The Mac Pirate’s Toolbox, aka “Essential Apps For The Digital Junkie”.

Fair enough. If you wanna be a digital junkie you’re gonna need some data. To connect to P2P BitTorrent file sharers and get some data you’re gonna need a BitTorrent client. uTorrent is a lightweight and fast client that has been popular on the PC-side for many years and has recently been brought to the mac. Even though it is in beta it is recognised by most as being ready for prime time.

Download BitTorrent files from tracker sites like mininova and thepiratebay and open them up in one of the above BitTorrent clients to download the data to your mac.

DOWNLOAD uTORRENT

“I don’t know of anyone who has successfully cracked apps from the iTunes Store…” – Andy Ihnatko, November 2009.

Listening to Macbreak Weekly is pretty fun, especially when Leo forgets the names of the different releases of OS X. But I had no idea how much fun Macbreak Weekly could be until Andy Ihnatko and Leo Laporte revealed their total ignorance about cracked iPhone apps! Also guilty were the show’s other guests, Don McAllister and Wil Harris. For shame.

When you consider Andy Ihnatko writes books about the iPhone this faut-pas will surely have him shaving off his mutton chops and turning in his utility belt so that another Jedi might carry on his work.

OK Andy, so chapter elevnteen will be called www.appulo.us … and you’re gonna say how every fraggin’ iPhone app (even the totally shit ones) are cracked and ready to be downloaded and installed onto any jailbroken iPhone or iPod Touch with a Patched MobileInstallation Library. Then you’ll tell them how to patch a mobileinstallation library. Or I will.

This revelation occurred in Macbreak Weekly episode 166 and the offending excerpt can be heard below. That’s right! This is mac celebrity gossip! WARNING: This clip damaged the podcasting careers of 4 men, 2 of them British: http://machacks.tv/clips/MBW-TWITS.mp3

Mac OS X Leopard only includes spell check support for about 9 distinct languages; English (4 varieties of), German, Dutch, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Danish, and Portugese (2 varieties of). You would think that if you did not speak any of these languages Apple would have provided some downloadable Apple Dictionary dictionaries (.dict) on their site which other foreign language speakers could install. Sadly this is not the case.Recently I was looking to provide Croatian language spell check for a friend and ended up finding a solution for almost all foreign languages!

The solution is the OS X port of Aspell, the open source spell check software, called CocoAspell. CocoAspell installs an OS X System Preference pane and comes bundled with a few dictionaries. Additional spell check dictionaries can be downloaded from http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/aspell/dict/0index.html

There are many Aspell dictionaries, including ones for Polish, Bulgarian, Czech, Greek, Norwegian, Malay, Croatian, Macedonian, Indonesian, Welsh, Afrikaans, Icelandic, Kurdi, Romanian, Slovak, Turkish, Ukrainian, Arabic and Zulu.

Additional dictionaries are installed by placing the uncompressed dictionary folder in /Library/Application Support/cocoAspell and then re-launching the cocoAspell System Preference pane. Activate the dictionaries by ticking them in the pref pane.Once activated the language you wish to spell check must then be selected in the TextEdit’s ‘Spelling and Grammar’ window: Edit > Spelling and Grammar > Show Spelling and Grammar. Apps must be re-launched to recognise the change in dictionary.

CocoAspell only provides spell check support for OS X apps like TextEdit, Safari and Pages, and other 3rd party apps that hook in to Dictionary.app. CocoAspell does not provide spell check support for MS Office for Mac. Spell check solutions for unsupported languages in Word rely on creating a custom dictionary. A tutorial on this process will be published shortly.

Aspell is an active project and new dictionaries are being produced the whole time.

Enjoy!