Slashdot Mirror

I don't understand why a machine whose diagnostic app from the OS vendor lists 2.3 GB of free (available) RAM is relying on hard disk-based virtual memory for basic tasks

Looking at the system memory tab of activity monitor, do you see pages in / out increase drastically while you have lots of free memory? Do you actually see swap file usage?

Info regarding OS X paging.

Not everyone is a *nix geek. Yes there is a linux way to do things but not everyone wants to deal with that. There is an OS X and a Windows version.

I bought my sister, brother and myself a version of Orbicle's Undercover which does everything this does and a bit more. It'll take pictures of the thieves (if your Mac has a built in iSight), change contrast, etc.)

I was pondering making my own group of shell scripts do do something similar.
curl -O mywebsite/stolen.txt. Leave it at a 0, then make it a 1 when my laptop is stolen. Then have it do weird stuff. isightcapture can record pictures of someone as soon as the lid opens or during invalid login attempts. There are apple scripts to change the monitor contrast, computer volume, say stuff. (All of which Undercover does).

As soon as it detects it is in an Apple Store (by host name) it cranks the volume up and announces "This laptop is stolen. This laptop is stolen."

I thought about how much work that would take and I thought, meh. I'm watching TV and bought Undercover.

Finally, this is open source. Isn't that what the slashdot crowd bitches about most "ZOMG IT'S NOT OPEN SOURCE BURNNN". Someone took the time to build an installer for 3 different systems, make it so it used a DHS so you didn't have to configure FTP settings (You know not everyone has a my.website that they can read logs on daily) and all 1/2 the people here can do is bitch about how stupid it is or easy it could be to do with cron.

Thieves are stupid. Most will boot the machine and use it. Look at Orbiclue's "success stories." One thief loaded WoW then tried to delete all the personal files of the person. This isn't going to stop a corporate hacker but the jackass that breaks into your car, you might have a chance.

But what's saddest of all is that he could have installed a USB WiFi dongle.

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=200602140626039

iTunes != Unix. Are you saying that because iTunes runs on Windows OS X is not Unix?

even something like KDE sticks to more of the core tenants of unix than Mac os X.

Mind telling that to the KDE developers who ported KDE to OS X? Or Gnome? How can X11 apps be configured for Gnome?

Simply, as I said in my post you replied to I can install many Linux programs, I wont say all because I don't know if there are any that can't be installed, on my Mac. Just as Linux users can use Debian packagers apt-get and dpkg to install .deb software on Linux, I can use Fink to install those programs on my Mac. I can also install software using Redhat's RPM package manager on it using MacPorts.

ARD = Apple Remote Desktop You can remove it by following these instructions.

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20071111202112177

That shell script is a good start. You have to run it after each boot, since it modifies a cryptographically signed plist. (If you're interested, you can figure out how to use OS X's plist utilities to change the plist's cryptographic hash)

You can create a custom sparse disk image that has a maximum size limit - then TimeMachine will know. There are instructions posted on macosxhints.com.

I think Anonymous Grump is referring to a hidden preference:

Disable Space switching on Command-Tab in 10.5.2

That might solve your problem of Command-Tab'ing to an application without changing Space. For me, I tend to open applications with the mouse. It'd be nice if I could tell Terminal and Camino to default to opening a new window on the current Space rather than transporting me to an open window on another Space. But I'm slowly forming the habit of opening new windows with right-clicks instead.

(In fairness, Apple are no better for hiding options in the command line and requiring the use of the defaults command to set them, but at least these aren't very very basic things...)

I had to use two terminal commands to turn off Tiger's "Safe Sleep" feature that makes it take about a minute for my computer to fall asleep while it dumps my 2 GB of RAM onto the hard drive. I sleep and wake my MacBook frequently so I'm not at risk of losing RAM contents, so I'm better off without this feature. I think this is a pretty basic configuration option.

You don't *have* to use the .Mac to do this, there are numerous different scripts people have made/thought of using the built in camera.

Taking iSight photos during invalid login attempts
Take photos via cron every 5 minutes
Take a photo everytime the lid is opened (Includes all of his pictures.

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050522045225980

Which then generates a nifty lock button in Mail.app. Good luck finding somebody else to send messages to, though.

The only safe way is to run the machine without a GUI. Is this possible on a Mac?

Ofcourse it's possible.

Either you can disable the gui entirely, booting straight into text-mode console:
http://www.oreilly.com/pub/h/348

Or you can boot to a console + gui mode, where it doesn't load the full gui, but you can still launch individual gui apps:
http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=24259

The architecture of OS X is not that different from other unices, except that instead of running X for the graphics, it runs Aqua, and instead of using init and a collection of shell scripts, it uses launchd and a collection of xml files.

Actually, all he was saying was that the CLI is inseparable from the GUI.

A shame that people keep saying that, since it is wrong.

The Mac has a window manager too, just not an X11 window manager. And as with any UNIX system you can disable processes you do not want or need.

If you leave the GUI up, but no-one is using it - what exactly is it then going to do to cause a crash? If it's not in use it's not really "running", or at any rate not changing state.

Funny that you would show up here. I thought GameRanger was pretty cool when it first came out, but didn't really need much use of it since I didn't play online much. But whatever, it seemed like a pretty great app. I had won a free copy of QuakeFinder during a contest on a pretty popular mac gaming Hotline server, which was pretty cool (yes, with an actual purchased serial # by the server admin). Some time in the future, after I had been using KDX for some time, I started hearing on forums about how GameRanger wouldn't run if KDX was open (link for anyone who isn't aware of the sketchy-ass behaviour). Wow, what the heck? It gets even worse when people are banned from GR for even talking about KDX. As though people are somehow supposed to be okay with your hatred of KDX/Haxial, for whatever unknown reason. I'm sure you've had a lot of people pissed about it. Maybe I don't know how the story ends, but I don't see anyone saying "GameRanger no longer tries to prevent you from running KDX". Lame stuff, man.

Sorry to prick your balloon, but you walked right into it. Leopard, in fact, does have file transfer speed issues. Which are often fixed by a simple run into terminal. Which is what I'm finding (relatively) refreshing about OS X. It seems to be easier to fix than Windows. But the issues are, indeed, present.

Now I've not done this specifically, but I do have a Dock shortcut for an Applescript that connects to my backup drive (an AFP share). I can't find the original code I used, but you should find something at http://www.macosxhints.com/ - they've got people who actually know stuff (ie not me) there.

Have a look here or here to start with.

Good luck.

Now I've not done this specifically, but I do have a Dock shortcut for an Applescript that connects to my backup drive (an AFP share). I can't find the original code I used, but you should find something at http://www.macosxhints.com/ - they've got people who actually know stuff (ie not me) there.

Have a look here or here to start with.

Good luck.

Now I've not done this specifically, but I do have a Dock shortcut for an Applescript that connects to my backup drive (an AFP share). I can't find the original code I used, but you should find something at http://www.macosxhints.com/ - they've got people who actually know stuff (ie not me) there.

Have a look here or here to start with.

Good luck.

What I mean is that when you click on a special folder (e.g., home, applications, documents, etc.) in the Finder in column view, it "roots" you to that spot and removes the horizontal scroll bar. In reality, it's just a silly thing that would require some retraining on my part (more likely, stop using column view) but I really dislike it. The reason for that because I feel like the Finder is trying to hide the upper level directories from me. I know perfectly damn well I'm at /Users/username rather than at "home" wherever that is and I take offense that Apple thinks I'm too stupid to be able to use a horizontal scroll bar. On 10.3 and 10.4 you can fix this by the hint shown here (macosxhints is a really great site, btw). I tried this trick on Leopard on a demo machine in an apple store and it didn't work. :(

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20071028173642747

Allows any network drive to be used, or at least an AFP share.

Using it with my NAS as we speak. No problems. Although its not lightning fast, but hey.

I beg to differ.. OSX 10.4.10 (Which I'm running now..) Plays fine with Win2k3 - With SMB anyhow - I'm yet to try and/or need to setup an AD domain.

X11 is in terrible shape in Leopard. You can't launch it from the dock. You can't switch to it from other applications and expect the windows to come to the foreground (you have to click the X11 icon a couple of times). Multi-mouse button emulation is busted. It doesn't work with Expose. The list goes on: see http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=80171

I realize that lots of these bugs are fixed if you overwrite Apple's binaries with the community-compiled X11.app; but I'm rather frustrated because it was working just fine in Tiger and became completely broken in Leopard. I'm glad I upgraded at home (where I use X11 occasionally) and not at work (where I use X11 all the time).

Last year and through part of this year, there were reports of some sort of DNS poisoning in China involving vnet.cn. See: http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=60083 for one report of the behavior. In the link I posted, the user was worried the problem was due to some sort of malware, but I witnessed the same behavior firsthand (domain names apparently at random resolving to a vnet.cn address) where the problem was not due to malware local to a particular user's machine. In the cases I witnessed, the DNS servers were operated by China Telecom.

Actually, it looks like the Preview app in OS X 10.5 will now auto-reload PDFs when they change on disk.

Well, 'under the hood' of OS X, it's really just Unix. As long as you have a decent knowledge of how Unix/BSD works, and a familiarity with a CLI, you can figure most everything else out.

For example, dig around in the packages of System applications, like the Dock (right-click, then select "Show All Applications"). All the graphical elements that the new Leopard dock uses are in there. I've changed those so I have a black dock (without the annoying curvy highlight), and white application indicators - much easier to see.

Also, a lot of the preference lists (plists) for applications are kept in your /Users/Your User Name/Library/Application Support/Name Of Application/ folders, and digging around in those with Plist editor can be fruitful (always make backups first, though).

Mainly, get as familiar as possible on Unix/BSD, and you will become more knowledgeable of OS X's underpinnings. Some good sites are Mac OS X Hints and O'Reilly's Mac Dev Center.

As a long time mac user I look at this OS with ambivalence, maybe even trepidation, if I may use another four syllable word. I look at the 3-D Dock and think meh... ugly. Maybe the little grid for large directory sizes will work, but maybe not. Regardless, I don't see much improvement over the current way the dock treats folders. As for the Finder, I see the continuing march to the sidebars, which I don't prefer, and the "rooting" behavior (this last part is unconfirmed, I don't know if 10.5 does this). Basically: if you are in column view (my favorite), and you click on a "special" location, like your home directory, the Applications folder, Documents, etc., you are rooted to that spot. That is, your horizontal scroll bar disappears. WTF?!? Why should the OS be hiding the directory hierarchy from me? That there is windoze-type behavior because it basically assumes the user is an idiot who can't comprehend what a directory structure is. There are workarounds for 10.3 and 10.4, but 10.5 leaves me blasé. I must be getting old.

What I'd really like is a native konqueror because it rocks and is my favorite mix of flexibility vs. bloat.

Tech-Recipes got a copy. Here are their first 20 tutorials about the new features of Leopard.

If you prefer the old dock style, Mac OS X Hints has that tutorial now as well.

Anybody going for a T-shirt tomorrow?

Here's a link to a guy on macosxhints talking about the issue. Seems he found a work around, but it's not something grandma would think up on her own. :P

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20060103193926854

My friend used to watch a lot of anime and the wmv9 codec is very popular in that area apparently (I'm not a big anime fan).

10.4 is much more responsive than 10.3, even on old unsupported hardware (you really notice the difference on a 400Mhz G3). That said I would be willing to bet that older G4 owners will still be able to install 10.5 either using Firewire Target Disk Mode (FW TDM on the 800Mhz G4, boot off DVD/run installer off a newer Mac) or by removing the hardware check and burning a custom install disk. ( http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20051211074138859&lsrc=osxh 10.4 custom disk instructions )

I hate to say it but this just sounds like Apple trying to sell more hardware (not that I can blame them). I doubt 800Mhz G4 iMac owners like my grandma are going to care that features she'll never use (Time Machine, Dashboard, etc) run 'slow' :/

You're welcome. I usually make a habit of reading macosxhints.com so I can keep up on the latest tips and tricks. Even if I don't use them myself I can always recommend to others.

Also, I should mention that I believe if your mini is one of the older Intel minis (one with a Core Solo/Duo rather than the new Core 2 Duo) that didn't come with Wifi or bluetooth you can still add the features as the mini-PCIe slots still exist in the mainboard. One guy even decided that 802.11g that he already had wasn't enough and so came up with a guide for installing 802.11n on an Intel Mini including installation of a second antenna needed for 802.11n to reach n speeds. Of course, it's probably way cheaper to do external devices but if you want to keep the aesthetic of the self-contained unit then it's possible to upgrade this way.

As for the mouse accelleration, I dunno, it has just never bothered me and I didn't even notice the change back when Panther (10.3) was released that a lot of Mac users complained about. Then again, I'm now running 1920x1200 on a 23" ACD and also 1920x1200 on a new MacBook Pro 17" with the displays side by side. With that kind of real-estate I like the accelleration curves the way they are since I'm able to do precision movements if I move at a reasonable pace and fast movements if I move fast. I thought there was supposedly some auto-adjust mechanism in OS X so that it changes accelleration curves based on how big your display is which is why it's not a user-selectable thing, it's supposed to be full-auto.

Don't forget also that Apple's accelleration curves are designed for Apple displays and Apple mice. If you're using something like a Microsoft or Kensington or Logitech mouse then you can try MouseFixIt that I mentioned or apparently most of the vendor-specific mouse drivers have accelleration adjustments. Though word is that Microsoft's software is not so great (I can attest to this for the older versions at least) but Kensington's is pretty decent and will work with every brand of mouse except for Apple.

Spotlight is NOT optional. There are hackish ways to remove it, but none sanctioned by Apple. Spotlight took away a very effective file-finding capability, which works great for the 90& of cases where I just want to search on a file's NAME, and replaces it with an ungainly UI that requires 3 or 4 extra clicks just to do the same file name search, cannot be modified to do that behavior as the default, often doesn't show you files you know it should have found, and presents its results in a window that doesn't work like a Finder window (so you can't, for example, sort the results on their modification date). The underlying metadata mechanism that Spotlight uses is great, but whoever at Apple designed the Spotlight UI ruined it.

True - but if you want to use it as an online storage medium it still costs $99 whether you use all that other stuff or not (which I did not). Also, I did not find it very "love-able" ... having the iDisk enabled significantly slowed down my Open/Save dialog boxes from many programs (requiring strange workarounds to remedy). I gave it up for an rsync account which I find more pleasing to the touch.

Or if you want to do it from the command line there is a perl script here to do it:

    http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20011 119095823908

You're right, I made a mistake. In my post I said that I had almost all file sharing switched on, and then I could see my harddisk with my Linux PC. That was wrong, I had it switched off. Only Samba and sshd were running. My sincere apologies for this stupid typing error and the confusion it caused. The fact that I could see my whole harddisk on my Linux PC even with Personal File Sharing switched off still puzzles me. I'm certain it was not a samba issue.

The password handling problems of Samba in OSX are known, see here, here, and here. I hope that will be fixed in Leopard.

You're right, I made a mistake. In my post I said that I had almost all file sharing switched on, and then I could see my harddisk with my Linux PC. That was wrong, I had it switched off. Only Samba and sshd were running. My sincere apologies for this stupid typing error and the confusion it caused. The fact that I could see my whole harddisk on my Linux PC even with Personal File Sharing switched off still puzzles me. I'm certain it was not a samba issue.

The password handling problems of Samba in OSX are known, see here, here, and here. I hope that will be fixed in Leopard.

/sbin/dynamic_pager ${encryptswap} -F ${swapdir}/swapfile

/sbin/dynamic_pager ${encryptswap} -F ${swapdir}/swapfile

Found your solution via google. Unfortunately no /application data/ folder (win2k). I did use

C:\"Program Files"\Safari\Safari.exe /enableDebugMenu

and that worked.

found in the comments at http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20070 611144942562

See also: http://somethingdifferent.wordpress.com/2007/06/13 /enabling-debug-menu-in-safari-for-windows/ for disabling.

on OSXhints:
http://feeds.macosxhints.com/~r/macosxhints/recent /~3/124520516/article.php

Finder is Carbon.

Safari is Carbon.

This will help to get you started in a different direction than the rest of the comments I've read. I'm not sure how well this will scale, as it would depend on a lot of variables, but I can see the bigger steps being scriptable:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20061 025130528687

I can say that this worked for cloning a huge number (ok, more like 3) of MacBook Pros at work for dual booting. (Copying PAGEFILE.SYS is not necessary, as it will be created on Windows Boot.)

Add some shell scripts, ssh turned on the mac side, and all you have to do is setup and format the drive in Windows once, then you can use simple command lines (rsync comes to mind) to pull the files from a central location any time you change the Windows image, and use the normal Mac tools (CCC, NetRestore, ASR, etc) for the mac side.

All you have to do to create standard Unix "mbox" files from Apple Mail is select the messages you want to export, and choose File > Save As, and choose Raw Source. Name the file something like "messages.mbox" and hit save. Thunderbird or any other decent MUA should import them just fine.

I suspect you could also just concatenate the individual emlx (individual message files) stored in the Library folder together, but it's unnecessary, since Mail will just do that on save, for any arbitrary group of messages you specify.

Saying that Apple Mail used lots of incompatible formats really blows the issue out of proportion. For the first few versions, it stored each mailbox in a "mbox" file, basically a long text file of messages. This is the standard format used by most other mailreaders (the ones which don't use a proprietary system or a database backend). In the most recent version, Apple changed from the one-file-per-mailbox "mbox" file to a one-file-per-message "emlx" format. This lets utilities like Spotlight or Quicksilver search them without parsing the files by hand. Either way, your messages are still stored, in their entirety, including MIME attachments, as plain text.

[Just as a slight digression: That, in itself, is worth a hell of a lot more than some 'Export' option buried in the software -- even if the software is no longer available; even if the architecture to run the software is no longer available, the messages themselves, in the as-stored format, will still be readable. (So when making a backup you don't have to worry about trying to put some sort of a reader or file-parser on there too, which I think is mandatory for backing up proprietary formats.) So you can do a full backup of your mail just by burning ~/Library/Mail to a DVD.]

If you want more info here's a "hint" about the process:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20060 706201156481

Actually, this can be done with a little fiddling. You can add an applescript to the toolbar:

This works well for local files, but may not update views of samba shares.

Or you can use a context menu extension called nudge, which may work better for network shares.

First Surf of The Day

Slashdot The Milwaukee Journal Gnews Fark Digg Mac OS X Hints Google Calendar Upper Room Google Personalized Home Page My Stumbleupon Page BuzzFeed Brookfield Now Facebook Three Random Stumbles

After the first run it is /., jsonline, Gnews, Fark, and Digg.

FYI, I have not yet used the AppleTV. On an OS X machine, running 10.4.9, with front row, there is a method to play many movie files that are not purchased from the iTunes store. For example, let's say you have digital video of your legal content, ie. kids hockey game, or a school play etc. and your Codec of choice is somewhere in the XVID or DIVX family. If you have the proper plug-ins for Quicktime/iTunes, they will play. It can get expensive in storage space if the content you are storing is in 22, 42 or 120 minute chunks, and doubly so if you have configured iTunes to copy all of your material into it's own DB. You can drag those video files directly into iTunes and edit their tags to sort them appropriately. Alas, I am not the source of this info, just one who has been able to make it work. The real trial and error - sorting out the bugs folks are here: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20051 013124423475 Again, I have not tried this on the AppleTV, nor have I tried it on XP or Vista - just a macbook pro.

It's true that the Mac wakes up much faster than any other notebook I've seen, near instantly (though I think they cheat a bit, because the screen comes up right away, then it sometimes disappears, and the system isn't responsive for a few seconds).

But current Macs have a known problem suspending, related to Bluetooth, USB or network activity. It may just be user confusion, but it's pervasive enough to be an issue. I've seen this problem on some systems, hunting around in preferences didn't help. I've seen other references to this problem, but here's one: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20070 210010538919&query=sleep

Basically, when you're in that situation, using a Mac doesn't mean much compared to Windows or even Linux, cause knowledge and hacking are involved for a solution.

On the other hand, I don't have any software problems, but my Macbook Pro's jewelry box like latch doesn't work well, so I have to use masking tape to make sure it doesn't wake up mid journey. Talk about favouring "elegance" over robustness.

I don't particularly like the interface

The lack of ability to set simple things (turning off anti-aliasing, shadows?)

It uses strange unknown formats (ie: mail.app etc.) which provides various ways to lock people into those apps

Being how OS X's x11 server can't copy/paste between Aqua

Sure it can, generally speaking: xclipboard

More specifically, I just went into OO (without xclipboard running), typed a sentence, selected a couple of words, pressed Apple-C, switched to TextEdit (an Aqua app) and pressed Apple-V, and there it was. All is not doom and gloom my friend. The clipboard works. You just have to learn how these two systems interact, and we're talking very simple issues.

I take it you haven't heard about the two-finger right click functionality