prestia.org

I generally enjoy OS X, but I have a recurring problem with duplicate entries appearing in my "Open With" contextual menu. At any given time I have five instances of Pixelmator, two instances of Xcode, and three instances of TextMate just daring me to choose the correct one. It's relatively simple to fix this problem using Terminal, but I can never remember the proper commands and I know that not everyone is comfortable using Terminal. This led me to create Destroy All Dupes!, a simple application that cleans up your contextual menus in a matter of seconds.

I wrote Destroy All Dupes! to work on my machine (a MacBook Air running 10.8.2), but it should work on just about any system. That said, this software is offered as-is and is used at your own risk. If you can live with those terms, you can download Destroy All Dupes!. If you're uncomfortable with those terms or don't trust an application provided by some yahoo on the Internet, you can usually fix the problem by typing the following into terminal:

cd /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/
./lsregister -kill -domain local -domain system -domain user

Watching Discovery hitch a ride to DC on the back of a 747 Tuesday morning was an odd experience. On the one hand, I've never romanticized the shuttle program. The technology was way past its prime and the entire program was unnecessarily dangerous. As a general rule, I'm wary of supporting any technology that Richard Feynman compares to playing Russian roulette. Still, the death of the shuttle program is symbolic (in my mind) of a much larger problem.

For all its faults, the shuttle program was inspiring. Discovery is a 165,000-pound reminder of a time when our country was investing in our education, tackling difficult technological problems, and securing the future of not just our country but our species. When I was a kid, I had no doubt we would be on Mars by now. Vacations to the moon? Absolutely. Sadly, none of this came to fruition. We're not growing to become an interplanetary species; instead, we are becoming increasingly obsessed with petty problems. We've stopped developing technology to extend our reach beyond our planet and started developing technology to extend our reach into the private lives of our citizenry.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe a 26-year-old spacecraft stopped being inspiring decades ago. Maybe it was just a sad reminder that we, as a society, have stopped dreaming. Maybe it was time to let go.

It's been almost a year and a half, so there's no sense in wasting your time. Read Phrack #68 or download the tarball here.