TJ Luoma

TJ Luoma cut his computing teeth on NeXT computers back in the day when 16MB of RAM and 8MB of disk space was considered a big deal. He helped to maintain the PEAK FTP archive for NeXTStep and OpenStep software. In 2003 he got his first iPod. In 2004 he broke off a brief-but-unfortunate relationship with Windows 2000 and jumped into the Mac OS X world. In 2007 his contract with Sprint expired one week after the iPhone was released and his transformation to Mac user was complete when he ditched his Treo for an iPhone. (He formerly wrote for the Palm Addicts website.)

He and his wife are now the proud parents of an iMac, MacBook, MacBook Pro, iPhone, iPhone 3GS, and an assortment of AirPorts and iPods.

TJ Luoma's Latest Posts

"Ducking iPhone" Revisited: two ways to improve iOS auto-correct feature

by TJ Luoma (Mar 21st 2013 9:00PM)

Back in December 2008, I came up with an "interesting" solution to iOS's annoying habit of "correcting" the word that I wanted with the word that it thought I wanted. The problem was colloquially known as the "Ducking iPhone" for reasons you are probably smart enough to figure out on your own. ...

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Dropbox has a new "Fix Permissions" feature

by TJ Luoma (Mar 19th 2013 1:30PM)

I consider myself fairly savvy when it comes to Dropbox, but I learned a new tip from Mac OS X Hints. If you get "Permission Denied" errors, you can try to "Fix Permissions" in Dropbox. This is not repairing disk permissions in Disk Utility, it's within the Dropbox app itself. To get to it, ...

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A Quick Guide to Dropbox Versioning

by TJ Luoma (Mar 14th 2013 7:00PM)

One of my favorite features of Dropbox is 'versioning,' which keeps a copy of every change that you make. Every time you press 'save' on a document that's in your Dropbox, a new version is saved. There are two things I have been wondering about versioning: What happens to changes that ...

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Use Keyboard Maestro to get ready for podcast recording

by TJ Luoma (Mar 12th 2013 8:00AM)

When you're in the middle of recording a podcast, chances are you'd like your Mac to be focused on that job -- not other network-hungry activities like syncing Dropbox, or CPU- and disk-intensive tasks like saving a Time Machine backup. Gabe at Macdrifter wrote about his Pause TimeMachine ...

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Play .dvdmedia files with VLC

by TJ Luoma (Feb 26th 2013 7:30AM)

Update 2013-04-11: Thanks to Felix Paul Kühne, lead developer of VLC for Mac, this feature has been added to VLC 2.0.6 without the need for the user to make any changes to the app. If you use that version, or later, you do not need to take the steps below. The article below remains only for ...

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Terminally Geeky: How to tell if a script is being called from launchd

by TJ Luoma (Feb 25th 2013 6:00PM)

Warning: command line geekiness ahead. When writing shell scripts, I often send interactive output to the user via echo to give feedback or information. But if the shell script is called on a schedule via OS X's behind-the-scenes process launcher launchd, rather than from a Terminal session, ...

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Archive your pasteboard using Flycut

by TJ Luoma (Feb 21st 2013 8:00AM)

I often find myself wishing that I could retrieve something that I had cut or copied earlier in the day, or maybe even longer ago than that. So I decided to make an archive of my pasteboard, and store it on Dropbox so I can easily retrieve something later. There are lots of programs out there ...

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Finding Dropbox 'conflicted copy' files automatically

by TJ Luoma (Feb 20th 2013 8:00AM)

Dropbox is a great tool, but if you use it on more than one computer, you are bound to find conflicted copies eventually. A conflicted copy is created when the same file is edited on two different computers at the same time, or close enough that Dropbox cannot tell which one is the newest. The ...

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A better Google search experience with Choosy, Keyboard Maestro and Fluid

by TJ Luoma (Feb 19th 2013 4:00PM)

There are so, so many things that annoy me about Google: Google can remember everything about me except that I want my search results to open in a new window. Google crappifies search results, so that instead of giving me a link to the site that it shows me, it actually gives ...

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Contact sync problems, Contacts Cleaner and The Nuclear Option

by TJ Luoma (Feb 19th 2013 3:00PM)

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who have no problems with iCloud sync, and people who use iCloud sync. Well, OK, maybe that's an exaggeration, but I have had plenty of problems with iCloud sync well back into the MobileMe days. Most of the problems relate to syncing contact ...

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