Our strategy with the ebookstore is ‘buy once, read everywhere.’ If you want to read on your iPhone, if you want to read on your BlackBerry. We want people to be able to read their books anywhere they want to read them. That’s the PC, that’s the Macintosh. It’s the iPad, it’s the iPhone. It’s the Kindle. So you have this whole multitude of devices and whatever’s most convenient for you at the moment.
JP Mangalindan, “Jeff Bezos’s mission: Compelling small publishers to think big“, CNNMoney Fortune, June 29, 2010

I also enjoyed Bezos update in the article on cloud computing and the utility model reality..

I love my Kindle 2, and what Amazon.com has done for publishing!

Here though, “read their books anywhere they want to read them”, there is a disconnect between vision and execution. The Amazon Kindle experience on the Mac has a strong unpleasant odor.

sudo port install bchunk

bhunk <bin -filename.bin> <cue -filename.cue> <new -filename.iso>

Explanation

A cue sheet, or cue file, is a metadata file which describes how the tracks of a CD or DVD are laid out. Cue sheets are stored as plain text files and commonly have a “.cue” filename extension. CDRWIN first introduced cue sheets, which are now supported by many optical disc authoring applications and media players.

…

Cue sheets are also used for many types of CDs in conjunction with an image file. The image file generally has a “.bin” extension.
“Cue sheet (computing)“, Wikipedia

Hat Tips

• James N. Sears, “Convert .bin + .cue -> .iso on Mac OSX“, April 14, 2007
• Gavin McLellan, “Convert .bin/.cue to .iso on Mac OSX“, October 4, 2007

Other Notes

Anonymous commenter Don writes, “For those of you who have a .bin file but instead of a .cue file have a .toc file, there is a utility for mac called toc2cue that you can get if you run macports and install the cdrdao port. Then you can convert over to .cue file and use this fine tool to convert your .bin file to .iso”

While deciphering countless web pages for information about configuring and tuning iTerm, reoccurring themes from the most hard core are:

• SIMBL: allows you to “patch” Mac applications to do what you want. I’ve come across at least 3 SIMBL plugins to make Apple Terminal.app more useful. The detractors cry that SIMBL destabilizes the OS, while its champions swear they’ve never had a problem.
• Visor: ”a Quake-style drop-down Terminal” need I say more?
• Fish: is the newest UNIX shell, it’s a friendly shell. The naysayers warn that it has a very small user community and that its development has slowed. The true believes proclaim that once you try it, there is no substitute for FISH in your diet.

I’m not currently considering using any of these, but I enjoyed coming across them.

Mac OS X has been with us since 2001. There is now a lot of stale information out there for tuning the command line experience. For example, there are still a lot of articles about tsch in search results. The earlier versions of Mac OS X default shell was tsch, but since 2003 the shell has been bash.

One thing I’ve noticed in the screenshots of tuned Terminal is “zsh” in the window’s title bar. I’m not willing to tackle figuring out the zsh shell, but I find it interesting that it’s a favorite of the tuners.

Another favorite seems to be using iTerm. I noticed my co-worker Demitrious Kelly sporting iTerm in his WATCHME for wpshell. And today, reading my co-worker Andy Skelton’s “My SSH config setup” fellow WordPress contributor Dougal Campbell and my co-worker Donncha O Caoimh both gave iTerm shout outs.

I wonder if Apple Terminal has mostly caught up to iTerm. It seems iTerm might still have some tab advantages.