From How to make /opt visible in Mac OS X Finder:
$ sudo SetFile -a v /opt
Author: peteware
DVD Ripping
I’ve been watching more movies on my laptop while commuting to work on the train. I’d mostly been happy either buying them from iTunes or just playing the DVD. However, lately I’ve wanted to have a couple available and decided to try some of the dvd rippers.
I’d used “Mac the Ripper” but it’s getting rather dated and since I upgraded to Snow Leopard I’ve been avoiding installing Rosetta to run old PowerPC binaries. So it was out.
I tried Aieesoft’s “DVD Ripper” but the demo wasn’t that impressive and I didn’t like the way the movies were organized. Why no titles?
I ended up trying Ripit and it does just what I want: insert a DVD and it copies it and names it appropriately.
It worked pretty well.
Price is $19.95 and you get 10 free conversions to try it out. It’s based on the open source Handbrake decoders.
Google dominating search
There’s talk that Bing has gotten to a 10% market share in search. Apple Insider instead points out that the study didn’t include a big part of Google’s search business (you know, maps, video, local directory). Here’s a chart showing how Google is dominating and pushing nearly 90%:
Way Cool Html
What an incredible use of scrollbars. Here’s a digital clock:
Unemployment rate
Pick your favorite, worst recession and compare with how we are doing now. There are even predictions that unemployment may reach 12%.
Unemployment is always a relative thing but this chart looks at employment as a percentage of the total work force. From Brad DeLong:
Gold bugs unite!
Here’s one of those info-graphics to get all the gold bugs in a dizzy:
Paris
Faranak with Notre Dame in the background.
Delay
Sorry for the long delay. I’ve been playing around a bit.
sqlite3 rocks
I’d been using the sqlite3 that came installed on Mac OS X but I ran into some portability issues — not every system has it installed. So I decided to bite the bullet and include it with my code.
It was trivial! I downloaded a zip with 3 files (sqlite3.c,sqlite3.h, and sqlite3ext.h). Added sqlite3.c to my list of sources and it just compiled! No configuration, no trickly flags, it just worked!
Taxes on the top 1%
From Conor Clarke is this chart plotting the effective federal tax rate of the upper 1%.
First off, never trust a chart that doesn’t start at 0 but anyway. What’s interesting is that this is the effective rate being paid (not the marginal rate).
Here’s some related information that shows how income has grown for the wealthy. This is also the chart that makes a great argument that income inequality isn’t representative of an educational gap. Presumably, the top 10% have all received comparable educations — yet the top 1%’s income has grown even more.
And in the most recent past, the very highest earners did very well indeed, capturing almost three-quarters of total income growth in the economic expansion of 2002 to 2006, while the remaining 99 percent of the U.S. population split among themselves the final 25 percent of the increase.
Pete Ware 