Aint that special » Software

Too many browsers

Macgiver — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 22:08:38 +0000

No one should complain that there are not enough choices for web browsers on the Mac. Each one is unique and has its own merits. The only logical thing to do is to run them all, right. Well at least a few. Here is an abbreviated list.

Safari
Firefox
Opera
Omniweb
Camino
Shira
Devonthink

The problem comes when you start to gather bookmarks and cookies in different browsers. You end up with a rats nest of info and no way to find that bookmark to that site with that guy that was once in that movie (you know, that guy). There are a few choices out there for syncing bookmarks but I’ve settled on Bookit from Everyday Software. It’s kind of tough to setup, but then again it is only $12.

Here’s a great use of this little application. I have a Mac at home that I use Safari and occasionally Omniweb and Firefox. Bookit is great for syncing all of the bookmarks across all the browsers. The major problem though, is that I run Firefox on a PC at work. It gets frustrating to use my bookmarks through a .Mac portal. The best solution for me is to run Google Sync with Firefox (it’s only available for Firefox right now) on both my Mac at home and my PC at work. Now when I sync with Bookit, all of my browsers end up with the same bookmarks. This also ensures that my iPhone has all of my current bookmarks too. I’ve reached browser nirvana.

Technorati Tags: Apple, internet, Mac, Review, Software, Tip, Trick, Web

Shareware customer service

Macgiver — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 02:20:43 +0000

Not long ago I purchased TextExpander from Smile On My Mac. It’s a handy little program that inserts long snippets of text when you type an abbreviation. Like when you type “ddate” TextExpander can automatically insert the current date instead. This can be very handy for coding or writing HTML.

Sure, the software is nice, and the price was not ridiculous, but what really impressed me was the email I just received. Smile on My Mac sent me message full of tips for using the application. Keep in mind, I already paid for the software. I’m not using a demo so they are not just trying to lure me in. I think they just genuinely want their customers to get the most out of their product. That’s refreshing.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac, Review, Software

We are living in the future

Macgiver — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 14:29:22 +0000

If I had any doubt that technology was not living up to my expectations, I’m a believer now. I just installed iPhone Remote on my Mac Pro and all I can say is WOW! My iPhone can control my Mac over the Edge network.

iPhone Remote is brought to us by the good people at Google (code named Telekinesis). Maybe they got tired of waiting for the gPhone and decided to make the iPhone the device dreams are made of. The server software is a quick install. It’s a lot like a VNC server. It runs in the background and receives requests from some port that it is told to listen to. The server software then directs traffic to its own applications. Here is a quick run-down of what you can do remotely from your iPhone.

You can take a picture with your Mac’s video camera and receive it right on your iPhone (only one frame, not a video stream). Any file on your Mac at home can be accessed from your iPhone. How about taking a screenshot of your Mac’s desktop? Yup, you can do that. You want to do a Spotlight search for a file? No probelmo. I’ll illustrate a quick tour of the application below. The screen shots are taken from Safari running on my Mac Pro (since there is no way to take a decent picture of the iPhone interface). But you have to trust me, this looks great on the iPhone.

This first picture is of the iPhone Remote software running on my Mac. It’s very simple to use. Just open up the ports in your firewall and start the server. I like to have the “applications” open in a new window on the iPhone just for ease of use.

This is the main application view on the iPhone. Just tap one of the buttons. That background image is automatically pulled from the Mac running the iPhone Remote server. That’s my desktop.

This is the list of applications on my Mac. Did you forget to fire-up your BitTorrent client this morning? No problem. Just turn it on from your iPhone.

You can just as easily access your files. Click through directories and open up that PDF file right from your phone. I found a strange twist, that I don’t think was intended but could have very interesting consequences. When I clicked on a Subethaedit document that contained an HTML snippet, my Mac opened the document in Subethaedit (talk about remote control!) and my iPhone presented me with a rendered webpage, rather than the snippet of code. I don’t know which surprised me more, windows just poping open on my mac, or the iPhone rendering the HTML code. This opens up a very easy way to make your own web applications without having a web server. I’m not sure this method would support cgi though.

And if you don’t remember where that file is, just use the iPhone Remote’s Spotlight function. Here is a Spotlight search for the word “Perl”

A feature that has a lot of potential, is streaming media from your Mac at home to your iPhone. The server software can stream audio or video directly. You gotta have a remote to control that music, right? One is included.

While the Edge service may never be fast enough to allow for true Remote Desktop, there is a work around. You can actually select and then trigger Applescripts from your iPhone. This has potential to allow you to FTP upload to servers, start Backup software, or even secure a stolen computer.

Finally, for all those Leet Mac users, there is actually a Terminal application. Finally, we can run our cron jobs while we’re on the road.

The service works through a secure shttp connection, so you don’t need to worry too much about the data being transmitted. It’s all encrypted. However, it’s a little scary to think that if some nefarious person gets your user name and password, they can have complete snooping privileges. I like a suggestion I found on the Telekinesis Wiki which is to setup some Mail.app Applescript triggers. Send an email with the Subject “iPhone Remote On” and voila, your Mac starts up the server. Send another email to turn it off. It’s really just one more layer of security. You could even have the script look for a particular password in the body of the message before running.

iPhone Remote is a wonderful application. Apple may someday provide an SDK for the iPhone, but until then, a little creativity and elbow grease will carry the device a long way.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhone, Mac, Programming, Review, Security, Software, Tip, Trick, Web

There’s a new update in town

Macgiver — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 00:31:08 +0000

The iPhone firmware now stands at 1.0.2. No real info about what is contained in this update. I’m sure it will make my life approximately 10% more complete than before.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhone, Software

Bin and Cue

Macgiver — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 01:00:25 +0000

Do you have a bunch of bin files laying around your documents folder from your PC days of using Nero Express. You know, those arcane disk images that fly all over the net. They’re still out there. There is quite an endless supply on the old torrent-sphere. Well if you have a mac, you can open them right up and convert them to an MPEG-4 video file suitable for playing on your iPod or iPhone. It won’t even cost you anything. Here’s the deal:

Download VLC for the Mac

After it’s installed, right click on the “cue” file (it should have come with the “bin” file) and select open with VLC. Sure, VLC will play the video just the way it is, but we want it on our iPhone, so stop the video and go to the “File” menu of VLC. Select “Streaming/Exporting Wizard” (shortcut is shift-command-w). You should have a screen that looks like this:

Now select “Transcode/Save to file” and click next

Select “Existing playlist item” and then Next

Now we choose our video format to create. I like H.264 video and MPEG 4 Audio. Try experimenting and see what works best for you.

On the Encapsulation format, I just choose MPEG 4.

Now click next and watch the video get transcoded to the iPod/iPhone compatible format. Pretty slick if you ask me. VLC is definitely a must have piece of software.

Correction— Sorry about that, but after importing the video to iTunes, you will have to convert it for iPod (which is done by right clicking on the video in iTunes)

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhone, iPod, Mac, OSX, Tip, Trick, Video

On Security

Macgiver — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 14:11:59 +0000

What if your Mac is stolen? How much personal info do you have just sitting there on those hard disk platters? My Mac has Tax info for the past seven years, copies of bank statements, credit card PINs, and receipts for almost everything I have bought (see this post about archiving it all). It’s rather disturbing to think of all that info falling into mischievous hands.

Up until about 4 months ago, I was using Apple’s FileVault (see this post). This is a great way to keep things secure. It essentially encrypts your data into a disk image that is unlocked on boot up. The problem comes when you want to migrate everything to a new disk, like I tried. FileVaults can not be migrated. You must install a fresh system on the new disk, mount the Apple FileVault disk image, and drag everything over manually. No thanks.

I quickly switched back to using the excellent software Knox from Marko Karppinen. Knox also uses encrypted disk images to keep out prying eyes. They can be opened on any mac (given the correct password), which makes them easily portable. Knox also runs as a system wide extension that will auto-mount an image on boot-up, backup encrypted disks, and (this is the big one) the disk images are searchable by Apple’s Spotlight. Basically, it’s like just keeping a separate secure drive with all of your sensitive data on it. Sure, you can do most of this with Apple’s disk utility, but Knox really makes it all seamless and easy to maintain.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac, Security, Review, Software, Tip, Trick

Sweet, sweet Safari Merging

Macgiver — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 13:41:43 +0000

Here’s a quick tip. If your browsing session looks a lot like a game of “52 pickup” then go to Safari’s “Window” menu and choose “Merge.” Voila, all of your open windows are now merged into one. Thanks Apple!

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac, Web, Software, Tip, Trick

Aperture training

Macgiver — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 13:22:54 +0000

If you’ve been following along with this blog, then you know I love Apple’s Aperture application. I upgraded from iPhoto shortly after I started using my first DSLR camera (the Nikon D80). Aperture is pretty straight forward to use. It’s elegant and intuiative, but there are many different workflow options when managing a large photo library. I started by reading through the Apple Pro Training Series: Aperture 1.5 (Apple Pro Training) which is a wonderful reference. It has some gorgeous color images on every single page. Detailed descriptions of the various tools and nice step by step instructions. It is well worth the price for both beginning and intermediate amateur photographers. It even comes with a DVD that contains all the images for the lessons and examples shown throughout the book.

After working with this book for a couple of months I was really working more efficiently in Aperture and taking advantage of some very cool features. But I still felt like I was missing out on some features that the professionals over at Inside Aperture took for granted. After some Google searching I came across Aperture 1.5 Beyond the Basics and bought it off Amazon. It was kind of pricey but I knew Derrick Story and Scott Bourne would not do a bad job. I regularly listen to the iLifeZone podcast and it is usually chock full of good tips. I was not wrong. The DVD is essentially a stand alone application with a simple user interface. You can watch an entire chapter at once, or just a single lesson. The video quality is very high and professionally produced as well. The best feature is that the material is completely un-biased. It is not certified or sponsored by Apple in any way, so you get the truth about what works and what does not. Click on a topic in the list shown and a video pops open and starts playing. You are even given the option to run in windowed or full screen mode. This publisher really gets it.

The training DVD helped so much, that I went over to Lynda.com (the publisher) to check out some of their other training products. WOW!! They have a lot of great stuff. On-line training videos as well as “ship to your home” DVD training is available through the site. They already have an Adobe CS3 training package available.

Technorati Tags: Aperture, Apple, iPhoto, Mac, Nikon, Photography, Productivity, Review, Software, Tip

Fun with Aperture

Macgiver — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 19:24:14 +0000

The new D80 has kept me pretty busy. This is my first “Pro-sumer” camera. I’ve never even focused a camera my self let alone adjust the f-stop and shutter speed. It’s all quite interesting. I rely heavily on Wikipedia and the Nikon user groups for help.
But when it comes to the processing side, I’ve taken full advantage of the 30 day trial of Aperture. After playing around with it for a week or so, I can say that it is far superior to iPhoto, but you will pay the learning curve tax. You not only need to be committed to the $300 price tag, but also to the time commitment to really take advantage of the features. Aperture adds many more options for controlling metadata. In fact, there is more metadata than the casual photography could really use. After all, it’s really meant for photographers that want to know what f-stop and ISO the photo was taken with.
The photo editing tools are not a replacement for Adobe photoshop but they are quite advanced. Once again, Apple has integrated elegance into the user experience. The Loupe is a magnifier that allows you to fluidly move across photos to check for imperfections. The red-eye reduction is easy to use and very effective as well.
Even though Aperture is aimed at the advanced user Apple has included a plugin architecture that allows third party tricks for amateurish tricks such as a Flickr plugin for Aperture (there is also one for iPhoto). Apple finally got it right. Third party plugins!!!! Why not let someone else finish the product for you? The Flickr plugin is still beta and managed to crash Aperture a couple of times. But for the most part it worked as I had hoped. I selected a photo and chose Export to Flickr. The plugin provided a screen to input a title, description, tags and even let me choose the image size. Everything I could need.
My final analysis is that Aperture is good but I’m still not ready to part with $300 for Aperture when iPhoto can now handle RAW photos for the D80.

Easy application updating

Macgiver — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 10:48:58 +0000

Versiontracker and Macupdate are some great services for Mac owners. With a paid membership you get regular notices when new versions of software are released. I let my membership lapse though so I periodically have to go out and look to see if I have the newest versions (because it makes me feel good to have the bleeding edge).

But now there are some new ways to accomplish this tedious task. The first is a little program called AppFresh from Metaquark. This is a great piece of code! When you fire it up for the first time it scans your applications, plugins etc and builds a list of your applications. Then it compares them to what versions are currently available.

AppFresh then provides a great list of available versions along with your own versions. Unfortunately (or thankfully) AppFresh just downloads the new version to your desktop. There is no magical Sparkle integration, so you need to run the installation by hand.

UPDATE

I’ve been using AppFresh a little more and it is really a fantastic piece of software. Metaquark really has an eye for detail. They’ve integrated a window pane for release notes as shown here

What’s more, you can enable I use this rating which is integrated with the web site. There’s even some kind of versioning for updates. I’m not sure how well this works. I’m not even sure what exactly it does since the help section is not complete yet. This is a great start for a new application.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac, Review, Software

It’s that time of year

Macgiver — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 20:06:03 +0000

Tax time usually means that I remember how much I wanted to organize my finances last year. I’ve used a nice little application called iBank from IGG Software. It has suited most of my needs over the past year and is about half the price of Quicken for the Mac. But this year I had the itch to see if I was missing anything by using independent software like iBank. I purchased Quicken 2007 from my local Apple store and got to work moving all my finances over from iBank.

The real drive for me was that Quicken claimed to be able to link up with my accounts online so that I didn’t have to remember to download my transactions. Well, guess what… no program will do that. Quicken does have one nice feature. It will import your bank info from the account activity. This means that if you import your activity from Wells Fargo, Quicken will recognize that the account is with Wells Fargo. It’s not really that big of a deal.

Both programs allow you to reconcile your account during import, both show all your assets and both show how you use your money. I really can not recommend Quicken over iBank. iBank does everything the average home user needs and you’ll keep some money in that bank account.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac, puppy, Software

Meander

Macgiver — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 03:11:35 +0000

Remember back in the day when you had to BUY mapping software? I can. I plunked down $30 for some mediocre software that was out of date in a year. Then Mapquest saved us. It brought forward free software to find out where we could go and how to get there. Google has since elevated online maps to an impressive level. There is still a major issue with creating waypoints and paths. Recently I came across a great little app that does this one thing really well. It’s called Meander. The principle is simple. It creates a transparent window that hovers over any map window, be it Google, Mapquest, or Microsoft Live. It can even be a PDF of a map. You set the scale of the map as shown, then draw your path over top of your map. It’s that simple.

What Meander does is create a line drawing (which can be seen with a white background) and measures that line. It’s so simple, it’s amazing.

I find it pretty handy for all kinds of mapping. Scheduling dog walks, bike paths and even some crazy road trips.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac, Map, Review, Software

A band-aid for the Finder

Macgiver — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 22:29:24 +0000

Yes, the Finder could be better. I think many of us are hoping that the next OS release brings tabbed finder views and a simple way to deal with moving and viewing files. But until that day comes, there is Pathfinder by Cocoatech (PF4). It’s been touted on 43Folders a couple of times, here and here. Cocoatech have produced a quality product that feels right at home on my desktop. It takes some practice to get used to it though, so I’ll outline some cool features here.

The dropstack is a temporary holding place for files. Think of it as a more useful and forgiving command-select. You just drop files in the square and it keeps track of all of them. Then when you are ready to manipulate the files, you can easily grab each or all of them. YOu can even ctrl-click the stack to compress, burn, or email the lot. I use this for organizing my directories. I just browse through a bunch of folders throwing misplaced files in the dropstack. When I’m ready I just switch to the folder I want them in and unload them all.

There are a huge number of options when working with files. The contextual menu for a single file allows you to do almost anything with it. Pathfinder not only gives you the option to copy the path of a file but it gives you the option of copying the UNIX, HFS, Terminal, URL, or name as a path. Honestly, it’s more than I have use for, but I’m sure some uber power user out there would love this feature.

As far as file paths go, PF4 has multiple optional drawer that you can setup to display the curent file path. As shown below, I also like to keep a folder histroy displayed so I don’t have to keep back tracking to folders that I use regularly. You know, those folders that are good enough for favorites, but you might make a desktop alias to.

The last feature I want to mention is the optional Running Processes tab. It’s kind of like having a mini-dock attached to the window. You can kill a process, switch to an application or bring up a contextual menu with loads more options, such as launching another instance of the application as root.

These are the kind of features that only a dedicated and Apple Fanboy would think about including. I bet the developers at Cocoatech all love their macs and started making great software that they wanted to use. I, for one, am grateful that the mac community is made by companies like Cocoatech

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac, OSX, Productivity, Review, Software, Tip, Trick

Upload your photos

Macgiver — Wed, 27 Dec 2006 00:48:20 +0000

Now that we all have a bunch of new holiday photos it’s time to get them uploaded to Flickr and other various photo sharing sites. If you’re running either iPhoto or Aperture on the Mac you have limited choices to automate the upload process. I have used the plugin ApertureExport in the past, but to purchase the full version is kind of pricey for a one trick pony. After trying out some of the options out there I’ve finally settled on PictureSync from uVerse. You can upload to just about any service you can think of (check out this list) with tags, descriptions and complete group control. It will even pull in all the metadata from Aperture. PictureSync is free for the casual user but they ask for $15 for heavy users.
One of the coolest features is the Automator like scripting. This allows you setup rules to control how information gets added to the photos during uploads. For example, if you don’t want your keywords from Aperture added to your photos on Flickr, just create a rule that substitutes new keywords to the photo before uploading.
PictureSync is also application aware. It can pull selections directly from Aperture, iPhoto or Adobe Bridge. It’s pretty universal.

A close runner up to PictureSync is 1001 from the makers of Ecto and Endo. I really like this application too. It does far more than upload photos, it’s also a photo stream viewer. Similar to using iPhoto to view photostreams, but 1001 allows you to set the time intervals for checking streams as well. It does a good job, but I just liked PictureSync better.

Technorati Tags: Aperture, Apple, iPhoto, Mac, Photography, Review, Software

The easiest way to print a calendar on a Mac

Macgiver — Sat, 16 Dec 2006 15:55:27 +0000

Today I had the need to print out a calendar for my wife. She needed a blank printout to write a schedule to hang on her wall. My first thought was “I think there is a template in Apple’s iWork Pages that could do this.” Well, that was a poor assumption. No such luck. I went to the iWork community site to find a template but nothing was really useful.

Then it hit me! I have iCal. Right there under the file menu I chose print, fully expecting to just get a bland printout of my current view. That’s not the Apple way though. You get a nice print preview and preference panel that allows some great print options. You can select the number of months to print, along with which calendar events to include. Black and white or color? No problem. Even mini-months are included. This is a wonderful surprise built right into iCal.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac, OSX, Productivity, Software, Tip, Trick

Sync two macs at home

Macgiver — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 02:56:46 +0000

Thanks to Apple’s aggressive release cycle, many Mac owners have a couple of different machines sitting at home. My particular setup is a Mac Pro in the study and an older 17″ Powerbook in the living room. You would think that this would be ideal. I have a powerful workstation for Aperture and a nice portable for couch surfing. But, eventually you realize that there is a fly in the ointment. Many items only exist on one machine or the other. Apple’s “Sync” utility does work great with a dot mac account. But their Backup application just doesn’t work very well. Sure, all of my bookmarks, contacts, and keychains are all in sync between the two machines, but it just doesn’t handle large data backups very well. Today I was just thinking, “wouldn’t it be great if I could do the same with all of my other documents?” Then I suddenly realized I own the must have application Chronosync by Econ technologies. This application is one of those little gems that just works well.

What it does

It can synchronize two directions, archive deleted files, and even email a log file to you when it’s all done. I’ve been using it for about a year now for nightly backups to an external drive and it works great. As the name implies, Chronosync has a built in scheduler that will run any script at a predetermined time. It only syncs files that have been modified, so it saves time and drive space.

How to do it

Here’s a brief breakdown of how to setup Chronosync to keep two machines up to date. There are some particular caveats that I will emphasize to keep from screwing up either machine.

Mount the remote machine (in this case it is my laptop). The first time you run the script, choose “Left to Right” sync. I am starting with the idea that my desktop has all of the master documents and I want to do an initial sync to replicate everything to my laptop. After the intial sync, you’ll want to setup two way syncing to keep both machines identical. The instructions that follow will outline bidirectional syncing since it is slightly more complicated.

I find it easier to use a series of Chronosync scripts to sync specific items rather than just doing a sync of the two home folders. While my Mac Pro has 750GB of drive space, my poor Powerbook only has 120GB (upgraded myself). I don’t want to run out of space on my portable. Also, the iPhoto and iTunes libraries are handled very sepcifically. I only sync those one way (from the desktop to the laptop). Make sure to read the Macworld article about using multiple libraries.

I create a new Chronosync script and set the left source as my “documents” folder onÂ my desktop and the right source as the documents folder on my laptop. Now choose “options” so that Chronosync can auto-mount the remote machine when it is time for the scheduled backup to occur.

Choose bidirectional sync and check the “Synchronize Deletions” box. I save deletions to an archive which I will go through and remove periodically. This is a nice safe guard to prevent accidental deletions on both machines.

We’re going to be pretty general with the sync triggers. If any of these attributes are different between two files, Chronosync will copy the new version. See the image below for the specific settings I use

Chronosync has many individual settings for each sync. I will just briefly outline my settings in the images below. In Error handling, I set “Ignore extended attributes and access control errors.”

Setup the email notification so that any errors are identified.

I don’t bother with the rule based sync because I want to capture all changed files.

That’s it

Just go try Chronosync. It’s a great application that gets the job done. It has just enough complexity to solve most archival needs but not so much that it is impossible to get anything done.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac, Productivity, Review, Security, Software

Parallels and Apple — Near perfect

Macgiver — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 03:13:29 +0000

There’s a whole lot of buzz around the latest Parallels beta release. They have added a new feature called “coherence” which allows OSX and Windows to co-mingle on your desktop. At first, this seems wrong and creepy. But once I appreciated what this will mean for the future, I found peace with Windows on my Mac.

Here’s the gist, you can drag documents between the Windows and Mac desktops and folders. Sadly, they do not “move” but simply copy from one environment to the other. Hopefully this will be changed in the near future. That’s not all, with the coherence mode turned on you can also drag an OSX window into the MS Windows desktop environment and copy and paste between applications using the default Apple short cuts. This is nothing short of monumental in the evolution of virtualization on the Mac.

I’m imagining a future where you can right click on a document anywhere and choose to open it in either the windowsÂ or the OSX environments. Or better yet, predefine that certain file types always open in the desired environment. The software will just work. No need to worry about the operating system. Web browsde in linux, rip DVD’s in Windows and take care of photo’s in iLife without ever concerning yourself with which environment is actually running.

I am blessed enough to be running dual monitors. This allows me to dedicate one to the Windows VM on Parallels and one to OSX. I couldn’t ask for a better setup for getting my work done. The coherence mode of Parallels allows me to drag OSX windows into the Microsoft environment with no problems (however, you can not drag Microsoft application windows into the OSX environment). The image below shows Microsoft Media Player 11 running overtop Vienna and iStat (both Mac applications).

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac, OSX, Parallels, Review, Software, Windows

The wonders of Apple Hardware Test and Console

Macgiver — Sun, 19 Nov 2006 16:31:43 +0000

It seems that Disk Warrior is not going forward to support Intel macs. It’s pretty disappointing because I was a big fan of this software for the PPC macs. Unlike the Windows world, there are few system diagnostic tools for the mac. Maybe that’s because there are fewer issues with incompatible third party hardware. However, sh*t happens and sometimes you need more than Apple’s disk utility program to figure it out.

As I mentioned previously, I had some serious issues with kernel panics on my Mac Pro. Coincidentally I had installed a third set of 512MB ram cards just a few days earlier, bringing me to a grand total of 3GB (Aperture is finally feeling a little more peppy). I was concerned that the new chip was the origin of my problems.

Luckily, Apple includes a Hardware Test application on my system install CD. I only had to restart my machine with the “D” key held down. The Mac Pro booted right into a diagnostics program. Ran the extended diagnostics which took about 12 minutes. It tests the RAM, CPU and motherboard. It also provides some info about the machine.

Since it is not possible to do a screen capture from the hardware test, I’ve added a link to a larger camera shot.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Hardware, Mac, OSX, trouble shooting, Software, Tip, Trick

Adding Youtube video to iTunes

Macgiver — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 18:29:01 +0000

Who doesn’t love Youtube (this month)? In fact some of the stuff I like so much that I want to keep it permanently on my computer. While there are applications out there like TubeSock, I think the way I do it provides more options.

I start by grabbing the flash file from Youtube with the free application PodTube. This little utility grabs the flash movie from the frontmost Safari window and loads it onto the desktop. While PodTube has settings to convert the file to an iPod playable format, I have not had any luck getting it to work. However, I am a registered user of Hawkeye. This is a great utility that converts files between a variety of formats. It can convert DVD files to play on iPods!

After Podtube places the flash file on the desktop, just import into Hawkeye and convert to MP4 (or any number of other formats). Hawkeye will even add the file to iTunes for you.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPod, Mac, OSX, Youtube, Software, Tip, Trick, Video

Beyond Onyx

Macgiver — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 16:32:45 +0000

I love the system utility Onyx. I’ve tried most of the others, including MacJanitor and Cocktail, but Onyx has always done a good job and has a great feel to it. Now I’m aware that most of them are simply running a series of unix maintenance commands to repair permissions, clear cache files and update catalogs. But I still find them easier to use than the Unix commands.

I am now an Applejack user. What is Applejack? Well, it’s the uber disk repair script. While it does require a restart into Single user mode, it repairs way more than just the permissions. Too much to list here, but check out the link I provided. One of the big features is repairing bad bits on a drive. If you feel like your mac has been crashing more often than it should, the disk could be corrupted. Applejack will take care of that. It also cleans up virtual memory catalog structures.

Be careful though, Single user mode is quite powerful. I would recommend reading up on it before you try it.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac, OSX, Productivity, Review, Software, Tip