Category: Macintosh
The long awaited update for the Mac OS X Lion operating system has been released by Apple. Thanks to a bevy of issues in the preceding releases of the Mac OS 10.7 series, many users have been counting the days until Apple released the latest update to resolve those issues. The 10.7.2 update includes the following new items in it: iCloud stores your email, calendars, contacts, Safari bookmarks, and Safari Reading list and automatically pushes them to all your devices….
This is a command coming from the *NIX world I found to be useful for maintaining a backup for important software. It works either on a single computer or with two computers. The details can be found in the man page for the command. I’d like to thank Mike Doob from the MUUG for reminding me about this command. The simplest way to use the command is “rsync <file list or directory 1> <file list or directory 2>”. All it…
Happy Canadian Thanksgiving everybody. This review will be just a quick one. I’m not an expert with this sort of thing and have only dabbled with it from time to time… What is it? Handbrake is simply a transcoder. It converts DVD’s to video files and video files from one format to another. Does it work? Yes. It does what it was designed to do quite well and actually is fairly stable in spite of having not been updated in…
A few minutes ago I downloaded and tried out a free music player called aTunes. They had a version update to 2.1.0. My impression is it is a good try. There are a couple of features which iTunes doesn’t have but (on the Mac at least) the interface is a little clunky. For the moment Apple doesn’t have much to worry about. However I can see where this project is going so it may be worth considering in the future….
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…
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…
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%…
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…
The Apple, Inc. Japan website is offering free upgrades for all Macs, iPhones, iPads, and iTouches damaged in the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. (http://www.apple.com/jp/support/information.html) According to the website, repairs must be requested before the end of June. Keep in mind that their current policy is subject to be pulled at any time so be sure to get your machine in as soon as possible. For those who evacuated from Japan with damaged machines, no definitive word on what can…
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…
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…
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…
This morning while performing my daily internet news gathering I came across an update to an interesting program. Minitube is a You Tube downloader/player. One of the major points the author makes is it doesn’t use the Flash player. In my opinion this makes it fairly fast. This program is available in four forms, Mac, Windows, Linux (32bit binary), and source code. The Mac and Windows versions have demos. I would guess the Linux and source code versions are the…
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…
