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Ever wanted any of the widget from the Dashboard to stay on your desktop? May be a weather forecast? Or a dictionary? I did. And was wondering why this could not be done on mac? Now after a bit of research I know how to do it and ready to share with you.

• Step 1. Open Terminal ( Applications » Utilities » Terminal )
• Step 2. Activate Development Mode by typing: defaults write com.apple.dashboard devmode YES
• Step 3. Logout/login (or restart) to reload Dashboard
• Step 4. Open Dashboard (F12), then click on the widget you want and drag it a little bit
• Step 5. Without releasing mouse button exit Dashboard (F12 again) and voila, the widget stays on your desktop. A touch of magic :)

Now here is a bit of a drawback - the widget is going to stay on the top of all your windows all the time, which is not ideally what I would usually want, particularly when I work in Photoshop, but still I find it quite useful occasionally. May be there is another line of code you should type in the Terminal or may be this i something that will be implemented in Leopard OS … I honestly don’t know.

PS. Oh oh forgot one tiny funky thing. Click on the widget and then refresh it by pressing Command+R. oh it’s twirrrrrling! :)

PS2. Just in case you wonder how to take your widget back to the Dashboard - just follow the same root :)

Genre : Lounge / Chill out / World music

I’m getting tired of all the music on my ipod. Want something fresh. Something MTV does not play, something you don’t hear on the radio a few times a day. So the best place to look for such a music is myspace.com. Though I hate its overall tasteless design and I always feel aesthetically abused by its look, it has thousands of unsigned bands and musicians, whom you would never ever hear about. And some of them are really good.

So this is my find today: http://profile.myspace.com/harrikakoulli. Absolutely beautiful.

Last weekend…It was absolutely exhausting - packing all things and preparing for moving. You can never imaging how many things you own, hehe. Even after chucking few things away and given away others to charity we still happened to have so many of them that I was extremely terrified.. I love moving to new places, love changes, but i do HATE packing and actual process of moving. It seemed to me never-ending. How many times will it take to take bags and boxes downstairs and then to bring them upstairs? Will we fit all of them in the cupboards? These questions were quite depressing for me, as usual.

So I’m so glad these few days are history now. We are now relaxed and enjoying our new space and ourselves. And with a little help of extra cash we live now in a very nice flat with a middle-size bedroom and a proper-size lounge. We still wait to be connected to the 24Mb broadband, but meanwhile… good news, everyone - we can catch the wireless signal from the restaurant downstairs :) That was quite unexpected, but as a matter of fact, I have never been left without internet for more then a few days since my computer at the bank I was working at had got a connection. And it was… let me think… 8 years ago… Wow, that’s quite… noteworthy.
Another extremely important thing is that we share the flat with extremely nice people ;) Our flat-mates are Aidan, a friend of mine with whom I work together and his girlfriend. I’m extremely happy we were not just chatting about ‘oh yeah it would be nice if we could find a place to share and have fun’ (what we, people, do quite often - have meaningless talks about the things we will never do, just for the sake of talking or better to say, socializing) but actually did it :), though at some point for certain reasons we seemed to give up on that idea.

Apart from just being nice, our flat-mates can cook :) Aidan’s gf has already prepared for us once a yummy curry and also another indian dish, which name I don’t remember, the other night, and also surprise… surprise.. Aidan volunteered to cook a Sunday dinner, what was very sweet of him. I did a bit of cheating, i.e. boiling traditional russian meat dumplings which I bought in local eastern-european grocery, but since they were delicious, which was admitted by everyone and guys did not taste those things before, I didn’t feel guilty about it at all :)

Another thing about our flat-mates is that Aidan owns literally tons of DVDs (I already told him there was such a thing as movie rent of what’s existence he obviously was not aware) and also they both are enthusiastic gamers, owning everything from Nintendo DS and PSP to Wii and Xbox 360. Well, this is kind of cool addition to our flat’s fun, isn’t it? So the top picture you saw was our ultimate entertainment center :)

So yeah, very, very happy about this move. It all looks to me very promising. We’ve already had couple of friends invited to Saturday dinner and there are still more things to come. I wonder if our flat-mates will always be so nice and sweet. Really hope so. Shouldn’t really be any catch there ;)

PS. See other part of the story.

Well this is how I imagine a week should look like: four days to work with a three day week-end. Shame, life sometimes is different from our best expectations. Well, let’s face it - most of the times :) So then bank holidays are quite handy…

So we started on Friday night, went to see the premier of Spider-Man 3. Well… I dunno.. too much happening and the spider-man himself (in his more human appearance) was too slobbery for me and then I finally realized I did not really liked Peter Parker at all, he was… too irritating for me. Oh well never mind.

So here is Saturday. Nathan, my colleague-developer was throwing a bit of a birthday party at his place, so I went there. Met a few people, had a few pieces of bbq chicken, had a few drinks… Nice and chilled overall. The only disappointment was a trip back home. It wasn’t that late - I still managed to catch up a tube train, but apparently fell asleep on its way and woke up a few stops later then expected (at Oxford circus to be precise) and since there were no more trains that night I had to catch a bus. After quite a while i got on my night bus. And fell asleep again. Woke up, but could not really understand which part of London I was in - those streets outside the window did not look familiar to me at all. What could I do? - Fell asleep again. Woke up and decided it was truly time to ask the bus driver where we were. As it turned out I was already making a round-trip - heading away from Hammermith (that’s our part of London). So I got off and was lucky enough to catch another bus which finally took me home. So instead of a planned an hour trip it actually took me thrice as longer :) Oh well never mind.

Oh by the way, check out the receipt we got from the local shop that day :) We were buying meat pancakes (quite a traditional East European food), but unexpectedly bargained something … I would say a bit disturbing:)

Ok, let’s move on. Sunday. Sunny but windy.

Went to see an exhibition at the Science Museum, which we did not enjoy. Somehow. As a matter of fact, museum shop was quite an entertainment with all sort of things on sale: from solar-powered gadgets to glowing-in-the-dark “things” as well as many other funny and weird items. And then we had a lunch at Yo Sushi… Every time we eat there I recall infamous Johny English :) You do remember that Yo Sushi episode, don’t you?

Another funny moment at the store. We went to Sainsbury right before its closing, and along with other grocery we had some that day bakery with a price reduced to nothing. But going through a check-out took us quite a while, because the amount due to pay on monitor was showing.. surprisingly £ 0.00 which I was quite willing to “pay”. So cashier could not figure out what to do. He called for a manager who kind of sorted it all out, asking us to pay… Another surprise… just £ 1.00 Which again I was happy to pay :) So under the astonished and I guess a bit envious glances of other shoppers we left the store with two bags of food and paid just a quid for all this :) Very nice.

So here it is. Monday. The “week-end” is still on. Lazy lazy lazy… But not quite. The end of the day was absolutely superb. We went to the Royal Albert hall to see something really special. Visiting the Albert hall was already something special since it was our first time there and it looks and feels absolutely amazing. But beside that we went to see urban-rock-funk singer TobyMac with his Diverse City band. TobyMac and Kevin Max have been a huge inspiration for me for more then a decade, since the time they were both a part of dcTalk. Inspiration musically, creatively, personally and even trendy. So it always has been my dream to see them live. But living in the post-Soviet block, obviously did not help that much… Besides, the guys went solo about six years ago, so there was not really a chance to see them performing together.

I had managed to see Kevin last summer though. And this year I was lucky enough to see Toby. Woooohooo! He was absolutely amazing, not quite a young man anymore, but still full of energy and charisma. The concert was so cool, absolutely mind-blowing and entertaining, I haven’t enjoyed such a great show for quite a while. And even more then that - Kevin Max happened to be in London as well, so there was a bit of reunion when he joined his ex band-mate for a few songs, including their all-time smashing hit. So it was a sort of realizing of my long-time dream. A bit too late, but still hugely satisfying :)

And yes, I could not resist the temptation to sneak in my camera and take some pictures of the performance, well illegally… See them now. We were sitting too far away from the stage, at the balcony, so the pictures are not gonna be that great, but still I think they were worth taking them ;)

And then it was over. Our well spent week-end. Back to work, slacker.

Honestly… I never create a folder with the help of right click or the top menu. It is always Command-Shift-N. Absolutely loving it (this particular one you can not do in Windows… or may be they added it now in Vista??) File information? It’s always, ALWAYS Command-I. Find a desktop? Of course, Command-D. and so on… It does not feel very convenient in the beginning, but then things just fly :)

Browsing random sites I’ve come across a nicely done Mac OS X shortcuts sort of pocket book and liked it a lot. Even learned a few key combinations I was not yet using. So I thought it might be a good idea to put it on the server so you could find it, use it and enjoy it. I believe guys from macintalk.com would not mind me doing that.

So please, download it from skrinda.com/docs/MacOSX-Shortcuts.pdf. It’s a tiny one page document. First learn and then enjoy ;)

By the way, the craziest shortcut so far for me is Save for web in Photoshop : Command-Shit-Alt-S, which I happen to use, well, every day. As a matter of fact, it’s not that bad with Windows keyboard layout, but when you do it on mac, your look and actually feel like a crippled-hand man :)