Author: BlankMike
The short response is don’t. The long response is it can be done but… It is very painful to get the TV to work as a monitor. The resoluton of a 720p TV is supposed to be 1200 x 720 (or fairly close). The aspect is 16:9. Unfortunately up to this point I’ve only been able to get 1024 x 768, which is an aspect of 4:3. To get there I first wasted a couple of hours fiddling around with…
Yesterday I saw a demo of a program called “Mouse Locator”. Surprisingly enough it lives up to its name. That’s always a big plus as far as I am concerned. This small utility puts a larger graphic around the mouse when it is moved. There are a number of preferences available. The first is the idle time (called the trigger time). This is how long the mouse has to remain inactive before moving it starts the graphic. The second is…
Like most people I hate being told how to spend any of my limited money. Especially in this economy. It seems every time Apple releases a major upgrade to their operating system a bunch of older computers are no longer supported. Readers will recall I have a G4 Server in excellent condition. Granted I had to replace the CD drive with a DVD drive, but that was the only hardware change I had to make. In order to get the…
The three readers are Adobe Digital Editions from Adobe, Stanza from http://www.lexcycle.com/, and Skim from http://skim-app.sourceforge.net. Each of the three have their strong points and weak points. Adobe is fairly powerful and fast, but lack many of the whiz bang features of other readers.They concentrate mostly on PDF documents (which is no surprise). Apart from formatting, there really isn’t much there which can’t be found in Preview (built into OS X). It has the look of a Windows program ported…
Just to let everybody know I’m still around and looking for material to write about. At the moment I’m comparing five E-book programs for the Mac. Although they are similar to the Comic Book readers I’ve previously reviewed, the two E-book reader programs I’ve looked at so far do not appear to support image files. They are mainly for PDF and other “text” related formats. At the same time the Comic Book readers do not like the “text” related formats….
Jomic is another comic book reader. It is written for the PPC, so the Intel folks will need to install Rosetta (allows the Intel machines to run PPC code). The version I have appears to be a demo. Many of the items in the menu are greyed out. However, I found by a bit of experimentation some of these items do function. Since the program was written for slower machines I’ve observed it is very fast on a faster machine….
Dapplegrey is a front end to DOSBox. It is a way to maintain quick access to the features and programs stored within DOSBox. Minimum requirements are OS X 10.3 and a PPC Mac. Access to programs is quite simple. It is a matter of going to the “Games List” tab and double-clicking on the desired program. The assumption is people running DOSBox are running old DOS (PC) games. In my case this is true. I do everything else in OS…
This article is a variation/enhancement to a post I found at http://sourceforge.net/apps/phpbb/freenas/viewtopic.php?f=49&t=9289 for a FreeNAS server. Of course purely Mac folks would likely want to stick with the AFP protocol. In terms of generalities the NFS server does not necessarily have to be running FreeNAS. It just has to work. FreeNAS is basically a “Swiss Army Knife” of external storage. I find it does a lot of things very easily. It doesn’t work on all machines (I’ve had a 60%…
Linux Mint 11 is out. Linux Mint is a specialised Linux distribution focusing on Multimedia. There are versions for residents of restrictive countries like the U.S.A. and Japan, as well as as a version for those of us in the rest of the world. It can be found at… http://linuxmint.com
Fedora 15 was released a short time ago. http://fedoraproject.org
When an app is installed via MacPorts, or one of the other programs used to bring Linux apps to the Mac, it is stored as a program requiring a terminal program to run. This is fine for some programs such as 7zip but not for others such as pan (a GUI newsreader) and gftp (a GUI based ftp program). I use these programs enough so I’d want them on the dock. After hunting around I found some discussion in a…
Most of our readers know I volunteer for an educational charity on Fridays. I install software on computers which are then given out to students. We have a “special needs” married couple who came in about a year ago and took a Linux box. They wanted to get their webcam running on it. After a couple of weeks I managed to get it more or less working. I thought it might be a good idea to pick up one and…
There are a good portion of our readers who know what I’m talking about. At the same time there are more than a few who don’t. I’ll explain what I mean in the title… Modern Intel Macs can be used to run PC software. When I say PC, I do not necessarily refer only to Microsoft and Windows. In this case Ubuntu is an example of a non-Microsoft operating system. Typically this is done in three ways. The first is…
I’ll admit this isn’t strictly a Mac oriented post. None the less it is still useful for the Apple//, Mac, and other communities. When people see something like the title of the post the reaction is pretty much the same as when a politician says “Trust me”. In this case the people operating this organisation have been at it for years. I remember getting books from then in the 80’s or 90’s. They have since updated their technology to support…
The new version of NeoOffice is out. The current version is 3.2. According to their web page at http://www.neooffice.org/neojava/en/index.php there are updates to font support and support for Lion (OS X 10.7) when it comes out. Their download page insists on a donation to the cause. Considering the quality of this product and the cost of a fully commercial product, for most people a donation would be justified. Those who can not afford a donation can still download and use…
By now folks realise I’m into free stuff. I was looking around some of the social networking sites I frequent when I found this little gem. It’s a live CD with old DOS games for the PC. So why am I writing about it here? Simple answer… It works better on Intel Macs than it does on PCs. Well, at least it does on the machines I use. 😉 The CD contains a whopping 40MB of games. Back in the…
I can hear “Mac purists” complaining about “polluting their computer with foreign software”. Sorry to dissapoint, but no computer, Mac or otherwise, is the be-all and end-all of computers. There are some things which work better on other platforms and conversely there are some things which work better on a Mac. The objective here is to add to the basic functionality of an excellent machine and make it better. As the title suggest Macports is a way to add the…
As is one can tell from the dates on my posts, I spent a while tracking this one down. The original link is in a now inaccessible e-mail account so I went out and located it directly on the web. The date of the manual is in 2010 so it looks as though it is being kept relatively up to date. For those interested in why I am posting this particular link, the reason is simple. BASH is the shell…
Actually it’s been out a couple of days now. At first blush (for maybe a couple of minutes), it looks pretty good. According to the various press releases it is faster than the previous version. Without actually timing anything my opinion is that statement appears to be true. As an aside, I’ve been seeing articles around the web suggesting it may be an IE killer on the Windows platform. Installing it on a Mac requires some steps. Connect to http://www.mozilla.com…
Finding interesting stuff for the Mac is difficult given the relative numbers of users and programmers out there. I think I may have found something though. In the *NIX world (including OS X) the Python language seems to be the up and coming thing for programming. Python is an interpreted object oriented language. Python comes free with OS X, Linux, and BSD. It has to be downloaded and installed if it is to run on a Windows machine. I have…
