Jing Project is an interesting new free tool for sharing screenshots and video (screencasts). It is quite similar to Skitch. It provides video recording which (AFAIK) is unavailable in Skitch, but Skitch [seems to] have more options including support for iSight. Both of them let you upload captured content to their sharing portal or any service such as Flickr or a subset of FTP/SFTP/WebDAV server.

A peculiar problem I have faced since upgrading to Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard): mouse clicks suddenly stop working! I can still move the mouse around and use keyboard navigation, but clicking any of the mouse buttons results in no action. The trackpad on my MacBook stops working too. After killing processes one at a time, I discovered a workaround: killing Universal Access (you will have to use the terminal to find the process id, in order to kill it; you could probably find the process using Activity Monitor also, perhaps) caused mouse clicks to start working again.

Not sure what/why is going on and this is a poor fix for any user/application that requires services provided by Universal Access. But it at least helps me keep working!

Sometimes its useful to know who’s LISTENing on a socket. On GNU/Linux and similar systems, the command netstat -lp provides a listing of all sockets on which processes on your system are listening for connections, along with the process IDs/names of these processes. Unfortunately, it seems the MacOS (Leopard) version of netstat does not support the -p option. Fortunatly, Leopard does come with that Swiss army knife of process and file info, lsof, which among other things can display socket info.

For instance, to find the process that was listening on port 3000 on my system, I used: lsof -i 4:3000. The -i arg is used to specify the type of socket/connection we are looking for, the 4 denotes IPv4 and the 3000 is of course the port we are interested in.

A few sites that you should add to your bookmarks or RSS reader:

The first two are “Deal a Day” type sites that offer significant discounts on Mac software (one a day), while Mac Heist does period “bundles” – a number of apps bundled together for a very low price.

If you have a new(er) (perhaps circa 2007) MacBook or MacBook Pro, and are using Leopard, you may be facing problems installing Windows on Parallels even if you upgrade to the version of Parallels Desktop recommended by them. In my case, the problem was that after the Windows install started up, loaded drivers, and began OS install, there was a BSOD with errors that started with:

SESSSION3_INITIALIZATION_FAILED …

After reading through various forums (not directly related to Parallels) I got the suspicion that this may be related to the CD/DVD drive access. A call to Parallels yielded a quick and friendly workaround that did work around the problem by:

• Upgrading to the recommended Parallels version (link above)
• Deleting the Parallels Windows XP VMs from my disk (default parent directory: /Users/your-id/Documents/Parallels/)
• Cleaning out Trash and rebooting
• Using the Disk Utility to rip the CD image to my desktop as a DMG
• Restarting Parallels Windows XP VM install and pointing it to the CD image

If you need finer instructions, please ping me. I couldn’t find this info anywhere on the net.