»Some notes on setting up a laptop

In addition to the applications I regularly use and the single widget I use, I have a few other bits of setup for a new laptop.

Mail.app

specific ports for SSL-enabled IMAP and SMTP; install a personal cert; install the self-signed cert for my IMAP server; and add some headers: defaults write com.apple.mail UserHeaders '{"Reply-To" = "theemail@goes.here"; "Bcc" = "another@address.here"; }'

Terminal.app

in addition to my colour scheme, I always forget to enable the "Use option key as meta key" tick-box. I also need to use the Netinfo Manager to set my login shell to /bin/zsh from /bin/bash (you laugh, but the default until 10.3 was /bin/tcsh!)

Security

Why doesn't OSX offer a key combination, or some scriptable method, to lock the screen?

keyboard layout

Although I don't want to remap the "capslock" key, I do want to disable it.

startup

To show verbose, non-graphical startup: sudo nvram boot-args="-v". (To turn this back off: command-option-P-R while booting, or sudo nvram boot-args="". Check the flags from the command line with nvram boot-args )

A few other interesting applications:

rogue

Rogue, the classic curses-based game.