Mac matters

Peter van der Linden

Software

Useful freeware to install on your Mac

Search engine optimization can work wonders for your business. Online reputation management and proper search engine optimization services will help you stay ahead of your competitors.

Cool Apple stuff

Speech recognition and output

Make your mac speak, by typing this command:
say "Macs are great!"
or make it scriptable with:
osascript -e 'say "Macs are great!"'

Mac poetry

To make a shell script double clickable, give it a file extension of ".command" - when double clicked, a terminal window will open (and stick around afterwards) to run it. If you don't want a terminal window, or you don't want the extension, set the file type to "application". You can do that with this command:
/Developer/Tools/SetFile -t APPL someshellscript

To stop iPhoto getting started when you plug in a USB card reader, run the app called "Image Capture". In its preferences, you can select the application, if any, to open if a camera is connected.

Add sounds to the alert sounds menu by putting them in ~/Library/Sounds. It works with an AIFF format; maybe other formats too.

To play something from the commandline, download "qtplay" from www.versiontracker.com It's a small freeware utility that works well.

To run a screensaver module as the desktop background, type this command into a terminal:

     nice -n 20 /System/Library/Frameworks/screensaver.framework/Resources/
       screensaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/screensaverEngine -background

Don't put the line break in when copying and pasting the command. You can make it choose a random screensaver by adding "-module Random" at the end. Or you can use another screensaver name than Random, if you know the names.

You can list the names of available screensavers with

ls ~/Library/Screen\ Savers/ | grep .saver
ls /Library/Screen\ Savers/ | grep .saver

Control-C out of it to stop it. Or use "killall screensaver" from another terminal.

Wireless Networking

Apple doesn't support their airport wireless router with non-Apple hardware. But through the miracle of industry standardization, the good news is it works.

The bad news is that it takes some fiddling about to get it to work. When you do get it to "work" there is are two common problems: Windows can only see the wireless net when you disable WEP, and when Windows gets on the net, it knocks all your Apple systems off the net (you can't have both of them on the net at once).

But don't give up: you can get them all happily cooperating if you fiddle with it enough. Here's what I did (and it took 5 hours of tweaking/experimenting).
1. Turn WEP off on the Apple base station, and establish contact with the Windows system.
2. Turn WEP on on the Apple base station, and use a 128bit password (this was the key breakthrough for me!) The claimed "better compatability" of a 40 bit key in fact made it not work.
3. You get the hex equivalent of the WEP password using the Apple airport admin program, and type that hex number into the Win XP dialog that configures the wireless card. Why Windows doesn't support a utility that lets you type in an ASCII password is a question for another day.
4. If you are filtering on ethernet (MAC) addresses, then either add the address of the new system, or turn it off. You can get the MAC address in Windows with "ipconfig /all". Filtering on MAC addresses is a pane within the airport admin utility window.

Web configuration

Here is how to serve personal webpages from your mac.

Cameras

Video conferencing on the Mac (AV Chat).

Setting up a wireless webcam on the Mac

DVD-related

Making a backup copy of a DVD

Extracting clips from a movie DVD

ffmpegx, download from http://homepage.mac.com/major4/download.html Has a kind of funky multi-stage install process, but the instructions are good.

Can create a slideshow from iPhotos as follows: 1. in iPhoto, select the album 2. click File-->Export-->QuickTime or Web Page then 3. you can also enable the "currently selected" music there too. Not sure how you select the music in the first place.

Administration/use

Doing a backup to an external firewire drive, and making it bootable.
This is so straightforward to do, there is no excuse for not having a regular schedule for backups. How much computer work are you willing to throw away? A day? A week? A month? Three month's worth? Whatever your answer that's how frequently you should run backups. And the easiest way to do that is with Mike Bombich's Carbon Copy Cloner.

Various booting options
boot + mouse button held down = eject CD
boot + command + s keys held down = boot single user
boot + command + v keys held down = boot verbose mode
don't forget - can't use a wireless keyboard for this (because it's not received by OBP, but by the OS)!

Those annoying confirmation pop-ups to keyboard commands ("Delete highlighted data Y/N?") can often be skipped by holding down the "option" key when you press delete (or select the menu item, etc).

To change shells (and you should change to bash) use netinfo - see http://www.macpronews.com/macpronews-30-20030716UsingtheshellTerminalinMacOSX.html. "info bash" is a fairly useful (and comparatively new) resource for getting a complete guide to bash at the terminal.

keyboard shortcuts and links

burning a CD that auto opens a folder

burning a CD that Windows can read (burn using Finder, not iPhoto).

Setting hostname

To change the app associated with a file type, do this: Select one document of the type you're concerned with. Do a 'Get Info'. Open the 'Open With' panel. Select the app you want and click the button that sets the default rather than just that one document.

NetInfo - this is a "directory" service like Sun's YP. It was brought forward from Next. It contains info on users, services, etc (and shares these across the net). There is an niutil program that takes various arguments to display or write netinfo data. Try "niutil -list / /users" to get a list of users. man niutil has more info.

How to get a script run on startup

Disk partitioning

What is this keychain thing?

Debugging/generally useful "When I launch foo, it crashes". Look in /Library/Logs/CrashReporter/ to get an idea of what is failing and drill down from there. Also search the Apple knowledge base. And look at http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106464 for info when your system won't boot.

Looking at logs

Looking at crashes

Getting your network info

Making unsupported printer drivers work on Macs.

Conferences

Notes from 2003 Apple Developer Conference

Deprotect your iTunes with hymn (Hear Your Music aNywhere).

Please send me any Apple/MacOS tips you want to share: pvdl@ sn a p- f l u.com (drop the red chars for the right address).

Would really like to hear of a way for a user to change/configure the menu items/mouse actions for Finder. I have a 2 button mouse, and by right clicking and holding down, I bring up a menu with these entries:

   Help
   New folder
   Get info
   Change desktop background

I am sure that users with the old fashioned one button mice have a way to summon up this menu too. However, I really want one of the entries on this menu to be "New Finder Window", so I can open a new finder window without pushing the mouse all the way over to the top left of the screen, clicking on file, waiting for it to come up, then selecting "new finder window" there.

Alternatively I can click on the desktop to switch to finder, then Command-N, but now I am using both my hands for a simple and frequent op. I really want to configure the right mouse click menu to include "New finder window". Is this possible by mortal man?

Links
Consult http://forums.xlr8yourmac.com/drivedb/search.drivedb.lasso for info on drive burners. But be careful - the data there is not always right, and anything that depends on modified plugin files is not supported by Apple.
The Mac OS FAQ
That mighty fine Apple museum