Q. That or Which?

When do you use the word 'that' or 'which'?  

A.  Well, we use "that" when we want to restrict our subject to some smaller subset, by using the descriptive phrase that follows that. Hence:

Please pick up the clothes that you dropped off at the dry cleaners yesterday.

I don't just want you to pick up any old clothes; I want you to pick up the ones you dropped off yesterday. No other clothes will do. Hence, I use the restrictive "that" to tell you exactly what clothes I want you to pick up.

Compare this with the correct unrestrictive usage of "which":

When I was a junior in college I drove a lime-green 1977 chevy, which I bought with the pittance I earned in my summer job with Greenpeace.

The clause following "which" doesn't tell us information we have to have in order to know which car it is. Even if we don't know that you spent your summer haranguing people to wear hemp shoes, we would still know exactly what car we're talking about: your car, the unfortunately colored American gas-guzzler that leaks oil and parallel parks about as well as the Love Boat. The information provided by our descriptive clause is interesting, but not necessary for us to identify its subject.

Q. How do I get address line search shortcuts to work in Safari?

For example:  In Firefox I can type "wiki xenon" and it will open the wikipedia page for Xenon.

A.  Install Sogudi

Download a Sogudi that is compatible with Safari 3 here:

Sogudi 0.47 Beta Universal

Installation for Leopard (from here)

1. Delete $HOME/Library/InputManagers/Sogudi if it exists.
2. Delete /Library/InputManagers/Sogudi if it exists.
3. Expand the "tgz" file above.
4. Drag the "Sogudi" folder into /Library/InputManagers
5. Use Terminal to:
1. sudo chown -R root:admin /Library/InputManagers
2. sudo chmod -R go-w /Library/InputManagers
6. Restart Safari

Symbols in Excel for Mac?

Q.  How do you add symbols in Excel:Mac?

A.  This has since changed in Office 2011 for Mac.. read the comments below!

Q. What is the easiest way to get started with Latex on a Apple Mac? 

A.  Mactex

HDF5 for Mac

Q. How do I get HDF5 Viewer 2.3 to open HDF files created
on a PC?

A. I had to download a special version of the program for INTEL macs.

Matlab and Macs

Q. I'm running Matlab on my Apple MacBook laptop running OS X 10.4.9. Question: How do I get F9 to "evaluate selection" in Matlab instead of being an expose button?

A. In the keyboard shortcuts section delete F9 as being part of expose. Cuz how often do you use it really anway?? :)

Nomencl

Q. Make my nomenclatures work damnit!

A. ok ok.. so i've been focusing on this for the better part of a week. But i found an easier solution that doesn't require applescript or shell scripts to do it. In the folder ~/library/texshop/engines I copied the tetex engine and renamed it nomenclature.engine with the following text inside it:

#!/bin/sh

bfname=$(dirname "$1")/"`basename "$1" .tex`"
makeindex "$bfname".nlo -s ~/library/texmf/tex/nomencl/nomencl.ist -o "$bfname".nls

The exact directory location of nomencl.ist is required since i manually installed my own updated version of nomencl.ist

Now I typset it Latex-Nomenclature-Latex and everything works beautifully!

Or change the last line to:

makeindex "$bfname".nlo -s nomencl.ist -o "$bfname".nls

if you have an updated copy of nomencl.