How to delay (and make the startup faster) login items in Mac OS X

Posted by admin | Posted on 10-02-2012

Category : How to

Tags:

After using your macbook or iMac for some months, you probably started to notice that it is become slower and slower to have you computer ready to go when you boot it. This happens because there are many applications that, when you install, adds items to the login items. These items are applications that start as soon as your login session begins, and makes your computer need more time to be ready to be used.

If you go to System Preferences ->  Users and Groups -> Click on your user -> Login tab, you will see a list of applications that are being opened every time you login. Look at mine, for exemple:

In my case, my computer was very slow. So every time I boot and I log in, even when I could see the menus and everything, there was many processed being started, and that was making my computer very slow. These login items are usually important, because they start apps that you need to be running to have a software working properly (e.g. Dropbox).

Luckily, there is a brilliant Application that allows you to delay the startup of these login items. By doing that, your computer will be ready to be used sooner, and you will still have your login items working. So, lets see how to do it.

First, download the DelayedLauncher using this link: http://www.taoeffect.com/delayedlauncher/DelayedLauncher.zip

Now, run DelayedLauncher. Once you see its window. Go to your Mac’s System Preferences ->  Users and Groups -> Click on your user -> Login tab. All the apps you have there, you have to add to DelayedLauncher. In my case, I have 6 apps, Caffeine, CalendarBar, Cloud, Dropbox, Growl and Xmarks. All these (or at least most of them) you can find opening Finder and going to the Applications folder. Drag every App you want from the Applications folder to DelayedLauncher and select for how long you want the delay to be for this specific application:

Do this for every application you have in your Login items. If you want to add some extra applications, feel free. If you don’t find an application, that is in your Login items, in the Application folder, you cal right click the application name in the Login Items, and choose “Show in Finder”:

Once you are done, the DelayedLauncher window should look like this (with different applications, of course):

Now it is time to remove the applications from the Login Items, so they don’t start all at the same time when you log in. Just select them all, and click on “-” to remove them.

The last step is to add the DelayedLauncher to the Login Items. Just drag the DelayedLauncher.app from your Applications folder to your login items. This will be your only item in your Login items. Don’t forget to check the Hide checkbox. This will make the application not appear on the screen when you log in.

And that’s it. Now your login items won’t immediately start after you login, making you startup a lot faster.

Optional: Hiding the DelayedLauncher dock’s icon

If you want to hide the DelayedLauncher icon, open a terminal and type:

defaults write /Applications/DelayedLauncher.app/Contents/Info LSUIElement 1

Now, the icon will not appear. If you want to revert it, just type this:

defaults write /Applications/DelayedLauncher.app/Contents/Info LSUIElement 0

And that’s it!

ps: Some applications (e.g. Dropbox) check automatically if their Application is in the Login Items, and if not, they add the Application back there. So, if after you boot, some Applications are back to your login items, go to the Preferences of each one of these Softwares and configure it for not to run automatically after login (or system startup, etc).

Popularity: 2% [?]

Setting up a remote git server using ssh

Posted by admin | Posted on 09-02-2012

Category : How to, Programming

Tags:

Hello,

This is how to set up a remote git server using ssh.

First of all, install git in your machine and also on the server. Then, you have to setup the server by doing the following:

Setting Up the server:

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mkdir /path/to/your/desired/repository.git
cd /path/to/your/desired/repository.git
git --bare init

Simple as this. And you are done in the server side. Now go to your local machine e start using Git.

Set up your application to use git

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cd /path/to/your/application
git init
git add
git commit -m 'first commit'

After doing it, you are already using git, but locally, to send your files to the server, do the following:

Committing from your local repository to your server

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git remote add origin git@REMOTE_SERVER:/path/to/your/desired/repository.git
git push origin master

And that’s it, now you have your server and your machine working together.

Now, have a look at a few basic commands:

Git basic commands

To checkout (svn/cvs “language”) your files:

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git clone url

To update your local repository with the remote files:

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git pull

To commit your files to your local repository:

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git commit -a

To commit your files to your remote repository:

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git push

To see the difference from modified files to the files in the repository:

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git diff

To check the status of you files:

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git status

To check logs

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git log

or

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git blame file

Enjoy ;)

Popularity: 2% [?]

Adding footnotes in tables

Posted by admin | Posted on 28-09-2010

Category : How to

Tags:

If you have ever tried to put a footnote reference inside a table, you problem had problems. Unfortunately, in LaTeX the way you have to insert footnotes in a table is not as easy as inserting in the main body of the document. However, it is not difficult at all.

The difference is that you will have to insert a reference to your footnote inside your table, and afterwards insert the text. Look at the example below:

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\begin{table}[h]\footnotesize
  \begin{tabular} {l|l} \hline
      Header 1 & Header 2\footnotemark[1]  \\ \hline
      col1 & col2 \\ \hline
      col1 & col 2 \\ \hline
  \end{tabular}
\end{table}
\footnotetext[1]{This is the footnote text}

As you could see, you have to add an \footnotemark[1] next to the item you want to insert the footnote and add the \footnotetext[1]{} after \end{table}

Now you will have footnote in a table :)

Popularity: 4% [?]

Using colors in LaTeX

Posted by admin | Posted on 21-09-2010

Category : How to

Tags:

LaTeX documents are usually written in black font in a white background, but sometimes is important to add some colors to your text. Adding colors to your text is very simple, first, insert the color package in the preamble.

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\usepackage{color}

By using this package you will have the following many pre-defined colors like: blue, green, red, yellow, orange, etc (have a look a this link to check the other colors).

You can also define custom colors, to do that, just use the rgb or cmyk values of the color you want:

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\definecolor{myblue}{cmyk}{0.8,0.37,0,0}
\definecolor{mydarkgreen}{RGB}{0,100,0}

And finally, to use these colors in the text, just call it by using {\color{your-color} your text}:

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{\color{blue} TEST}
{\color{myblue} TEST2}

Popularity: 4% [?]

Changing line spacing in LaTeX

Posted by admin | Posted on 16-09-2010

Category : How to

Tags:

Here is a quick tip about how to change line spacing in LaTeX. Basically there are 2 main ways to do this.

The first method doesn’t require to use an external package and  change line spacing in the whole document. To do this, just add the following line to the preamble of your tex file:

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\linespread{1.6} % 1.6 for double spacing, 1.3 for one and a half line spacing.

To change line spacing in a specific environment you will use the second way, which is to add \usepackage{setspace} to the preamble and then you can make use of the command \singlespacing, \doublespacing, or \onehalfspacing to specify the line spacing for all sections and paragraphs until you sued another command to change it.

Popularity: 25% [?]

Fixing problem with PNG images with LaTeX

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Posted by admin | Posted on 13-09-2010

Category : How to

Tags:

When we are using PNG images in LaTex, if you do not define the bounding box, you see the follwing message:

“Cannot determine size of graphic in figuras/picture.png (noBoundingBox)”

To avoid this issue, you need to set some extra parameters when inserting PNG images. Look at this example:

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\begin{figure}[htb]
    \centering
    \includegraphics[scale=0.5,bb=0 0 300 500]{picture.png}
    \caption{Some description about the picture}
    \label{picture-label}
\end{figure}

This example you not present the “noBoundingBox” error because we have set the bounding box by using the “bb=0 0 300 500″, where 300 is the image height and 500 the width.

Another alternative is try to compile using “pdflatex” other than “latex”. However you cannot have EPS images if you use “pdflatex”.

Popularity: 8% [?]

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