After spending hours trying to find the fix that does the trick (and, man, did I try them all: removed spotlight indexing from my HDD, removed launchpad db files, removed various folders and files), countless Trash emptied and reboots, I finally found the fix.

Here’s what worked for me (via stackexchange):
I opened up Terminal.app, pasted the line below, then pressed Enter:

A few minutes of waiting, and when it was done I launched the Mac App Store app and.. miracle: I was able to, once again, download my favorite app from the store.

I hope this will save a few hours for you as well

To get you sorted in this digital mess, we present to you the 5 most important tools you can use to de-clutter your digital existence Evernote, Simplenote, Dropbox, Push the Page and Instapaper:

1. Evernote

   I have already told you about Evernote and how I’ve been trying to use it as a digital information manager, gathering my links, snippets, texts and quick notes. While the software’s user interface is not impressive, one can’t deny that Evernote is a real powerhorse, able to store pretty much everything you send to it, and even automatically tag the images/photos to allow for text search inside them. The main advantage of using Evernote is as a powerful sync tool of information files – be they text notes, web snippets, photos or other documents. The clients for iPhone / iPad / Android will sync these, so you can always access your data on the go.

2. 
   

   Simplenote

   Whenever I mention Evernote on my Twitter posts, there are always some replies like “Yeah.. Evernote is nice.. but I kind of prefer Simplenote“. Unlike Evernote, Simplenote only lets you edit and sync text notes, but does so with style and a fast minimalist user interface. It only has a web interface(a great one) and clients for iPhone & iPad (there are no official desktop clients), but there are 3rd party apps that fill the need(such as the highly recommended free editor Notational Velocity)

3. 
   

   Dropbox

   You surely remember Dropbox from my previous articles. The ease of use of the desktop client and the free official clients for iPhone & iPad make it a perfect tool to keep most things in sync across your various devices – so if you save a file from your computer, you’ll be able to retrieve it afterwards from your iDevice. If you want it the other way around, there are many apps with Dropbox integration to help you: for instance the free PlainText iPhone/iPad text editor or the $0.99 iPad text editor Clean Writer (developed by yours truly) that will save your text notes directly to your Dropbox account.

4. Push the Page

   To be honest, this is the real reason why I wrote this post in the first place. You might have heard of all these other apps, but chances are you haven’t yet heard about Push the Page. It is an amazing free app that does one simple thing.. but does it extremely well. Kind of the thing you didn’t know you missed until you see it. What Push the Page does is help you send, instantly, a link from your desktop to your iPhone or iPad.

   Let me explain this a bit.
   
   Imagine you are browsing the web on your computer, looking for a pasta recipe, which you want to cook tonight. When you finally find it, you usually have 3 options:
   1. you can take the laptop with you in the kitchen. But you probably don’t want to, ’cause there’s no place for it there, and it’s too risky anyways
   2. you write it down on paper, so you can take the paper with you. But it’s time consuming, and kind of beats the purpose of all the gadgets in the house
   3. or, you can open that web page on your iPhone or iPad, which are much more suited to help you in the kitchen(being smaller and more kitchen-proof than a laptop)
   In order to open that same web page on your iDevice, you used to have 3 ways : a. either type the url on the device to match the one on your computer, b. email yourself the link, or c. save the link in Evernote or Simplenote, open the Evernote/Simplenote clients on your device, sync, then finally click the url in the latest note.

   Push the Page brings a 4th, most direct variant: all you do is, on your computer’s browser, click on a bookmarklet and the page’s address is instantly sent to your iDevice. You’ll get a notification and tapping it will eventually load that page in the browser. Free, quick and painless. All you need is to set up an account on www.pushthepage.com, download the free Push the Page apps on all your devices, set them up and drag the bookmarklet to your browser’s Bookmarks bar. Easy peasy.

5. Instapaper

   Like its headline says, Instapaper saves interesting web pages for reading later. It’s more than a bookmarking tool, because it actually saves the web pages content, strips off advertising and clutter and magically saves the web article’s actual content, so that you can read it later. What’s best is that there’s a free iPhone client app (or a $4.99 iPhone+iPad universal app) that will retrieve these articles from your account, for you, so you can read them even offline, using your favorite iDevice. I can’t recommend Instapaper enough, and I think it’s probably the greatest web-related invention since the RSS reader. But that’s just my opinion.

Tip #1. Quickly prevent your Mac from going to sleep

If you are doing something important but not interactive enough(reading an ebook/article or demoing a slideshow to your boss for instance) and get frustrated by your computer repeated attempts to go to sleep, there’s a quick and simple way to prevent this temporarily and without messing anything up: in Terminal, type down
pmset noidle
Just remember to type Ctrl+C (^C) in the same window when you’re done.

Tip #2. Organize your Dock with invisible spacers

To add a spacer to the applications (left) side of the Dock, run the following in the terminal:

You’ll need to run killall Dock afterwards in the terminal, to restart the Dock and see the changes.
The above spacer only gets inserted in the Icons section of the Dock. If you want to insert one in the Documents section on the right, you’ll need to run this command instead:

To get more spacers, you call the commands several times. To move the spacers around the Dock, just drag them like you would for any app icon. Same in order to remove them, (drag them out of the Dock).
(via macworld)

Tip #3. Get Dashboard widgets on your normal screen

Your favorite Dashboard widgets are usually one keypress away(which you can chose from Settings->Keyboard->Dashboard and Dock) but, if you want to have them on your screen at all times (like they do on Windows), you need to follow these two easy steps:
First, in Terminal.app, type down

after this, enter the killall Dock command, in order to restart your Dock and acknowledge the changes.
Second, when in Dashboard (mine opens when I press F12), click on your favorite widget and, while dragging it slightly, exit the Dashboard(by pressing the same Dashboard key). Your widget should now appear on the main screen, on top of your usual app windows. In order to hide it, you’ll need to do the same things, but in reverse(that is, keep holding your mouse pressed on the widget, then fire up Dashboard and release the mouse). To disable this neat feature(but why would you?), you’ll run the same command only with devmode NO instead of YES.
(via Lifehacker)

Tip #4. Clean up the contextual menu

After a long time of installing and removing apps, you might get a messed up “Open with..” menu when you right click on a given file; this is because removing an app doesn’t usually clean up the app’s settings, the contextual menu ones in particular. From the same all-mighty Terminal.app you’ll need to run

, press Enter and wait until the command gets finished(might take a while).
On older versions of OSX – 10.3 Panther or 10.4 Tiger, you’ll need to run this one instead

Afterwards, the context menu that you get when you right click(Cmd+click) on those files should be slimmer and more accurate.
(via Maclife).

Tip #5. Boot your Mac the way real hackers do

You can see all the console messages thrown out when your mac is booting up with this simple command, to be typed into the Terminal.app
sudo nvram boot-args="-v"
From now on, when you’re booting your computer, it will write down everything it does, and your user friendly computer will start looking like a Unix hacker’s piece of hardware straight from the Matrix. Guaranteed to get you all kinds of shocked looks from coworkers and classmates. You can also access these messages later by running sudo dmesg in the Terminal.app. To reset it to the default user friendly behavior, all you need to do is run sudo nvram boot-args= in the same Terminal.app.
(via stackexchange)

If you like these tips, stay tuned, as there are many more to come in the future.

Enabling screen locking is pretty easy, although hidden where you leaste expected it. Here’s how it’s done:

You’ll need to open up Keychain Access, a utility app that comes preinstalled on your Mac and can be found inside the /Applications/Utilities/ folder. Once there, you’ll open up the Preferences menu (press ⌘, or as the submenu of Keychain Access menu). In the General tab, make sure the checkbox ‘Show Status in Menu Bar’ is checked. A tiny lock icon will appear in the menu, somewhere on the right. Clicking on it will reveal the long awaited option: Lock Screen.

PS. Make sure you know your mac password before clicking on it, because only those who know it will be able to unlock the computer.

We don’t usually remember mundane things. Repetitive tasks somehow tend to blend together as we remember only general, global ideas. Need proof? Just ask yourself what you did in a given day in the past. Let’s say… April 27, 2001. Most people(me included) will fail remembering anything from that particular date, so they’ll just use the general information about that period, as well as their common-sense, to extrapolate what they might have been doing on that particular date. Me, I was in the last semester of my second year of college, so I probably studied, or worked on the numerous homeworks and projects. I was also, probably, spending time with my girlfriend from college. Nothing more comes to mind, though. On the other hand, what about February 17, 2000? Well, that’s a lot easier – it was my birthday, I visited my grandfather in the hospital, and it was the last time I saw him alive(he died one week later, may he rest in peace). I even remember a few of the things we talked about, and how one of the hospital roommates did a magic trick with a cigarette. What about December 31, 2007? That’s even easier – it was the date I proposed to my lovely current wife, and I can remember a lot more things from the date, including moments from the New Year’s party afterwards.

This was a long paragraph, meant only to prove a point – we don’t usually remember every single step and every single breath and every single thing of an otherwise ordinary activity. Instead, we remember our lives by key moments, by the moving discutions, by extraordinary events. Key events create anchors in our memory and define our perception of time. Time seems to stretch when we do memorable things, and dim until vanishing from our memory when we do ordinary ones.

This is why the latest project of this guy, a BBC News journalist, seems so intriguing to me. Matt Danzico is taking on an interesting self-experiment this year: he tries to prolong his perceived life by putting himself, each day, through a new or uncomfortable experience. In his own words, research suggests that while having new and unusual experiences time seems to go slower, while during ordinary and casual ones time seems to go faster(we are talking about the backwards perception of time past). Matt’s experiences range from boring and simplistic ones(look at paint drying, eating left handed, etc.) to the more exciting(jump from a moving car), and he tries to time each one of them using a chronometer, but without looking at it, thus being able to compare his afterwards estimations with the actual time spent.

I haven’t read all his experiences(and likely never will), but I did enjoy jumping at the end of some of them and compare his estimations with the chronometer’s results. The differences between perceived time and actual one are mind-blowing(for some experiments there’s a gap of over 50%), and I think they are a great indicator of the human incapacity of accurate time estimation.

I end this boring post by recommending each of you to try and experiment new and even uncomfortable things, like Matt does. Not one each day, since in my opinion even an ‘unusual’ routine ends up being just this – a routine, but at least once each week. Do memorable stuff, to remember this year by.

Have a long perceived life!

Photo credits: Jinto!

If you don’t already use Dropbox, you probably should. Dropbox is the amazing file sync service and utility that I’ve told you about it in a post from a few months ago. You might also remember that it has a neat referral program, giving out 250MB extra space for each friend referred to the service.
What I didn’t know and only learned about today is that, this year, Dropbox has a pretty awesome internet contest / puzzle / scavanger hunt, called Dropquest 2011, with various prizes.
Now, since I missed the actual contest, I didn’t qualify for the mega prizes(which included 50GB of space, branded t-shirts and more). However, for all those who answer some(or all) of the puzzle questions, there’s a consolation prize of up to 1GB of space to be added to your Drobox account.
The complete list of questions and answers, as well as explanations for those, can be found on several places online; I found the most thorough solution page to be that of erroneus, with other versions available over at tuqiri or boio. For your convenience I’ll shamelessly paste, below, the walkthrough from tuqiri/erroneous:

And before I leave you with this resourceful online quest, here are a few of the tricks you can use to increase your Dropbox free account quota(for the full list check out this page):

1. use a referral link when signing up with Dropbox; it will give both you and your referee an extra bit of space
2. complete any of the tasks from this page and connect with Dropbox on Twitter/Facebook, for up to 640MB extra
3. complete the Dropbox “Get Started” tour for another 250MB of space
4. refer other friends to it; make sure they use other email addresses, and that they install the Dropbox client on different machines than yours

.. and now on to Dropquest2011

Go to https://www.dropbox.com/dropquest2011 to start which is important and further on to https://www.dropbox.com/dropquest2011/D

5305404/18681 = 284

Go to http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=284 , look at post 3 and download Step4.zip

In the zip it says 38.889, -94.703 – Those are coordinates and they mention a mascot. Google Maps: 38.889, -94.703. This School is close by and their mascot is huskies

Open Step5.zip which is inside Step4.zip with the pass “huskies”, go to http://www.dropbox.com/dropquest2011/r

Finish the puzzle (solution) and you are sent to https://www.dropbox.com/dropquest2011/0

The 3612th prime number is “33739”, it will send you to https://www.dropbox.com/dropquest2011/p

It refers to this picture at the Dropbox blog

Look at the picture, in the background is a yellow paper with an address to https://www.dropbox.com/dropquest2011/b

Solve the sudoku (you can use this solver or look at the solution), it leads you to: https://www.dropbox.com/dropquest2011/o

It wants you to go home, which means jump to the Dropbox homepage at https://www.dropbox.com

Go there and click the link at the top where it says it’s not over, it will lead you to https://www.dropbox.com/dropquest2011/x

The “book” is this forum thread

The post refers to this blog post

Click on Katana-ya at item 5 for your Step16.zip

In the zip file is a link to http://www.dropbox.com/dropquest2011/h and a image

The image from Step16.zip, it’s HEX color code is “BAFF1E”, enter it and you are taken to https://www.dropbox.com/dropquest2011/e

The names are anagrams for classic composers. The classic composer for Dropbox, is CEO “Drew Houston”, enter that and you are taken to https://www.dropbox.com/dropquest2011/a

The signs you see here are in braille and it says “help 206”, this is a hint for this page: http://www.dropbox.com/help/206

Download the Step21.zip

Place the picture from the zip in a dropbox folder and share it with dropquest@dropbox.com

Hint22.txt appears in the folder, which leads you to https://www.dropbox.com/votebox/3712/frozen-yogurt

This is a reference to Rian Hunter which can be found at https://www.dropbox.com/about

Click at Rian Hunter this leads you to https://www.dropbox.com/dropquest2011/R

The text is a reference to the game Chrono Trigger and the side quest Rainbow Shell, the link to the zip is therefore http://dl.dropbox.com/u/211024/rainbowshell.zip

In the zip you will find an address to http://www.dropbox.com/dropquest2011/t and a midi file

The key phrase is the notes from the midi file, which is: “badcabbage” and this leads you to https://www.dropbox.com/dropquest2011/s

Print out the paper, fold the paper to a crane and across it’s wings it says 11696 x 96911, which equels the the code “1133471056” on the wings. Enter the code and you are taken to https://www.dropbox.com/dropquest2011/U

Last puzzle! Remember those dropquest URL’s? The last letter, they form the the last code: “Dr0pbox heaRts U”

And you are done: https://www.dropbox.com/dropquest2011/finish_line

Check your score at https://www.dropbox.com/dropquest2011/wall_of_fame

1. Download Calibre, a free powerful army swiss-knife on all things ebook. Calibre has conversion tools, ebook library management and even a desktop ebook reader. What it doesn’t have is a UI that doesn’t make you want to scratch the screen with your fingernails. Still, one heck of an app, one that you can easily use to convert most document formats into most ebook formats. Word to epub, pdf to kindle, etc. You name it, and Calibre probably has it.
2. Download this set of Calibre plugins(and hurry, who knows how long they’ll stay online) from this address. Unzip the archive.
3. In the Calibre app go to Preferences page(the rightmost icon), then to Plugins(in the Advanced section), then select Add a new plugin and chose, one by one, the 5 plugins from the archive you unzipped in the previous step.
4. Now, configure each plugin (click Customize for the plugins in the File Plugins section), as follows:(copied from the Apprentice Alf’s Blog page):
   • for DRM’ed Mobipocket ebooks you must enter the PID you entered on the retailer’s web site, or the PID of your installation of Mobipocket Reader into the customisation field of the K4MobiDeDRM plugin. The PID will be ten numbers and letters, with * or $ as the eighth character. If you have more than one PID, enter them separated by commas
   • for Amazon Kindle ebooks that were downloaded to your Kindle, you must enter your Kindle’s serial number into the customisation field of the K4MobiDeDRM plugin. If you have already entered a PID there, add the Kindle serial number as well, separating it from the PID with a comma.
   • for Amazon Kindle ebooks that were downloaded to the copy of Kindle for Mac or Kindle for PC that was installed on this computer, you do not need to add anything extra into the customisation fields.
   • for ePub or PDF ebooks that can be read in Adobe Digital Editions, you do not need to add anything extra into the customisation fields.
   • for Nook and all ePub ebooks from Barnes and Noble, you must enter your name and full credit card number into the customisation field of the Ignoble Epub DeDRM plugin. The name and credit card number should be the ones set as part of the Credit Card unlock code on your Nook Library page. Separate the name from the number with a comma and do not put any spaces in the card number or around the comma. For more details, you can check out the related README file from the tools folder you’ve unzipped way above.
   • for eReader ebooks from Barnes and Noble or Fictionwise, you must enter your name and the last 8 digits of your credit card number into the customisation field of the eReader PDB 2 PML plugin. Again, the name and credit card number must be the ones entered at your ebook retailer’s website as the DRM key/Unlock code.
5. Now, all you need to do is to import your protected ebooks into Calibre, and the DRM will be removed. The plugins ONLY remove the DRM when the ebooks are imported, so if your ebooks have already been imported into calibre you will need to remove them and import them again.

Attention! EPub ebooks bought from Apple iBooks or Microsoft LIT ebooks can’t, for now, be hacked by Calibre.

**Warning/Disclaimer! This blog’s author is not responsible for any damage, lost or other kinds of problems caused by this article. The responsibility of using the above information lies only on the reader. **
foto credits: kodomut

Forrester: What are you doing?
Jamal: I’m writing.[...]
Forrester: Is there a problem?
Jamal: No. I’m just thinking.
Forrester: No thinking. That comes later. You write your first draft with your heart. You rewrite with your head. The first key to writing is to write. Not to think.
[...]
Forrester: Start typing that. Sometimes the simple rhythm of typing gets us from page one to page two. When you begin to feel your own words, start typing them.
Forrester: Punch the keys for God’s sake! Yes! You’re the man now, dog.

Sean Connery as William Forrester, a character inspired by J. D. Salinger – Finding Forrester

“When asked ‘How do you write?‘ I inevitably answer ‘one word at a time‘”

Stephen King

The year was 2005. I was having my lunch on a bench in the Trocadero Park, at the shadow of the Tour Eiffel. Hordes of tourists were bustling on the esplanade, photographing the breathtaking view. Me, on the other hand, was quite unimpressed by the view for which tens of millions fly to France each year. I had seen it hundreds of times. I was working at less than half a mile from the glorious symbol of Paris, in a software company providing the trading floor software for most of the banks in the top 50 world. Living and working there, in the 16eme Arrondissement, the poshest quarter of Paris, showed me that everything is possible; even for a Romanian geek born in the last decade of the communism regime and whose parents’ salaries were less than $200 per month. Me, on the other hand, had gotten my raise and, at age 24, was earning monthly more than both did in 1 year.

The occasional Bordeaux bottle of wine and Brie cheese. Rollerskating on the shores of Seine. A secure, well paid job. Some would have thought it was the perfect life. Me, I felt it as a glorious golden cage which was sucking the life out of me.

Maybe it was the late work hours with lots of overtime. Maybe it was the corporate life and the monotonous routine. Or maybe I was craving for adventure, for independence, for freedom.
It was a hard choice but I eventually made it. A few months later, on April 13th 2006 I left France, returning to my home country. I had no plans for my future, no safety net. All I knew was that I didn’t want to work ‘for the man’ anymore. This was the start of my second life and the best decision I ever made.

It’s 2011 now, 5 years since my departure. I haven’t had a ‘classic’ job since. I don’t think I could ever go back to being a normal 9-to-5 worker. The tree of independence has grown much too big, its roots are way too deep inside me. I wake up at the time of my choosing, go to sleep when I want(well.. or when my wife wants me to ), I work from whatever location I desire. As long as I have an Internet connection, I can work. I am my own boss and love it. There are ups and downs, and once in a while the occasional emotional roller-coaster. But overall I feel happier and more alive than I had 5 years ago. Independence rules.

It’s easier than it looks. All you need to do is start letting go of your fears. Being a freelancer, self-employed, small entrepreneur or indie developer is now at everyone’s reach. You don’t need to be a software programmer. You don’t need to be a talented writer. You don’t have to be an uber geek. But you can still be your own boss. There are countless opportunities for those who seek them.

Now, when I have the occasional wine and Brie cheese, or when I visit foreign countries, I can finally enjoy myself. The difference from 5 years ago is that, now, I actually love my life and enjoy my work.

Are you happy with yours? Do you enjoy your work? If not, what are you waiting for?

This year I promised myself not to make any public personal New Year resolutions. Life is unpredictable enough as it is, and year-long commitments are way too often bound to be broken. So, why purposely aim to disappoint myself later on? Why should I want to feel like shit sometime later for not having been able to do stuff that was not in my power to do so, in the first place?

Instead, for the past days I’ve started to try out some new professional, productivity and lifestyle changes. The difference from New Year resolutions is that they are just that – try outs; I won’t feel like shit if they don’t work out, but I will like it if they eventually turn into habits.

One of the things I decided to try out (for the past 4 days, but the outcome looks promising so far) is to use of a more organized note taking method(and tool). There are countless methods to do it, some of them already built into your computer. However, the difficulty is to stick to just one system, and to use it at its full potential.
Long before I owned my Mac, I used to take quick notes either using Windows built-in Notepad, YM-ing myself over Yahoo Messenger (along with enabling Yahoo Messenger message archiving), or even emailing myself. I also left out post-it notes all over the place, scribbled on the margins of notebooks or used online tools like Yahoo Mail Notepad. This combined approach resulted in a huge mess of information.
Since I got my Mac, I got into the habit of using the built in Stickies app, which I had immediately placed on my Deck. It is the simplest note taking tool you could get, at the same time pretty powerful(colored notes, multimedia capabilities, decent looks and, above all, small enough to launch in a matter of seconds). I’ve been using it pretty often; however, after a while, the Stickies space got really crowded and you’d need to remove older notes; also, it wasn’t fit to accommodate larger notes, such as blog posts or short stories drafts. Last but not least, it wasn’t compatible with the iPhone and the notes I take on the go. So I ended up needing to delete older Stickies notes(which later turned out to have been pretty important), and to have my blog post drafts scattered all over the place.

Another built in alternative that kind of takes care of the last two problems would be the use of Mail.app and its built in notes; they do sync with the iPhone’s notes app and can be used also for larger texts. However, the Mail.app Notes weren’t suited to my taste, not only because of the cartoonish design, but also because they were hard(read almost impossible) to organize, and sync-ing them requires my iPhone connected to the Mac(one thing that I almost never do).

The alternative I found out so far is the well known Evernote:

For the past 4 days I’ve using the free Evernote tool on a daily basis. I had actually given it a try long time before, by the time it had started to make the news. So far I feel that Evernote is a pretty complex app, with the Mac client a bit too constrained, of a cluttered design missing some pretty important(for me) features (fullscreen writing, quick appending). But I also feel that after the initial pains and the first day of using it, it has made me considerably more organized. It also seems like the perfect gather point for all the web snippets, quick ideas and long texts I try to write. I even(painstakingly) managed to manually import the list of interesting bookmarks from Chrome into it, and start using it as an imperfect(but still useful) research aid, by using its Chrome plugin to capture interesting web snippets and pages. The iPad and iPhone free app clients make for a great addition, ideal for quick note taking and photo snapshots, which easily syncs over Internet with their web service.

My setup is pretty simple so far:

• Evernote Mac client running all the time on my desktop
• 4 Notebooks
  • Personal
  • Projects
  • Cool links and web things
  • Other
• I’m not really using the tag system, although I might get to use it some time
• I’ve installed the Evernote iOS clients on both my iPhone and my iPad.

This tool is not perfect, and there are others(probably way better) out there. But my non-resolution for this year is to pick just one system and stick with it for as long as possible. Consistency is the base for all habits; the perfect tool might not exist, but it’s way better to pick one and use it all the time than to pick many and never use them(or use them all simultaneously).

Happy New Year and to many successful New Year’s non-resolutions!