I came across this great widget for tracking package shipments from the Dashboard. It has a really simple interface while remaining incredibly flexible. You can enter a title for your various shipments which is especially handy if you are an Amazon Prime member and order a lot of stuff.
Here are a few quick keyboard shortcuts. When viewing a smart playlist in iTunes, you can complete delete the selected track from the iTunes library by hitting command-option-delete.
If you want to select a button option on a pop-up selection, just type the first letter of the button. For example, type “d” for “delete.”
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
The internet has become as much a part of OS X as Mail.app. But if your like me, your mac is stuck behind several layers of security. My first layer of “protection” is Comcast. Comcast really does not want you running your own server with their cable system. They effectively block IMAP ports to prevent you from running your mac as a mail server. They have even begun to packet shape BitTorrent traffic. There is little the average user can do about this. This outline is about the other layers of security that prevent you from using VNC, Devonthink Server, Omnifocus server and many other applications that now offer data up over the internet. I’ve tailored it for use with the Airport Extreme base station
The first step is to get a static DNS entry and point it at your router. I use DynDNS. I chose something memorable so I don’t have to look it up all the time. If you can remember the IP address of your router, then you can probably skip this step.
Open up the Airport Utility and select your router. Click the “Manual” button in the lower left corner. The IP address that your provider has assigned to the router should appear at the bottom of the next screen. Write that down.
Now go back to the DynDNS web page and enter your routers IP address as the address that you would like traffic routed to. You’re telling DynDNS to make a readable URL address available and point all traffic to your router. Don’t worry, there are TWO firewalls between the internet and your Mac.
Get a static IP address for your Mac
Your Mac’s IP address can be found in the System Preferences. Open the “Network” preferences and select whatever connection you use to get on the internet. Mine is Ethernet 1. On the TCP/IP lozenge, choose “Using DHCP with manual address” as the method for “Configure IPv4″. Most likely, your router is distributing a series of IP address from 10.0.1.1 to 10.0.1.200. You need to choose an IP address outside this range. I suggest using 10.0.1.201. Type that into the box next to “IP Address”. The “Subnet Mask” and “Router” IP address should already be set. Set the DNS server to your router as shown. We only need the router to do the DNS look-up for us anyway.
Firewalls
The Airport Extreme is your first line of protection. No unsolicited traffic can make it past the router. That is, unless we tell the router to make some openings in the firewall. These are called Port forwarding or Port Mapping. To add port mapping to the Airport, click the “Advanced” button at the top of the Airport Utility window.
Now click the “Port Mapping” lozenge
Click the little plus sign underneath the “Allow:” box. The next pop-up window allows you to either choose a common service to add such as Apple Remote Desktop or Windows Sharing. A really useful port to open is the one used for VNC. This will allow you to control your mac remotely from anywhere on the internet.
To add a VNC port, do not select a service. We are going to create one instead. VNC typically uses port 5901, so type that into all the port boxes shown. Enter your Mac’s IP address as the destination of the ports forwarding. This essentially tells the router to send any traffic it receives on port 5901 directly to your Mac.
So now the router understands what to do with the traffic. You have to tell your Mac what to do with it. I said earlier that there were TWO firewalls. The first is the Airport Extreme. The second is the one built into your Mac. Back to the system preferences and open the “Sharing” preferences. Click the “Firewall” lozenge. If you have never done so, turn on your Mac’s firewall and then flog yourself for not maintaining your personal security. Never do that again!
Now click the “New” button to open up a new connection through the Macs firewall. From the pull down menu, select “Other” and enter 5901 as the port number to allow through.
Now the world can access port 5901 on your Mac. That’s kind of scary. You can always go into either Airport Utility or the Mac Firewall and turn off the port again without deleting all the work you did. The same technique can be used to open up BitTorrent or Telekinesis ports. There are several online tools that will tell you if the ports have been successfully unblocked.
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
I was quick to complain about the iPhones lack of note syncing. I’m still hopeful that Apple will come through with a patch to implement it.
In the meantime I think I have pretty good work around. If you don’t have an IMAP email account (like .Mac) then you can skip this post.
When I want to make a note, I just create a draft email. I leave the recipient address blank but add a subject title. I can then type away (I’m writing this post using the method now). When I’m done I hit “Cancel” and the iPhone asks if I want to save the draft. Once it is saved, the iPhone syncs the drafts with my IMAP email account which syncs with all of my computers. Now I have my mobile notes anywhere. It’s a lot like just sending yourself an email message, but I find that it is less messy since I don’t have to sift through my entire inbox to find my notes.
Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhoto, Organization, Productivity, Tip, Trick, Web
You can quickly pause anything playing in the iPod mode of the iPhone without any button presses. In fact you don’t even have to remove the phone from your pocket. Just unplug the headphone jack. Apple was clever enough to realize that if your headphones come unplugged, most likely you don’t want your music to keep playing. You gotta love the attention to detail. I’ve tried this with both the headphones that ship with the iPhone and the traditional iPod headphones.
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:
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
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
I tend to listen to Podcasts (one of the best is MacBreak Weekly) while I work. But when my wife starts talking to me from the other room, I have to stop what I’m doing to navigate to iTunes just to click Pause. It finally reached a level of annoyance that made me fired up Script Editor and throw together a little script to do it for me. This is just about as simple an Apple Script as you can get:
tell application “iTunes”
playpause
end tell
Now, just save it as an application and bind it to some key you’re not using. I used one of the buttons on my Wacom Tablet. One key press and the podcast will either pause or play depending upon its current state.
It’s so great that Apple included a little hook for the Pause/Play function. This is yet another great feature of OSX. If something’s missing that you really want it to do, chances are that a short Apple Script or Automator Action can remedy the situation.
I think this little trick will hold me over until that new keyboard sees the light of day.
Technorati Tags: Apple, AppleScript, Mac, Programming, iTunes, Tip
The quickest way to reduce office clutter is to get rid of paper. The stuff spreads onto every available flat surface and into every open container in the office. New paper is delivered to my house everyday by the mailman whether I want it or not. Even if you opt-out of junk mail, you are still going to get credit card offers from companies that you have a business relationship with. There’s almost no way to stop your own bank from sending these “exclusive offers” to you every day.
What you need is a trusted routine. Mine is to Scan and Shred. Here’s what works for me: everyday when I get home I collect all of the mail, fliers, advertisements and papers into a large box near the entry to my office (which for me is at the bottom of the stairs to the second floor). When I head up to the office, I take the pile with me. I’ve got a great scanner and a small shredder and almost no paper clutter.
The scanner I use is a Fujitsu Scansnap . They make several models, but if you use a Mac then you need to get the Mac model (S500M). This is the real work horse of my routine. The Scansnap converts 36 pages per minute into PDF files. That’s right, I said 36 pages per minute (about one per second). Technically it can scan 18 double sided sheets per minute. Another time saver with the model is that you can set it up to really skip any user interaction. With a press of the scan button a stack of sheets are quickly scanned and PDF files are saved directly to a pre-defined location. Personally I scan the files into Preview so that I can save them with a descriptive file name and practical tags. Here is a typical work flow:
I shred immediately for two reasons. The first is that I don’t have to worry about the can collectors that throw my garbage all over the street. My neighbor recently found all of his old mail in a shopping cart behind the local gas station. I’m sure there was more than enough personal info in that pile to cause him some concern.
The second reason to shred immediately is for the commitment. Once it is in the shredder it will never come back out to be filed in a shoe-box or stacked on a desk. It’s gone and life goes on. I tried to separate the scan action from the discard action, but I just ended up creating new piles next to my computer.
I really can not say enough about the Scansnap. Before dropping the rather sizable chunk of cash on the S500M, I had an HP all-in-one. It was passable, but from start to finish, a single scan took me about 7 minutes. That’s ONE side of ONE sheet. It made me feel like Sisyphys. I scan virtually anything that is worth keeping, but here is what I don’t shred:
I haven’t reached Nirvana yet, but I am certainly on my way out of Purgatory (wow, mixed religious metaphors).
Technorati Tags: Organization, Productivity, Tip
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)
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
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
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.
A little while ago, I wrote about using Podtube to download flash videos from Youtube. As Youtube pulls more and more videos off, due to complaints from studios like NBC, I enjoy keeping local copies for future viewing. Well, I’m happy to report the easiest way yet to capture these video. VideoDL is web service that simply fetches the flash file and provides you with a simple download link. Just put in the URL from a video that you want to keep. VideoDL produces a link. Click the link and your browser starts the download. From what I can tell it works great with both Google video and Youtube, but not Metacafe (they don’t claim it should).
Technorati Tags: Apple, iTunes, Mac, Software, Tip, Trick, Video, Youtube
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
I love to look at other people’s photo’s on Flickr. Maybe it’s the voyeur in me or maybe I just wonder if other people’s lives are more interesting than mine. With iPhoto, you can keep up with all of your favorite photo groups and pools without having to click through to the web page. Just go into iPhoto and under the “File” menu choose “Subscribe to Photocast.”
Get the RSS feed address from the bottom of a Flickr photo set and paste it into the address box in iPhoto. Click “ok” and iPhoto will download the latest photos for you to view right on your desktop. You can even view the comments and titles for each photo.
Technorati Tags: iPhoto, OSX, Photography, Software, Tip, Trick
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 on 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
I tried out a trick making the rounds on many of the Mac news sites. Supposedly, it is possible to enable Apple’s Front Row on the MacPro.
This sounded like a great idea. I’d love use my Mac Pro as a media machine but for some reason Apple chose not to include an IR remote with the Mac Pro. The hack seemed easy enough. Just modify the AppleHIDMouse extension to allow the mighty mouse to control Front Row. So I backed up my file and applied the hack. I then tried to install Front row from my installer CD but got the usual error. So I downloaded the updated installer from Apple. This time it claimed to install the package, but I couldn’t find the application anywhere on my machine. So, I gave up and pretended nothing happened.
Well, my Mac wasn’t going along with that decision. Within a few hours I was having kernel panics just about every hour. For no particular reason. Sometimes when I was using iTunes. Sometimes in Safari. No specific cause.
I tried to just replace the modified extension and delete the cache files. This, of course, required me to rebuild my privileges as well. No good. I was starting to think that I would have to do a new system install. I finally resorted to running Onyx, restarting, and then running Applejack. Everything seems fine now. No kernel panic for the past hour. I’ve been pushing it with Safari, Aperture, Devonthink, and now Ecto.
Technorati Tags: Apple, Hardware, Mac, OSX, Software, Tip, Trick
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
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