If you ever experience a problem with importing vCards (.vcf files) that contain foreign characters in Address Book for Mac OS X, you might be in complete dark as to how to solve the problem with the foreign characters not being displayed properly.

You might have tried to save the vCard as ISO-8859-1, UTF-8 or the likes, and it still doesn’t work in Address Book. You might even have tried to add charset info in the MIME type of the vCard, having it display something like text/vcard; charset=iso-8859-1 all the while it still doesn’t work. Bugger.

The only solution is to make Address Book use a different character encoding for the vCards. If you access Address Book -> Settings… -> vCard, you’ll see the ability to change the character encoding. However, Address Book might have chosen vCard version 3.0 for you per default. Change this to 2.1, then change the character set to e.g. Windows Latin 1, and then change the version back to version 3.0.

Having done the above, the import of vCards containing foreign characters will work as expected. This includes vCards exported from Meeho!™.

A screenshot of the settings regarding vCards in Address Book.

(One last note: Having to choose vCard version 2.1 to change the character encoding, then changing the version back to 3.0 AND having Address Book preserve the encoding settings might be a bug… Seems odd that it preserves the encoding settings while jumping from version 2.1 to version 3.0, when the dropdown menu is dimmed when set to vCard version 3.0, indicating that a change is not possible in that case…)

Should you ever be in the need of finding out where RubyGems installs all of your precious gems, just run the following command:

sudo gem environment

This will give you an overview of the environment settings for RubyGems. Find the “GEM PATHS” settings and there you go:

A screenshot of my l33t Terminal.app.

If you have a controller that uses a general layout, but you want to use a custom layout for one of your controller methods and the corresponding view, what you do is simply to add a render :layout => ‘my_layout’ to the method. Have a look at the below example:

class MyController < ApplicationController
layout ‘main’

 def my_method

   # Do stuff here…
   render :layout => ‘my_layout’

 end

end

Whether you’re a night owl like me or just occasionally stay up late to work on your computer, you might be interested in a piece of software called f.lux. The software can alter the color temperature of the computer display to match your indoor lighting and in doing so hopefully take some strain off your eyes during work. This is not purely meant as a cosmetic change but also intended to aid sleeping after working at the bright screen in the wee hours.
One caveat is though, that the software’s color distortion is no good for graphic design work.

Versions of f.lux for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux can be downloaded from http://www.stereopsis.com/flux/.