Blog posts page 5 of 44

Make Home & End keys behave like Windows on Mac OS X

I’ve been using Mac OS X daily since 2001 when I purchased my Titanium PowerBook. I still can’t get used the Home and End key behaviour.

If, like me, you want Home to send you to the start of the line and not to the top of the document, then create a file called DefaultKeyBinding.dictDefaultKeyBinding.dict in your ~/Library/KeyBindings~/Library/KeyBindings folder (might need to create that folder too) with the following contents:

Revitalizing a BBC Micro

Recent casualties were my Apple ][e (no disks), Acorn ARM (wouldn’t boot) and Commodore VIC 20 (poor state). Next up is my Acorn BBC Micro B:

My “Beeb” is in good condition and works well, but the case screws have long since disappeared (a common theme in my collection), and it needed a good clean. These older mechanical keyboards attract dust and dirt.

Sequence averages in Scala

I’ve been learning Scala and decided to put together a C# to Scala cheat sheet. All is going pretty well but then I got stuck on the equivalent of Average.

Enumerable.Average in .NET calculates a mean average from your sequence by summing up all the values and counting them in a single pass then returning the sum divided by the count in a floating point format (or decimal).

Optimizing Sum, Count, Min, Max and Average with LINQ

LINQ is a great tool for C# programmers letting you use familiar syntax with a variety of back-end systems without having to learn another language or paradigm for many query operations.

Ensuring that the queries still perform well can be a bit of a chore and one set that fails quite badly are the aggregate operations when you want more than one.

What to do before your iTunes Match subscription expires

At $25 a year the iTunes Match service can be a little tough to swallow given all it does is synchronize your music across iTunes especially when other file-sharing services are cheaper and more general purpose (OneDrive, Mega, DropBox etc).

One important thing to know however before you let your subscription lapse or cancel is that once it’s gone all your cloud-backed-up music will be unavailable.