Spotlight does Math

I just discovered that Leopard's Spotlight does math. Try it. Bring up spotlight with ⌘+space. Then start typing something like
7pi*8.3 or
sqrt(2)
and the answer is the first search result.

This isn't quite a powerful as the Google calculator. It doesn't appear to do base conversion, and it doesn't let you copy the result for pasting into an application, but it seems handy nonetheless.

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Mac OS X handy bash aliases

Here are a few handy aliases that I keep in my .bashrc in OS X:

alias cppwd='eval "echo `pwd` | tr -d \\\\n | pbcopy"'

This copies my current working directory to the OS X pasteboard so I can Cmd+V it into another terminal. Often I want several terminals open in the same directory at once.

alias burn='drutil burn -noverify'

This one lets me type

burn mydisc.iso

to burn an ISO disc image to CD or DVD without having to open Disk Utility.
And a variation:

alias vburn='drutil burn'

This does the same as the other but also does the disc verification step.

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