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I've seen this book a couple of times, but I have not bought it because Web sites like Mac OS X Hints seem to cover much of the same material.

The book looks pretty good for people beginning to explore what they can do with their Mac beyond iTunes, iPhoto, Mail and Safari. However, "experts" will probably be more satisfied with on-line sites like Mac OS X Hints, which have other benefits over the book as well: they have search engines, offer discussion forums, and are lighter to carry in your knapsack than a book -- even a paperback.

-Mark

http://www.macosxhints.com/ rocks for searching, and if you're unclear on the concept, you can post a query and get an answer from someone in the know. Ad free, and on a decently fast server too. Highly recommended if you want to save a tree.

Microsoft's equivalent to OS X...will include a journaling file system, so us mere mortals can enjoy what Linux Geeks have had for years."

And OS X users have had for months...

W

As a non-iPod related side note, I've got this working with iTunes and my iMac (and its built-in mic). With the help of this Applescript and a Keyspan Digital Media Remote I can control iTunes by voice across the room, almost exactly as your example there is set up.

But, to be honest, I don't know if a system similar to OS X's built-in voice recognition could be used with an iPod, at least conveniently. At least, with the Applescript linked above, on my 800MHz G4 it takes about three to five seconds to load the names of 128 artists to recognize. It would take significantly longer to do so on the iPod. (I guess the names could be held in RAM to make it quicker.)

Slashcode doesn't like the ITMS link directly using iTunes as described here. Cut and Paste if you want, iT4 users.

itms://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa /com.apple.jingle.search.DirectAction/search?term= Mistadobalina

the first comment to this hint gives the format for queries to the apple music store.

I wasn't able to register until I read on Macintouch that your id has to be your email address--firstname lastname doesn't work and will result with a generic error.

Well, you sound like a good troll. There's a vorbis plugin for Quicktime. Granted, it only plays oggs (no encoding) and it's a 3rd party component, but the option is there. I use it frequently on my iBook. Just because Apple doesn't support it doesn't mean there's not an easy way to do it. Check out this link for details.
--

The gist of the situation:

McAfee used Fink during the development of Virex, and as such, if you're using Virex and try to install Fink--well, you can't install Fink, so I won't finish that thought.

It's not a problem with Fink. Virex is causing the problem, and unfortunately, until McAfee get their act together, Fink and Virex can't be installed on the same machine.

Fink, when instaled, looks for /sw, and if it finds it, it doesn't install. This might look like Fink's problem, but in reality, it's Fink trying its absolute best not to do anything that might harm your machine. (They use /sw instead of other binary directories for the same reason.) Much applause to the Fink team for these conventions, I say. Developers looking out for users is always a good thing, even when some might think they [the developers] are being overly cautious.

Check out this thread for more discussion.

Try running the Disk Utility and Repair Privileges. It could be that you have a faulty install CD which is setting privs incorrectly and not allowing the rc script to start up your Ethernet on boot.

Some different info is here

Have you updated with any of the post 10.2 updates?

Your problem may be fixed in 10.2.1 or later...

Yup, something's different. I use that unix script fro OSX hints to check my battery status in more detail. The "flags" variable changed from being just 5/0x005 for plugged in to 838860805/0x32000005.

The script may be found here.

It's a good point that he runs the site with no advertising revenue. Of course, aside from buying the book, there's ways you can help him to keep doing that: personal check, PayPal, Amazon, or Kagi.

it's been said here before I think, but this is a great site with tons of usefull (also sometimes stupid) osx info.

Some really funky applescript stuff, some lame bash scripts & much gui tweaks, but I've found a lot of fixes for problems that no apple docs could help me with.

With the other four and reduced CPU usage I get around 3 hours on a 1 GHz TiBook. This is noticeably better than my 500MHz TiBook, by the way, which usually hit the wall at 2 hours and a bit.

On turning off Airport:There's an interesting thread at macosxhints.com where there is disagreement about it. One person claims:

This doesn't actually work. I've spoken with support techs, and the airport card never actually gets turned off. The menu extra does disable the network interface, but the hardware is not ever powered off unless you remove it. I suppose this is part of the kernel extension and why the Airport Extreme hacks to work with other cards have problems when you remove the 802.11g cards.

So, your mileage may vary. - Eric

...and the result is fink.

Really, the situation you describe is very similar to what the oldtime Mac-heads who like OS X are going through. For many examples of how to boil down these kinds of instructions, see Mac OS X hints.
Basically: KISS. Like, three commands for one concept? How would you like to open an application by clicking it, dragging it to another location, and then clicking it again?

This article tells you how to set up a rule that will detect HTML mail in Mail.app:

Add an HTML filter to catch more spam in Mail.app

It works great!

"Then I found that there was no colour in the shell, no vim, no bash, no multiple desktops."

Yeah, that's really too bad.

For more info on all sorts of techy Mac OS X stuff, just read www.macosxhints.com, where this hint came from. All free and sensible, with daily updates.

Current stories include:
Hiding information from nmap
Accessing the 6BONE with OS X 10.2
Automate screen captures via Grab and GUI Scripting
Large image previews in column view
Hear new Mail messages announced by customized voices
Network proxies and internet access via AirPort
Cocktail - A collection of mini-utilties in one app
Restore Aqua look and feel in NetBeans 3.4 with Java 1.4.1
Temporarily silence the startup sound
Another USB to network printer conversion

This will greatly increase browsing speed, though it supposedly reduces stability, I've been using it for a long time, and haven't noticed a reduction in stability.

First, make sure Camino is not running. Then open the prefs.js file, located in Library(the one in your user directory)/Application Support/Chimera/profiles/default/.slt

Paste these lines into it:

user_pref("network.http.pipelining", true);
user_pref("network.http.proxy.pipelining", true);


Note: I got this information from Mac OS X Hints some time back. A handy thing to know.

.. running screensavers in the root window.. Particularly the Atlantis OpenGL screensaver port.. Wow your friends and cow-orkers.. Just don't run snood or anything else intensive while you're doing so..

But the thing is probably that micro$oft said this thing would be impossible since winxp is so secure. Whatever.

Ciryon

There is also debug menu that can be enabled in Safari that lets you change the browser's User Agent, so in many cases you can easily spoof the site into letting you see that which their web developers or marketing droids have either expressly (or more likely through laziness) forbidden.

Is anyone else having touble getting the 'Applications' menu to work? I can't get GIMP to start except by starting it from an xterm and I'd really like to be able to use the menu for it (and other applications).

If executing applications from Terminal instead of xterm you have to type "open-x11 program" instead of just the program name. If you are used to Fink and XDarwin this wasn't necessary. To get it back to the way things used to work, add "setenv DISPLAY :0.0" to your .tcshrc file.

I had similar problems with Matlab and OroborOSX. The worst was that OroborOSX wouldn't start up reliably, so that starting up Matlab would often be a half-hour ordeal. In addition it tended to crash semi-randomly, which meant I had to go through the ordeal almost every day.

In the end, I found a way to use Matlab with Apple's X11 beta here at this site. This solved all my problems. Matlab starts reliably and faster, doesn't crash, opening and closing windows works fine, and it's still well-integrated with OSX. All it takes is installing Apple's X11 and making a few small changes to .xinitrc.

You should try it out. Hope this helps.

Integrating Mac OS X with Active Directory BTW this also includes using secure LDAP authentication!

A quick search at Mac OS X Hints turns up some usefull sources too.

Note to Mac OS X users browsing with Safari: if you've enabled the Debug menu, change the "User Agent" setting to either Mac or Windows MSIE. Site instantly becomes readable.

• WebKitMinimumFixedFontSize
• WebKitMinimumFontSize

I wish Safari all the best but will wait a little. And WHY with Aqua have they still not dropped that awful brushed metal look???

MacOSXhints had a story on how to remove the brushed metal appearance from Safari (requires the free Developer Tools). Works for me.

As of this writing there are over a dozen other helpful hints on Safari as well.

I wish Safari all the best but will wait a little. And WHY with Aqua have they still not dropped that awful brushed metal look???

MacOSXhints had a story on how to remove the brushed metal appearance from Safari (requires the free Developer Tools). Works for me.

As of this writing there are over a dozen other helpful hints on Safari as well.

I wish Safari all the best but will wait a little. And WHY with Aqua have they still not dropped that awful brushed metal look???

MacOSXhints had a story on how to remove the brushed metal appearance from Safari (requires the free Developer Tools). Works for me.

As of this writing there are over a dozen other helpful hints on Safari as well.

I was somewhere up this thread... I may have to submit this hint to Mac OS X Hints. The QT debacle was the primary reason I wasn't entirely satisfied with Jaguar upgrade.

But don't fret! You can run .ogg files in iTunes; in fact, I'm doing so right now! While it may not have been posted on Christmas, and it may not be from Apple, consider it a christmas present anyways. Here it is. Merry Christmas! =)

and don't forget the Mac OS X Hints book

Whoops. Sorry about that. Should have previewed. The link was http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20021 125060127218

Check out this hint that shows how to add an image handling preference pane to Chimera's prefs. It works great, and adds that most essential feature you mentioned.

This article explains how to bookmark groups of tabs in Chimera. And this one tells you how to block images selectively by server. The more I use Chimera, the more I like it-- it's fast and stable, and it's nice to know that folks can expand upon its functionality easily. It seems like every day I learn about a new way to trick out Chimera.

This article explains how to bookmark groups of tabs in Chimera. And this one tells you how to block images selectively by server. The more I use Chimera, the more I like it-- it's fast and stable, and it's nice to know that folks can expand upon its functionality easily. It seems like every day I learn about a new way to trick out Chimera.

The Dock is a truly inovative and powerful application-launching *and* context-switching all-in-one metaphore: Hold the ctrl key while clicking on a running app's icon (or use the right mouse button) (yes OS X natively supports pretty much all two-button USB mice). Lately i'm trying to further maximize my desktop real estate by putting it on the right side of the screen, turning off magnification, making it very small, and always leaving it on. i had it at its default position before, worked pretty well too, so we'll see how that goes.

Having multiple terminal windows opened with tcsh, and, sporadically, with bash, allows me to use all the utilities i like, such as find, sed, awk, grep, xargs, vi, emacs and even ... pico. heh. Those of you who have tried to get a development environment set-up with tomcat while fooling around with classpaths must be intimately familiar with how GAY and RETARDED the DOS shell is, and while cygwin is a very nice tool, any time there needs to be interactions between windows OS and cygwin layers, dealing with 'cygpath' is still highly gay.

For those of you familiar with BareBones Software's BBEdit, one of the Macintosh Platform's most old-school text-editor/code-authoring software (i still have my BBEdit, it doesn't suck t-shirt), it comes with a command-line executable called "bbedit" that gets installed with the app, and you can use it to open files from the shell:

find . -path "*some/path*" -name "*.html"" |xargs bbedit

incredibly cool.

Anyway, there are a ZILLION ways you can customize OS X to work better for you, check out sites such as macosxhints.com and of course, Fink.

Of course, you should have Apple's Developer Tools installed, which is a CD that comes with your OS X package.

The bottom-line is, once you install Developer Tools, OS X comes out-of-the-box equipped with a slew of geek power tools, with a *all* the unix utilities you are accustomed to, plus a slew of application development IDEs and utilities, such as Project Builder, MallocDebug, ThreadViewer. Beyond that, you can easily install additional unix tools such as X-Windows, Gnome, KDE, Gimp via Fink. I've got those running on my TiBook 400mhz 384MB RAM.

To further customize your working environment, the finder's "favorites" (heart icon on a finder window toolbar) are also highly useful, as you can quickly make any folder or drive or shortcut a "favortie", which will be listed in any dialog box that asks you to save or open a file.

So like ... how is OS X frustrating to you?

It'll never happen[snip]

It could be an option. The option to swap the left control and capslock keys on USB keyboards is supported and that particular option tends to annoy the hell out of everybody except for old school Unix folk and people who use emacs. They could simply make it an option like caps/control swap that nobody would ever run across unless they were specifically looking for it.

pulled from macosxhints:

There's a much easier way to do this:
"Don't use open, just make sure the file is in a directory on your path, then drag the file 'ASCIIMoviePlayer' to your terminal.app, next pull the movie you want to see onto the terminal and press return.

Tip: use a movie that is not too large, or reduce your terminal font very small.
Also, you get the best results by changing the Terminal window settings to white on black. "

Credit this trinket to: sao
http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php? s=&th readid=7095

That actually does no good. As soon as I quit "System Preferences" it reverts back to another browser, even though the other one isn't on the system. It just seems to hate Mozilla, I don't know why :( I've even edited the files described here but to no avail.

Here y'go, my friend.

As I've said before in this thread, the 'card companies have got their pricing a little beyone the range of mere mortals, whether they purcharse Macs or not...

Here's a to show you how to flash a Radeon 8500 ($229 retail in the Mac market), and here's a link to show you where to get it for $89 (US). It's the exact same card. Just slightly over $240 difference in the retail price once you factor in shipping.

I made a point, a lot further down in the thread, and I'm restating it here. The video card/peripheral vendors price their items just below their (*perceived*) point of pain for the markets they're targeting.

Gamers (particularly Morrowind players -- as I've found the past week trying to play a damned game I *bought*...) seem to be the mid-high demographic, while Maya/Pro3D/Mac users seem to be the high end of their profile.

For the record, I wish they'd cut that shit out -- so the people who didnt' know any better could buy the same gear at the same price point without having to do the whole run-around.

Yes, virginia, you're being *SEVERELY* overcharged for your new über video card. The only things to do about it is not buy it until the manufacturers' markerters realize that you've figured out their game -- or buy the Wintel versions (which are *still* ridiculously overpriced) and flash the ROMs.

(In retrospect...)

Wow, how self-referrential was that? You'd think I've been out drinking on Halloween or something... at least smoking some crack.

--dr00gy

Yes, and this gives OS X quite a performance penalty. It is easy to add swap partition support to OS X by editing your /etc/rc file manually or by using the simple Swap Cop utility and then using the program Swap Relocator to get post-10.2 MacOS X to use those prefs set in /etc/rc. The Darwin team at Apple is supposedly working on this, and there will be a simple way to assign VM swap partitions in one of the next releases.

of course for the sake of keeping up, here's my top ten:

1. kill processes by name
2. fixing command-line typos before hitting enter using Option-S
3. creating a talking cat in Jaguar
4. use gcc_select to switch compilers
5. open urls from the command line
6. search macosxhints from the commandline
7. Replace iTools with your own web and mail servers
8. Run Software Update from the Terminal
9. Correct command line typos with carets
10. AND THE BEST ONE! running the screensaver as your background

of course for the sake of keeping up, here's my top ten:

1. kill processes by name
2. fixing command-line typos before hitting enter using Option-S
3. creating a talking cat in Jaguar
4. use gcc_select to switch compilers
5. open urls from the command line
6. search macosxhints from the commandline
7. Replace iTools with your own web and mail servers
8. Run Software Update from the Terminal
9. Correct command line typos with carets
10. AND THE BEST ONE! running the screensaver as your background

of course for the sake of keeping up, here's my top ten:

1. kill processes by name
2. fixing command-line typos before hitting enter using Option-S
3. creating a talking cat in Jaguar
4. use gcc_select to switch compilers
5. open urls from the command line
6. search macosxhints from the commandline
7. Replace iTools with your own web and mail servers
8. Run Software Update from the Terminal
9. Correct command line typos with carets
10. AND THE BEST ONE! running the screensaver as your background

of course for the sake of keeping up, here's my top ten:

1. kill processes by name
2. fixing command-line typos before hitting enter using Option-S
3. creating a talking cat in Jaguar
4. use gcc_select to switch compilers
5. open urls from the command line
6. search macosxhints from the commandline
7. Replace iTools with your own web and mail servers
8. Run Software Update from the Terminal
9. Correct command line typos with carets
10. AND THE BEST ONE! running the screensaver as your background

of course for the sake of keeping up, here's my top ten:

1. kill processes by name
2. fixing command-line typos before hitting enter using Option-S
3. creating a talking cat in Jaguar
4. use gcc_select to switch compilers
5. open urls from the command line
6. search macosxhints from the commandline
7. Replace iTools with your own web and mail servers
8. Run Software Update from the Terminal
9. Correct command line typos with carets
10. AND THE BEST ONE! running the screensaver as your background

of course for the sake of keeping up, here's my top ten:

1. kill processes by name
2. fixing command-line typos before hitting enter using Option-S
3. creating a talking cat in Jaguar
4. use gcc_select to switch compilers
5. open urls from the command line
6. search macosxhints from the commandline
7. Replace iTools with your own web and mail servers
8. Run Software Update from the Terminal
9. Correct command line typos with carets
10. AND THE BEST ONE! running the screensaver as your background

of course for the sake of keeping up, here's my top ten:

1. kill processes by name
2. fixing command-line typos before hitting enter using Option-S
3. creating a talking cat in Jaguar
4. use gcc_select to switch compilers
5. open urls from the command line
6. search macosxhints from the commandline
7. Replace iTools with your own web and mail servers
8. Run Software Update from the Terminal
9. Correct command line typos with carets
10. AND THE BEST ONE! running the screensaver as your background