Archive for March, 2008
« Previous EntriesOld school tax refund
Monday, March 31st, 2008The government is sending some money your way. Before you blow it on the latest toy to catch your eye, what about that toy you never got twenty years ago? It’s not too late!
Blackberry 9000 isn’t a cheap iPhone knock-off - or is it?
Monday, March 31st, 2008By many measures, Blackberry seems to be heading toward a pretty big battle with Apple’s iPhone in the coming months. So it comes as a big surprise that they’ve basically taken the iPhone’s look and feel and put it on their new flagship product like they were some cheap knock-off shop in Shenzen.
Blackberry 9000 isn’t a cheap iPhone knock-off - or is it?
Monday, March 31st, 2008By many measures, Blackberry seems to be heading toward a pretty big battle with Apple’s iPhone in the coming months. So it comes as a big surprise that they’ve basically taken the iPhone’s look and feel and put it on their new flagship product like they were some cheap knock-off shop in Shenzen.
Drag Safari Bookmarks Bar items directly into folders
Monday, March 31st, 2008After switching from Camino to Safari (temporarily; I’m still not really convinced that Safari is really “the better browser”), I was quite annoyed by the fact that you’re unable to directly move a bookmark from the Bookmarks Bar into one of the folders on the Bookmarks Bar. When you drag an item, you can only reorder it.
Finally I discovered the following trick: If you first drag the bookmark off the Bookmarks Bar area (by dragging down first, instead of horizontally — but keep dragging; if you release the mouse after dragging down, your dragged bookmark will vanish in a poof), and then drag it back onto the Bookmarks Bar, you’re able to move it into a folder. I don’t know, whether this is a bug or done on purpose, but at least it works.
10.5: Speed up initial AirPort - Time Machine backups
Monday, March 31st, 2008
I found the initial Time Machine backup to a disk hooked up to my AirPort Extreme to be painfully slow. This procedure sped the process up enormously. The only tricky part about this is that you don’t have to tell Time Machine you’re moving the drive. I’m using an external disk with one partition formatted with “Mac OS Extended (Journaled),” and sharing it with a disk password.
First hook your USB drive up to your AirPort Extreme and configure the disks for Time Machine. Add the disk to your time machine and start the initial backup. Once Time Machine is past the “preparing” stage and is actually copying data, cancel the backup. This step creates the sparsebundle image that will contain the backup on the drive.
Unmount the disk. You’ll probably also want to disconnect all users using the AirPort Utility. Disconnect the drive from the Airport Extreme and connect it direc…
Create sets of desktop images without duplication
Monday, March 31st, 2008I like the way Mac OS X lets you choose any album from iPhoto to use as a set of desktop background images. In particular, using iPhoto albums to create sets of images saves disk space because the same image can be displayed in multiple sets (”albums”) even though it’s only physically stored on disk just once. I had a number of images that I didn’t want to store in iPhoto, but that I did want to use as desktop backgrounds in some sets and that I didn’t want to duplicate.
The solution turned out to be to simple but a little tricky. Using the Desktop & Screen Saver System Preferences panel, you can select any arbitrary folder to use for desktop backgrounds. If you fill this folder with Unix symbolic links that all have an absolute POSIX path specified for the link, Desktop & Screen Saver finds and follows each image. However, only symbolic links with an absolute path (or hard links, of course) work. Notably, Mac OS X “aliases” do not work.
So, by way of examp…
How to print to a PC-connected HP Photosmart 7960
Monday, March 31st, 2008My partner is a Windows guy. I am a Mac guy. He was on site with a customer trying to get a new MacBook Pro (MBP) to print to a shared HP PhotoSmart 7960 which was connected to a WinXP Pro SP2 PC. Should have been a five minute job.
The printer works just fine when directly connected to the PC or to the MBP using the HP drivers. It simply would not work via the shared printer queue. We tried everything! Reviewed all of the online literature, etc. After an hour of this, we finally decided to try the Gutenprint drivers (the new name of Gimp-Print) that come with Leopard. Worked like a charm!
OOXML probably passes at ISO (and Error’d)
Monday, March 31st, 2008It’s IT Blogwatch: in which predictions are that the Microsoft-sponsored Office Open XML format has passed the ISO standards vote. Not to mention strange tooltips and other IT perversions…
Steven Schwankert suggests:
Balloting on whether Office Open XML (OOXML) should become an international document standard closed at midnight Saturday in Geneva, in an apparently tight vote … two-thirds of participating countries needed to vote in favor of the issue and less than one-quarter of observer countries in opposition to it. A total of 87 nations’ standards bodies will [have] cast votes … A few key vote changes ahead of the final tally could push the measure towards approval …
iPhone Pwnage Project goes to new levels of hacking iPhone
Sunday, March 30th, 2008iPhone owners now have a new option when deciding to hack their iPhones. Until now the iJailbreak and Ziphone hacks have allowed people to easily change some files on their iPhones in order to install applications from the Installer or change the mobile carrier.
Today, or next week,
Flying with a MacBook Air? Be forewarned
Friday, March 28th, 2008MacBook Air owners who complained about getting through security at U.S. airports prompted the TSA to dig further. Yep, says the security agency, it looks different than the laptops TSA workers usually see.
Create clickable references in Pages’ PDFs
Friday, March 28th, 2008If you are creating an iWork Pages document containing either a table of contents or with endnotes, these objects will be clickable in PDF-exported versions of the document. The PDF may be created through either File » Export… or File » Print… » Print to PDF.
When the PDF is opened in Preview or Reader, clicking on a table of contents entry will jump right to that heading in the document. Also, if you click on an endnote superscript, Preview will jump to that specific endnote. Pretty slick!
Share USB Printer on Mac OS X Server
Friday, March 28th, 2008Normally, you can’t share USB printers via Mac OS X Server because the Print Server can only deal with Postscript printers. However, you can share USB printers normally via CUPS.
Set up your printer as normal (System Preferences » Print & Fax). Then, in Safari go to CUPS, which is usually at http://localhost:631. Click the Administration tab, then click the Share published printers connected to this system checkbox. Click Change Settings, and enter your admin username and password. Voila, plain old USB Printer Sharing works.
Note that you can’t use Print Server to manage the printer, but who cares?
Share USB Printer on Mac OS X Server
Friday, March 28th, 2008Normally, you can’t share USB printers via Mac OS X Server because the Print Server can only deal with Postscript printers. However, you can share USB printers normally via CUPS.
Set up your printer as normal (System Preferences » Print & Fax). Then, in Safari go to CUPS, which is usually at http://localhost:631. Click the Administration tab, then click the Share published printers connected to this system checkbox. Click Change Settings, and enter your admin username and password. Voila, plain old USB Printer Sharing works.
Note that you can’t use Print Server to manage the printer, but who cares?
A note on WDS, Airport Express, and DD-WRT Routers
Friday, March 28th, 2008If you have been attempting to follow the various guides posted on the Internet on how to set up the AirPort Express as a bridge using WDS and DD-WRT routers, you may be left wondering why your particular setup does not work even when all the settings are entered correctly.
However, these guides fail to realize that not all routers behave similarly when running DD-WRT. If your router has a Broadcom wireless chipset, then you’re probably safe, since Airport Express als runs on Broadcom chip. However, if your router is Atheros-based, such as the D-Link DIR300, Airport Express would not be able to participate in the WDS network.
Cheap talk goes global
Friday, March 28th, 2008Voice communications keeps getting cheaper and cheaper thanks to voice over IP technology. How does 2-cents per minute sound for international dialing?
MacBook pwned in two minutes (and fly me!)
Friday, March 28th, 2008It’s IT Blogwatch: in which a MacBook Air gets hacked in a hacking competition (for hackers). Not to mention how to make dangerous-looking paper airplanes…
Robert McMillan McReports:
It may be the quickest $10,000 Charlie Miller ever earned. He took the first of three laptop computers — and a $10,000 cash prize — Thursday after breaking into a MacBook Air at the CanSecWest security conference’s PWN 2 OWN hacking contest. Show organizers offered a Sony Vaio, Fujitsu U810 and the MacBook as prizes, saying that they could be won by anybody at the show who could find a way to hack into each of them and read the contents of a file on the system, using a previously undisclosed "0day" attack …
Sadly, Apple’s Safari isn’t that safe
Friday, March 28th, 2008There is a lot of noise going around the blogosphere about how an attacker was able to hack into a MacBook Air in 2 minutes at this week’s CanSecWest conference. I am going to put on my reality distortion tinfoil hat and try to break it down as it really happened.
Anatomy of an Apple IIc
Thursday, March 27th, 2008PC World recently dissected a 25-year-old Apple IIc in a fun and insightful photo gallery. Only a few technical errors keep it from being a flawless romp down memory lane.
Should Windows users boycott Apple’s Safari?
Thursday, March 27th, 2008Apple has made such a mess of its Safari 3.1 browser for Windows that Windows users should consider boycotting the browser, because of an underhanded way of distributing it, that according to Mozilla honcho John Lilly “borders on malware.”
Photoshop Express tested, enjoyed
Thursday, March 27th, 2008Adobe, in my opinion, has a huge hit on its hands here that will likely change the way we use image editors. This isn’t going to change many current Photoshop CS3 users, rather it has created a new customer base among the Bloggers and Facebookers that will eat this Web application up.
I’ve been waiting for my chance to play around with the online, Flash-based Photoshop Express for awhile. Adobe started granting beta users recently so I signed up. If you are thinking about doing so, I’d recommend you hurry…