With Homebrew, it’s very easy. Given that you tapped in with Jose Gonzalez’s php repo.
1. Install mcrypt and it’s libraries by typing: brew install mcrypt php53-mcrypt
2. add the content of /usr/local/etc/php/5.3/conf.d/ext-mcrypt.ini to /etc/php.ini
3. restart Apache ( sudo apachectl restart )
The title of this post might sound fatuous to you. The latest update to the Mac operating system, OSX Lion costs only $29, that compared to the main commercial competitor is over seven times cheaper than the full-fledged version.
But when I think of the people I know, my thinking becomes very simple: to be able to buy OS X Lion, you need first and foremost a Mac… either a MacBook, an iMac, a Mac Pro or a Mac Mini. Any of these will do the job. But buying a Mac in general isn’t the cheapest choice. It’s rather the most expensive one, in most cases (except the high-end maybe, where differences are not so relevant). In addition, if your machine is slightly old, you need to buy Snow Leopard at $29.
My point is, for many, the need of a Mac and all its features is not justified by the price: for much less they can have a simpler and cheaper machine running either Windows (for the common user) or Ubuntu (for the geekier one) that can do pretty much whatever they need to do.
And to me this is fine. Peaceful. And Apple is fine too. They still make tons of money thanks to their great ecosystem of iTunes, iPods, iPhones, iPads, App Stores etc. They create beautiful products that are more profitable for them when targeted to the higher market. And selling the hardware is their most profitable market, not the software itself (even thought Apple’s apps on the App Stores are highly profitable too) but high quality software and the ecosystem around it is what’s needed to make the machines so valuable.
To sum it up: to be able to buy the best and most affordable operating system in the world, you need to own the most expensive computer in the world. More or less…
My favorite OS X Lion «hidden feature»
International voices for Speech. Priceless.
If you come from the PC world, you might know of the Print Screen key on the keyboard. It is handy to have a key to do such a job, but maybe it’s a bit much for the common user to have such thing to have a specific place on the keyboard.
On a Mac, there’s a simple combination of keys to do this job: cmd-SHIFT-3. This will capture the whole screen, and it will save an image file on your desktop. If instead you want to capture a smaller sector of your screen, you can use cmd-SHIFT-4, that will change the mouse cursor to a cross. Now you can click and drag from one point to another and select what you want to be snapped. As soon as you release your mouse or trackpad, the image will be snapped and the file will be saved on the desktop.
Need to capture a whole window? After using the combination cmd-SHIFT-4, you can hit the spacebar on the keyboard and the cursor will change to a camera. Now all you have to do is to click on the window you want to snapped. Same result as the other options, with the image being saved on the desktop.
Here is a very short guide on how to change your OS X system language. This goes from the menus, the general UI to the various aspects of app localizations. Indeed, when you change the system language, every application that has that specific language will use it; it will fall back to English if it’s not available.
The next time you will login to use your Mac, it will be localized as you decided.
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