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Archive: Mac

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March 21, 2007

Apple Remote Tricks and Programming

In addition to operating Front Row, Keynote, and iPhoto, the Apple remote is capable of a few less documented tricks. You can sleep/wake your Mac by holding down the play/pause button (particularly useful for media boxes). Pressing both the play and the menu buttons, you can also pair the remote to your machine, so that no other remote can operate it.

If you want to remote-enable your apps, there are some decent libraries available that will make this fairly painless. Martin Kahr did a great job documenting and building an Objective-C wrapper class, and RubyCocoa Resources used that to put together an example and documentation for accessing the remote within Ruby.

Links:

March 20, 2007

Import Your Old Mail to GMail With GML

GMail Loader is a cross-platform Python utility that can import mail messages from several mail storage formats (including mBox and MailDir) straight into your GMail account. It doesn't currently support Outlook's PST format, but there are utilities for converting PST to mBox format (see below). Eventually, support for direct access to IMAP will be added, which should allow you to transfer mail from just about any system into GMail.

I've got years of old mail archived away from different ISPs over the years. I think it'd be interesting to push all that stuff out to GMail and re-read the discussions I was having in 1996.

Links:

GMail Loader (GML) -[via] Link.
GML Instructions for OS X -Link.
Convert Outlook PST Files to mBox Format -Link.

March 19, 2007

Bluetooth Proximity Detection in OS X

Jesse David Hollington put together a set of scripts that automatically disables and enables his screensaver password when his cellphone comes in and out of Bluetooth range.

Ideally, I would want to activate the OS X screen saver and enable the password protection when I move away from my computer (out of Bluetooth range), but otherwise I'd prefer to keep the screen saver password off for normal use, as it gets quite annoying when I'm working near the computer to have to continually re-enter my password after I've diverted my attention elsewhere for a few minutes (which happens frequently, as often the Powerbook sits to one side of other systems that I'm working with, rather than being in constant use).

With a few Applescript apps and some quick C code, his computer will automatically unlock for him when he comes near it. -Link. (source included!)

March 18, 2007

HOW TO Create an Encrypted Disk Image in OS X

There's a feature built into OS X that will allow you to create AES-128 encrypted disk images. You can use this to create mountable, encrypted virtual drives, or even burn password protected CDs. Here's how:

Open Disk Utility in the Applications/Utilties folder.
Click "New Image".
In the "Encryption" pull-down menu, select AES-128
If you want to make a CD, make sure the size is small enough to fit on a CD, typically 610MB.
Enter the name and location of the image file and click Create to finish.
You will be asked to enter a password for the new image. Pick a good one.

Disk Utility will create a .dmg file in the location you specified and it will automatically be mounted and appear as a new drive with the size you specified earlier. You can drag files to this drive and they will be added to the encrypted image. When you are finished, just eject the drive by clicking the eject icon next to the drive in the Finder. Once the drive is unmounted/ejected, anyone attempting to mount the image will be required to enter the password you specified.

If you want to make a password protected CD, just insert a blank, recordable CD (or DVD) and drag the .dmg file to it in the Finder. Just like the dmg image, the CD will require a password to be entered before it will mount.

March 14, 2007

Meet User 99: File Ownership on External Drives in OS X

In addition to root and nobody, there is another special unix account in OS X with some interesting properties: UID 99, Unknown User. Account 99 is treated differently by the operating system and has a couple of interesting properties that allow removable devices to be easily used between multiple machines, specifically:

Files owned by UID 99 will appear to be owned by the user who is accessing it. This applies to all accounts, except the root user.
Volumes that are mounted with the ignore ownership option will appear to have all files owned by UID 99.

Thanks to this feature, if you take your iPod or external hard disk from one machine to another, your account on machine 2 will be able to read and write to the device even if your UID doesn't match your account on machine 1.

Sometimes, however, this isn't what you want. Say you have a drive that you use with only one machine, and that machine is used by several people. This might be a scenario where it would be desireable to enforce user specific file permissions.

You can do this for HFS+ formatted volumes. Just right click the volume and select Get Info. Then, under the ownership and permissions section, uncheck "ignore ownership on this volume".

The first time you do this, you'll notice that all files on the volume will be owned by the account you were logged in as at the time. You'll be able to set file ownership and permissions from this point forward and OS X will enforce it.

User 99, Unknown -Link.

March 10, 2007

Hacking OS X Apps - Add a Scrollbar to Stickies

Sometimes an otherwise useful application is missing a feature or two. Take the Stickies app, for example. For whatever reason, the authors decided not to include a scrollbar. Perhaps this was because it's not a necessary feature for most users. Perhaps it was just overlooked.

Thankfully, you can customize most OS X apps with the tools that come with the Xcode dev suite. This goes beyond mere skinning. You can actually add functionality that wasn't part of the application's original design! Erica Sadun, author of Modding Mac OS X, writes:

Not only can Mac enthusiasts modify an application's look, but we can also actually change the way it works. OS X's Interface Builder, part of its Xcode development suite, provides all the tools you need to go beyond. With Interface Builder, you can accomplish the unthinkable. It lets you customize existing applications in ways that ResEdit users never dreamed of. If you think that customizing an application interface involves nothing more than moving a button into a new position or resizing a screen, think again.

In Erica's howto, she heavily modifies Stickies, adding a ruler toolbar, a drawer containing extra preference and utility options, and the aforementioned scrollbar. You can use these same tricks to alter your other favorite Mac apps... just make sure to give us a shout with your own slick application mods.

Modifying Stickies -Link.

Related:

March 6, 2007

Teach via IM with One-Way Video Chat

Click To Play

Over at O'Reilly's Mac DevCenter, Erica Sadun points out a little-known (at least to me) feature in the current version of iChat:

By control-clicking (right-clicking) a buddy's name, a contextual menu pops up offering the option to invite that person to a one-way video chat. This means that they can watch your video but will not send video back to you in return.

How have I missed this option for so long? Though Erica wants to use this feature to iPodcast (stream via IM) movies and TV shows to her friends, I see this as a great opportunity for "hands-on" instruction you normally don't have access to when you're not physically in the same room with someone.

For example, crafts like knitting are notoriously hard to teach without visual cues, and even the most detailed books often suffer from their lack of moving pictures. When I learned to knit, I used books as a crutch, but actually learning required sitting next to my mother-in-law to see how it was done. Even now, when I hit a roadblock with a new technique, I need to wait till the next time we're together. But if we had a feature like this, we likely wouldn't have to wait. I could just "look over her shoulder" as she described what she was doing.

The most obvious benefit of one-way video is that it doesn't require the recipient to have a video camera on their end, but as Erica notes, for instructional content as with streaming movies, one-way video has another notable advantage over two-way video conferencing:

you don't have to watch the other person watching your video. You don't have to see them adjusting their hair, performing nasal maintenance, or any of the other unconscious things people do when they get involved in watching TV as opposed to engaging actively in a social situation.

The pedagogical opportunities for this feature are virtually limitless, and it will add a whole new dimension to tech support with the release of Mac OS X Leopard, when we finally get iChat Screen Sharing. - Link to video download.

March 5, 2007

Apple Lisa Emulator Released

Forget Y2K or the 2007 Daylight Savings Time change, fire up an Apple Lisa, and experience life as it was meant to be lived between 1981 and 1995. Ted Hodges of Low End Mac has a complete writeup on the recently-released Lisa emulator:

I had heard about the Lisa, but I had never had a chance to use the Lisa Office System (LOS). The reason was that the emulator project didn't have a working Lisa emulator, and neither did anyone else - until now.

Ray Arachelian, creator of the Lisa Emulator Project, has finally created a working Lisa emulator.

Hodges' article has a whole mess of screenshots and is an excellent tour of the Lisa and its capabilities. - [via] Link

Related:

Applefritter on the Lisa emulator - Link
Lisa Emulator Project - Link

Sleep Your Mac by Email

With a combination of Automator actions, one line of Apple Script, and a Mail rule, you can make your Mac sleep by sending your account an email with "sleeper" in the subject line. Of course, you could use this same trick to do a number of things via email remote control.

Sleep your mac by email -Link.

March 4, 2007

Speed Up Mail In OS X

Cory over at BoingBoing writes:

The Mail.app fan-site Hawk Wings has a great tip for Mail.app users -- a simple command that many are swearing by as a means of evincing a gigantic speedup in Mail.app's performance. If you're suffering through the same hell I lived with back in my PowerBook days, you might give it a shot.

Apparantly, Mail.app uses sqlite for it's mail databases. In order to make normal, day-to-day inserting and deleting of mail items speedy, these typical transactions don't force the database file to go through an optimization process. Over time, however, the mail database can end up fragmented and can be sped up quite a bit by reclaiming unused space and cleaning up the database structure. Here's how you can do this with the Mail database:

Quit Mail.
Open Terminal.
Type the following:
cd ~/Library/Mail sqlite3 Envelope\ Index An sqlite> prompt will appear. At that prompt, type vacuum subjects;. After a short delay, the prompt will return. Type Control-D to exit.
Restart Mail and enjoy the extra speed.

Scripts to automate the Mail.app Envelope speed trick - [via] Link.

Related:

March 2, 2007

SeisMac: Turn Your MacBook Into a Seismograph

"SeisMac is a Mac OS X application that turns your MacBook or MacBook Pro into a seismograph. It access your laptop's Sudden Motion Sensor in order to display real-time, three-axis acceleration graphs. Version 2.0's enhancements make SeisMac an even more valuable tool for classroom demonstrations of seismic concepts and techniques." -Link.

February 28, 2007

Run Windows Apps Within Your Mac Desktop

Click To Play

Since its beta release, Parallels has let Mac users run Windows simultaneously with Mac OS X on any Intel Mac, which is a real boon whenever you need that one Windows-specific program you just can't avoid. But the recent Official Update (free for all registered users of Parallels Desktop) offers the ability to bypass Windows altogether and get right to the apps you need. With Coherence mode, you can now launch and run Windows applications directly within your Mac desktop, just as you would any Mac app.

Even though the windows for your Windows applications are now divorced from the virtual Windows desktop in Coherence mode under Parallels, you'll still want to have your Windows virtual machine running before you launch any programs under Parallels. Otherwise, launching the application will take as long as launching Windows. But as long as Windows is running, launching a specific application is pretty snappy. Just click on its icon in the Dock, as you would any other program, and up it comes.

I've been testing out Word 2007 lately, which now lives right next to Word 2004 in my Dock. As you can see, opening it and getting straight to a new document takes no time at all, and I get my own Word 2007 window, making it look (almost) like a native Mac app. You can also access Windows applications that don't live in your dock by just clicking the Windows Start menu in what now effectively becomes a Windows-specific Dock just above your real Dock. - Link to video download.

Silence Your MacBook's Whine

I've been using a MacBook Pro for about a year now, but with a growing desire to be able to swap internal hard drives whenever I feel like it, I've decided to switch to a black MacBook. It's basically perfect, except for a barely audible whine (which I'm convinced most people would not even notice). I had a similar problem with my MacBook Pro, but it was a bit louder; that was solved by having the LCD inverter repaired.

I checked out the Apple discussion forums and found a weird fix that worked for me:

1) open photo booth
2) force quit (not just quit, force quit)
3) sleep (i just leave the lid open and use the menu option)
wait until you see the pulsing light and wait for a couple seconds
4) wake up quiet

If I later start and then quit Photo Booth, the whine comes back. Also, if I leave Photo Booth running in the dock, it silences it completely, and only uses 3% of the CPU (Photo Booth doesn't show a live dock icon). But I love the Force Quit solution because it's so strange. Link

Related

Apple Discussion Forums - Link
MacBook (13-inch) hard drive replacement instructions (PDF) - Link
Apple Acknowledges MacBook Whine and Offers Logic Board Replacements - Link

February 19, 2007

Track Down Runaway Mac Apps

Fried Egg PowerBook
Recently, there's been a lot of feedback and internal discussion around the topic of Powerbook Fever. Phil's post about using smcFanControl to cool you Mac down solves part of the problem, but Mac OS X in a Nutshell co-author Chris Stone suggests that overheating is often times the result of a runaway process:

Sounds like it's hung up on some process. What does 'top -u' show? The top line of processes there should show what's chewing up the CPU and causing the fan to stay on. Rebooting would of course clear that up, but if it starts happening again, check with "top".

It turns out that a runaway application will not only heat up your laptop, but sometimes even prevent it from sleeping correctly. Those of you that know your way around the command line know where to go from here: just open a terminal window and type top -u.

PID COMMAND %CPU TIME #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT RSHRD RSIZE VSIZE 1047 meanapp 99.3% 0:31.09 1 13 16 176K 560K 468K 26.6M 1049 top 14.6% 0:03.55 1 18 20 1.14M 612K 1.61M 26.9M 213 Terminal 0.6% 8:01.23 14 182 239 5.18M- 19.3M- 28.4M- 246M- 282 Safari 0.5% 2:03:22 12 393 2297 218M 81.9M 277M 833M

If you see an application that's consuming 99% CPU, such as 'meanapp' in the above example, it's probably the cause of your overheating and laptop sleep issues. Scribble down the process ID of the app (in this case 1047), type "q" to exit top, and force the application to quit by typing kill -9 1047, where 1047 is the troublesome process ID.

If this becomes a regular issue, track down the application that's consistently causing you problems. Chances are it's a third party application or driver that could use an upgrade.

Cool off your Macbook with smcFanControl

Make 362
Previously Dale had mentioned his Macbook was getting hot, here's a tool to manually control the fan to cool that puppy down...

Let's you set the minimum speed for each fan individually.
Adjust fan speed until the Macbook(Pro) is finally comfortable on your legs again
Auto apply mode to set the new fan-speeds after a restart
Sourcecode included! Extend it and change it to your needs

smcFanControl - Link.

More:
Updated version, smcFanControl 2.0 - Link.