of short messages. Your followers can then “like” and comment on them. My Instagram username is “JoshHighland”, follow me

Click here to view the embedded video.

“touch” is a handy unix utility to udate the time stamp on a file. Recenly I ran into a case on my mac book pro that required me to update all of the files and sub-directories of a project with the current date.

In terminal, I could have gone one by one an used this command on each file

touch thisIsAFileName

But after a few moments of onterweb searching, I came across a perfect solution

find . -print0 | xargs -0 touch

This command will find all of the file in all sub-directories, even if they have spaces in their name, and set their last updated time to the current time.

Just a handy tip I thought I would share

It’s no secret that I LOVE WordPress. I’ve been using the software for 6 years and have no plans to stop any time soon. Last year I attended WordCamp LA with @JasonKeller, it was awesome. I knew that I had to be involved with WordCamp 2010.

When WordCamp 2010 was announced, I signed up as a speaker. My topic, “Improving the performance of WordPress”.

I had a great time preparing and delivering my presentation. A lot of people asked me to post the slides online. I decided to do one better, and post a recorded version of my presentation.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Download the slides in PDF format

Recently, I got a mac laptop at work, which is sup[er sweet, but I wanted to hook it up to a real monitor, keyboard and mouse. All very easy things to do. The problem I had was that the laptop was acting as the primary monitor. Every application that I drug over to the secondary monitor worked great, but the application tool bar was still on the laptop.. annoying.

I did a quick Google search to see if there was a solution to the problem. There was, and it’s dead simple to put into action.

Connect the external monitor

• Start up the “System Preferences” app
• Click on “Display Preferences”
• Within Display Preferences, choose Arrangement. You should see two blue squares that represent each display, main and secondary. On the main display you’ll notice a bar along the top.
• Click and drag this bar from the Main Display to the Secondary Display.
• Close Display Preferences
• That’s it!