Category: OS X

Fodder for Virtual Machine users: Ubuntu 11.04 is out

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…

NeoOffice 3.2 is out

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…

Live Game CD

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…

Macports: Running Linux/BSD software directly on a Mac

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…

Apple Releases update for Snow Leopard

Plagued by inquiries from users with issues with their new MacBook Pros, Apple, Inc. has released an update for Mac OS X intended to deal with those issues directly.  Mac OS X 10.6.7 update has come more than a month after the release of the product and is “Intended to resolve stabilitity issues” with the os. The issues with the new line of MacBook Pros are graphics related according to an article in Engadget (http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/21/new-macbook-pros-freezing-under-heavy-load/) in which the machine feezes…

Shell script example for OS X

Almost any series of commands which can be run in the shell can be run from a shell script. Tying in some of the last few posts I published here this is an example. Let’s say I wanted to run the gedit editor from the shell rather than from the dock/GUI… I would first have to locate the executable program. I happen to know it is installed in “/Applications/gedit.app/Contents/MacOS/gedit“. By running this program the gedit editor will start. Since it…

Apple Releases Update for iTunes, Java

For the second time this week, Apple has released a new version of their iTunes software.  10.2.1 was made available for download but the documentation of the changes in the program has not been mad available on the Apple website. This is the second update this week, and with the impending release of iOS 4.3 on March 11th looming ever larger in the windshield, Apple is obviously trying to cover all the bases with a slew of updates before hand….

KillDashBoard: Get Your Mac Back!

by Sean Henriques KillDashboard : a utility to disable the Dashboard on your Mac After seeing my lovely 4GB Macbook Pro come to a halt, I checked the Activity Monitor and was horrified to see that the Dashboard was taking up more than 1GB of Real Memory! I don’t know about you but I rarely pop into the Dashboard so I wrote up a utility to Kill the Dashboard quickly and posted on buzz. A request to share it soon…

Tip of the Month

This month’s tip is for the Macintosh and is known to work on all OS’s 7.x through 9.x. This tip will come in handy when you want to capture a screen for a document or to provide a customer with a screen shot of a program. It can also be handy for those engineers who need to see exactly what is on a customer’s screen. Get the screen you want up and then decide which you want to do; a…