Posts tagged as:

Mac

Snow Leopard – The What It Broke Edition (updated)

by Tony Mattke on September 4, 2009



Snow LeopardSnow Leopard was released on August 28th, and at 1:37pm I received my copy and proceeded to install it like a well trained puppy. After installing, I think I was more obsessed with playing with / finding new features than even testing out any of my software. Here is a list of things that no longer work on my mac in order of annoyance.

  1. Witch, or more specificly Application Enhancer (APE) [my post on witch] – UnSanity, who develops APE has not stated if an updated is on its way or not. Judging by the state of their website, it could be a long while.
  2. top – ok, its not broke, but what jacked up version of top did they ship with Snow Leopard?
  3. Crossover, which I only use for Visio. – Although it appears Crossover 8 is fully compatible with 10.6, I am unable to upgrade, since I picked up my copy when they were giving it away for free. $40 fix
  4. Cisco AnyConnect VPN Client – Other people are having mixed results with this one. I need to find a newer version to try out, but it is not working for me.
  5. My tftp server – I haven’t dug into this one yet, but the client I used for controlling tftpd stopped working.
  6. My GeekTool Scripts – I’m still working on rewriting the one for my wireless ap / signal
  7. Little Snitch – There appears to be an update to this, altho I haven’t tried it.
  8. CandyBar Icon Switcher – I was able to update after installing Snow Leopard, and now this appears to be working just fine.

Thats all I can think of, I’ve yet to try a few applications, but everything I need for everyday life works minus a couple of things above. Not having my application switcher is really annoying and by far the thing I miss most. Although if you were to ask me how do I feel about upgrading? Overall I’d say slightly annoyed, but then again, I’m pretty happy.

Update:I forgot to mention that InsomniaX has been broken by the blood thirsty Snow Leopard, and the developer has released an update. Also, the maintainer of the tftpd gui app has commented on support.apple.com regarding a fix for his application.

Update 2: TftpServer has been updated!

Update 3: APE, and PullTab have both been updated. So has Witch!

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Setting up Apple Filing Protocol and Bonjour under Debian

by Tony Mattke on August 28, 2009



Got a Mac ? Got a Linux box that you use as a file server on your home network? Sick of problems with samba? So was I, until today when I decided to figure out how to setup Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) and Bonjour under Linux, debian in my case. In the following tutorial, we’re going to install and configure, Netatalk and Avahi. I’m also going to show you how to create a TimeMachine backup location on your file server, and get your Mac to recognize / use it.

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Usefull OS X Eject Key Shortcuts

by Tony Mattke on August 16, 2009



Recently, I was using one of my custom short cuts and fat fingered the F12 key on my laptop… What resulted was my screen shutting off. Mystified, I began searching for standard OS X keyboard shortcuts that included the eject key. Here are a few I found over at My Ethereal Mind.

Ctrl – Shift – Eject Puts screen to sleep
Option – Command – Eject Computer to sleep
Ctrl – Command – Eject Computer Restart
Ctrl – Option – Command – Eject Shutdown computer completely

Obviously these are great for when you’re leaving for the day, or if you just need to lock your screen while you goto lunch. Do you have any non-standard shortcuts you use daily? Share them in the comments.

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OS X Leopard Hacks

by Tony Mattke on June 11, 2009



Here are a few settings you can change using the OS X defaults command to access some system parameters. As always, proceed with caution, and don’t mess with things of which you have no clue. I have only verified these in OS X 10.5 – no promises if they work in any other version. Some of these require a full restart to take effect.

Menubar

  • Remove translucency in menubar, turns it white.
    sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.WindowServer 'EnvironmentVariables' -dict 'CI_NO_BACKGROUND_IMAGE' 1
  • Remove translucency in menubar, turns it grey.
    sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.WindowServer 'EnvironmentVariables' -dict 'CI_NO_BACKGROUND_IMAGE' 0
  • Reverts back to default translucent menubar.
    sudo defaults delete /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.WindowServer 'EnvironmentVariables'

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Web Searches via Quicksilver

by Tony Mattke on December 1, 2008



Everyone does a fair amount of googling these days, but any network engineer can tell you that a quick ARIN whois search can be invalueable. I know I end up there quite often. Anyway, when I got my mac a friend told me to make sure I checked out Quicksilver, that it would be amazing.. upon first review, sure, I was impressed, but I wasn’t sold on it, until now..

Now, I’m no Quicksilver expert, I’m just getting started, but I’ll bring you along the way with me.  Setting up quick silver is pretty simple, altho both times I’ve installed it, I’ve had issues with it downloading plugins initially.. (it would always hang). Without any configuration you can press the hotkey(s) and search your Applications easily, run them, whatever.. not very impressive. Here are the steps to setup a web search.

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Cmd + Tab Replacement for Mac

by Tony Mattke on November 30, 2008



I’ve never liked the Mac OS X Command Tab application specific switching style… today, I found a few things to help ease the pain. The program in question is called Witch. A rather detailed, very versitile little program. Unfortunatly, you are unable to bind this to Cmd+Tab by default. But with the help of another application, plus a plugin, all is well.  Go ahead and install Witch, and then go grab APE,  install it, reboot :(, and then download PullTab. Open it up, and copy PullTab.ape to ~/Library/Application Enhancers/ (create this directory if it’s not there)… again, you’ll need to reboot or logout/in :(

After the song and dance of getting everything installed you can open up System Preferences. You’ll see two new items under Other. Application Enhancements, and Witch. Lets open up Application Enhancements, and make sure PullTab is enabled. Afterward, Command+Tab should no longer switch between applicatoins, and you should be able to open up the preferences for Witch. I have a very simple configuration applied. First, I checked Enable Witch. Second, I set the Forward, All Applications Trigger to Cmd+Tab (you may get a warning, just press ok). Third, under Behavior, I set ‘Sort windows by’ to window activity order.. last, but possibly most important, choose, or create a theme without transparency. Even on my ‘late 2008′ MacBook Pro 2.5 w/4GB memory the transparency option slows Witch up beyond usability when lots of window changes have been made since last invoking witch.. to me, this makes it unusable.

witch


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the road to Mac

by Tony Mattke on November 5, 2008



I’ve been pondering it for quite some time, but yes now I have switched to Mac.

I purchased a new 2.5ghz, 4gb of Ram, 15″ Macbook Pro. Purchased the 320gb 7200rpm hard drive seperate for about $109, and I’m pretty happy so far. I miss the extra screen real estate that my Dell d820 offered, but its not _that_ significant. Besides, my current plan is to ride this one out for a few months, maybe get an external monitor and keyboard for when I’m doing some serious work. Then, when things are right, upgrade to the 17″, once they update it, and maybe sell this one, or just keep it for kicks.

So, the transition hasn’t been so bad. I have some issues on the keyboard, mainly the moving of the Control key. Getting used to not being able to Alt Tab (Cmd Tab) between multiple windows from the same application. But most are minor issues. I do have some software problems, that I have yet to sort out 100%….

I miss Winamp — Why are Mac users so in love with iTunes ? Its horrible, it dosen’t support watch folders, its klunky at best, and its slow. I’m not asking for much, a simple clean interface (like the winamp iPlay skin), a library that dosen’t try to move, rewrite or modify my collection, CD ripping (MusicBrainz support would be nice with this), possibly some streaming media options, and of course watch folders !

What, no Visio — Microsoft, is this your evil plan to prevent people from switching ? Seriously? For now I’ll either be running visio under VMWare Fusion, or Crossover Office. (Which was free a few days ago).

Font Rendering — This is going to just take time for me to get used to. With reguard to fonts, Apple generally believes that the goal of the algorithm should be to preserve the design of the typeface as much as possible, even at the cost of a little bit of blurriness. Apple’s method, to me at least, makes the fonts look horribly chunky and slightly blury, very distracting and hard for me to read.. Microsoft generally believes that the shape of each letter should be hammered into pixel boundaries to prevent blur and improve readability, even at the cost of not being true to the typeface.

As for stability, I’ve had random issues with the mac so far, lagging during shutdown, program crashes, etc. But my current issues a few and far between. Soon, I’ll do a software review and let you know what I’m using.. Of course, as always, comments are welcome !

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