Mat on Macs

Added an Amazon.com Wishlist

matonmacs — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 22:47:20 +0000

Anybody who wants to buy me a present, feel free!

The Show!

matonmacs — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 04:16:23 +0000

I got the call. After plugging around on my own for a while I’m finally heading to the bigs. Catch my posts from now on at The Unofficial Apple Weblog. Hope to see you over there!

Quick tip: Put Imagewell (etc.) in your Finder Toolbar

matonmacs — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 01:53:14 +0000

Here’s a quick tip for my fellow bloggers. I find that I often have to slightly manipulate my images (often screenshots) before posting them in the blog, and I generally do this with the marvelous little freeware program ImageWell. This means I generally need to start ImageWell, and then either drop the image into it or go through the File -> Open menu. Well it just dawned on me that I could save a step by putting ImageWell directly in my Finder toolbar (I actually use Pathfinder, but same difference). Now I need only drag and drop the image file on the ImageWell icon, and it opens with the image loaded ready for editing. Of course the principle applies to any program you can drag and drop to, so I use the same idea with the cool AppZapper software deinstaller.

Google Maps for Palm Treo

matonmacs — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 01:37:48 +0000

I normally limit my posts to Mac related things, but this is just too cool to leave unremarked. Today Google released Google Maps for Palm Treo and it just plain awesome. It works just like you would expect: the five-way Navigator scrolls the map and any direction (you can also use the stylus). In addition the side buttons zoom in and out just as you would expect. Prior to this official release from Google there was a program available called KMaps that would allow you to do some of these things, but unfortunately it was Java (and so required the memory eating Java runtime) and just plain did not work as well. In addition to maps you get (as you would expect) full satellite views.

You can search for locations in more or less the same way you can in Google Maps, with to/from directions, nearby businesses, and realtime traffic (in a few cities). Running on my old Sprint Treo 650 (without the benefit of the much higher bandwidth of EVDO as in the newer Treo 700) it is a bit sluggish, but still eminently usable. This one is definitely a keeper! Thanks Google!

Customizing Pukka

matonmacs — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 06:51:12 +0000

Pukka is a neat little multi-account del.icio.us posting client compatible with NetNewsWire as well as all browsers (via a bookmarklet). To be honest I until recently really preferred cocoalicious, but it has stopped working for me since the API change, but even more importantly it does not support multiple accounts as does Pukka. Multiple account support alone is worth Pukka’s modest fee of $5. There is one, however, I don’t like about Pukka: its posting sound effect of a smooch. I could just turn the sound effects off (in the Preferences), but it does in fact serve a purpose of letting the user know that the item has successfully posted. So the solution is to change the annoying sound effect; fortunately, it’s pretty easy to do.

Before you start, duplicate the original Pukka.app in case you screw something up.

1) First find (or make) a wav file you’d like to replace the default posting effect with.
2) Right click on Pukka.app in the Finder and select “show package contents”
3) Navigate to Pukka/Contents/Resources/
4) Delete (or maybe just move to the desktop) the file called: kiss.wav
5) Copy your preferred sound effect from step (1) to Pukka/Contents/Resources/
6) Rename that file: kiss.wav and you’re done

Now when you post with Pukka you’ll get your preferred sound effect. I used the OS X default ping sound which I converted to a wav with SoundConverter

Ecto for Intel Released

matonmacs — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 19:25:35 +0000

An Intel native build of ecto was released today, and this is mostly a test to make sure it works. Apparently ecto 3 is taking a while, so Adriaans’s decided to post this Intel build. It’s not a Universal Binary, but it does load much faster than the PPC build under Rosetta, and seems to work just fine.

MLB.TV Mosaic for OS X Well Done!

matonmacs — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 02:24:24 +0000

I had previously chided MLB.TV for their weak support for OS X. Well with the release of MLB.TV Mosaic for OS X, all is forgiven. This is awesome! The concept is really cool, this stand alone application allows you watch six game streams simultaneously! Furthermore, subjectively at least the video quality is much better than was was previously available through the browser-embedded Windows Media streams via Flip4Mac. It allows you to click on any of the six mini-views to enlarge a single game.

Here is last night’s Astros-Pirates matchup. About the only downside I’ve detected so far is that the application is definitely a memory hog (~200 MB of real not virtual RAM). Nonetheless, for any baseball fan this is a no-brainer. Well done, MLB.TV!

Yes, hell has officially frozen over

matonmacs — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 08:04:19 +0000

WOW! My 17″ iMac is now running a Virtualized copy of Win XP thanks to Parallels Workstation for Mac (luckily I still owned a copy of XP from the bad old days before I saw the Mac light). It is in fact, quite responsive, though there is definitely still quite a bit of work to be done (e.g. networking is fragile–thanks to endemic Windows suckiness–and there’s no sound support yet), but this is really shocking. Firefox and WIndows Media Player run just fine, opening up web content previously unavailable on the Mac. I’m personally much more interested in a virtualization solution like this one that in dual booting, though I’m also going to try Boot Camp tomorrow just see what kind of gaming performance old Bonaventure is capable of. All in all, an amazing week; watch out for those flying pigs!

MacVolPlace: MLB runs on OS X. So why is MLB.TV Windows Media?

matonmacs — Mon, 03 Apr 2006 17:14:00 +0000

Well this is insanely ironic. MacVolPlace publishes a picture of some kind of operations center at Major League Baseball, showing them running lots of OS X machines with Apple 20″ Cinema Displays galore. Of course, MLB.TV runs like crap on the Mac since it depends on Windows Media. As of version 2.02 Flip4Mac will play the streams, but it doesn’t work yet on Mactels! Of course the real question is why MLB is using Windows Media in the first place, especially if they’re doing lots of work on Macs, presumably in QT. Ugh.

I got this via MacVolPlace, but it looks like a scan from a newspaper. They don’t give the original source. Click on the picture of a larger version.

BTW, Go (defending National League Champion) Astros!

Update: They’ve released a bloated, but cool stand-alone Universal Binary: MLB.TV Mosaic.

MacZOT: helping make AppZapper Free

matonmacs — Mon, 03 Apr 2006 16:40:07 +0000

Don’t know if I want it myself, but MacZOT is trying to get 259 bloggers to mention AppZapper, lowering the price by 5 cents a post. Forthwith, here’s my contribution. I’ve never used AppZapper, but I have purchased from MacZOT before and I like the idea.

MacZot like Woot for Mac software; one discounted title per day. I picked up RapidWeaver for about $10 off the regular price a couple of days ago.

This is an interesting idea. Clearly some blog mentions (e.g. TUAW’s) are worth a lot more than others, but I’m guessing that this is a really good way to publicize the existence of this application, since after all it’s going to be the hardcore Mac geeks doing this, and it’s costing the publisher very little. I doubt, however, that this is sustainable; we bloggers probably aren’t going to be willing to whore every product that comes along. But this one gets dibs for being first.

Knoxville Sucks Just a Little Bit Less

matonmacs — Sat, 18 Mar 2006 23:28:51 +0000

We’re getting an Apple Store! Okay, perhaps that’s a bit harsh, but the cool news is that the Knoxville News Sentinel is reporting that we’re getting an Apple store in West Town Mall. No word yet if it’s going to be a full size store or one of the mini stores. I suspect that the local Mac dealer (MCS) can’t be too happy about this. (And yes, I realize we’re not going to be getting an Apple Store as cool as the one in the picture, but I took this at the New York SOHO Store back in 2003 and it was convenient to hand).

Via MacVolPlace

Finally! NetNewsWire UB beta released

matonmacs — Sat, 18 Mar 2006 18:09:45 +0000

So I haven’t been posting for a while, but I do have a bunch of things on the burner. However, something I have been waiting for since I got my Mactel finally happened. Brent Simmons has released a public beta of NetNewsWire 2.1. I absolutely live in NNW, so this is a big deal for me. It’s smokin’ fast, and includes a variety of other updates (like Newsgator syncing of subscriptions, including read/unread status between computers (Mac and Windows) and the web). Brent has previously promised that registered users would be given 2 year subscriptions to Newsgator at some point, so I’m looking forward to that. Anyway, go get it here.

Now if only Pathfinder and Flip4Mac would come out as UB’s, I’d be pretty much set. Evidently they’re doing a closed beta for the UB of Pathfinder right now, and there is a clunky work-around for Flip4Mac that I will be posting about later.

Great Collection of Apple / Mac videos

matonmacs — Sat, 04 Feb 2006 07:41:44 +0000

The Different District. Lots of great Apple ads, conveniently arranged. A fun time-waster.

Home Server Project: Update - Waiting for NICs

matonmacs — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 22:56:58 +0000

Just a quick note to say the HSP is on hiatus while I wait to receive a couple of NICs I ordered from Newegg. Once I get those, I should be able to get everything going. I’ve been doing some research online which leads me to think I might be better off going with IPCop rather than smoothwall (ipcop is a fork of smoothwall) since support for a Blue interface is already built into IPCop 1.4.

Home Server Project: The Server itself - CUPERTINO (G3 iMac)

matonmacs — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 21:05:56 +0000

So to get the Home Server Project started I obviously needed the server. At first I thought about going with a Linux server running on an old Athlon PC I happened to have from the bad old days from before I saw the Mac light. However, after playing around a bit with Ubuntu I decided to just go with what I know–OS X. Now ideally I would be running OS X Server, but I’m not willing to drop $200+ on the project so I’ll just have to go with a regular client version of OS X which nonetheless has a lot of server features available, and which can of course be upgraded with lots of open source server tools. Since I’m doing this project on a shoestring budget I was wondering what sort of Mac I could get for $100 or less. Some eBay searching revealed that 500-600 GHz G3 iMacs were generally going for about $150 and I didn’t want to pay that much. As luck would have it, however, I found a 400 MHz graphite iMac DV SE without a hard drive, but with 512MB of RAM for $68. The RAM was important because OS X is very memory hungry and I didn’t really want to buy it (in fact, at Crucial.com a 512MB stick for this machine runs about $100). Anyway, I bought the iMac and it was delivered a few days later–with shipping it totaled about $100.

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Home Server Project: “Fix it till it’s broke”

matonmacs — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 08:56:35 +0000

I fear that I’m afflicted with a terrible disease whose name I’ve just discovered. While browsing the smoothwall.org community I saw someone else noting that he was also afflicted with this disease and he gave its name. We are both suffering from the “fix it till it’s broke” syndrome. Just can’t stop; if it’s there to be mucked with… well ya just gotta. So my latest project: a home server. Here’s the plan:

What the image shows (click for larger version) is my planned home network. I recently purchased an old graphite G3 iMac DV SE (more details in a subsequent post) to be the home server itself. I’m planning to do several things with the server including running it as:

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The Apple Remote - Not Just for Frontrow

matonmacs — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 00:46:04 +0000

Most of the time when I’m playing videos I’m also futzing around with other stuff at the same time so I often do not use Frontrow (as I’m typing this post I’ve got a movie going). Anyways, I’m playing a DVD full screen on my main monitor with DVD Player and it occurs to me: I wonder if the iMac remote works with DVD player. Well, hot damn, it does! Play/pause, chapter forward/back, 4x fast forward/back (hold buttons down) all work. In fact, the play/pause button works on the DVD Player app even if some other program like Safari is in the foreground. (The menu button, however, does not bring up the DVD menu, but Frontrow). What about Quicktime Player? Yep, that one works too (play/pause, scan forward/back). When something besides Frontrow is running, the volume up/down buttons on the remote adjust the system volume. In short, this thing does more than I realized, but exactly what one would expect–isn’t that more or less what makes the Mac different? Well done Apple!

[update: TUAW has linked to this post (Thanks!) and in the comments there you find out that the remote does even more things–control iTunes, put the machine to sleep, etc. Cool!]

Why doesn’t Apple want my money?

matonmacs — Sun, 29 Jan 2006 01:08:07 +0000

I was recently looking for some Macintosh posters to decorate my office and perhaps one of the sort of mousepads that you see in Apple showrooms, but I’ve had a heck of a time finding any. I’ve never understood Apple’s unwillingness to sell officially licensed accessories. While you can find a few Apple memorabilia type items at places like The Missing Byte, it is quite hard to find any number of things one might like to have. Apple tends to engender the kind of loyalty that would lead to a lot of sales of mousepads, shirts, etc. Apple owns one of the most valuable brands in the world, and while I can understand their desire to keep it somewhat exclusive, it seems patently foolish to forgo a lucrative market which is pure profit. Other exclusive brands don’t seem to mind. So what gives? Why doesn’t Apple what my money?

Playing Divx and xvid (but not WMV) on Intel

matonmacs — Sun, 29 Jan 2006 00:38:25 +0000

One of the first problems I ran into was playing downloaded videos on BONAVENTURE. This is really annoying as Divx for Mac 6 (PPC) had just been released a few days before and I was justing getting used to using it to play divx and xvid content in the Quicktime Player. Fortunately, the Divx people are on the ball and have already released a Intel beta. I’ve downloaded it and it seems to be running quite well. It has played most of the files I’ve thrown at it so far, but still chokes on certain xvids. [update: There’s a divide by zero error caused, evidently, by malformed AVI headers. Supposedly it’s already fixed internally, so I assume they’ll kick it out with the next beta. For now, though, my only recourse has been MPlayerOSX (see below)]

Before the Divx release I was using the excellent open source video player VLC, but it just wasn’t cutting it through Rosetta. And from what I could tell from the forums it might be a while before the Intel native binary is released. A few sites list an Intel binary from last year, which I had to google to find, but even when I did I was unable to make it work properly (all the blacks appeared green). [update: Someone suggested to me in an email comment that I should try one of the nightly Intel builds found here. I just tried the Feb 21st nightly build and it’s finally working! Huzzah!]

After assiduous searching I found that an Intel binary of MPlayerOSX (download) had been released that would in fact play the xvid that was acting up. I never really liked MPlayerOSX (which come from the Linux world and looks it). I found the PPC version to be much less capable (and attractive) than VLC, but I’ll take what I can get as long as my content playing. So I would recommend first trying the Divx codec in Quicktime and if that doesn’t work try MPlayerOSX.

[update: sadly the story on Windows Media support isn’t as good. Ironically, Microsoft announced that it was stopping development of the unlamented Windows Media Player for the Mac and instead would be giving away flip4mac’s WMV codec for QT Player at MWSF, but unfortunately they’ve indicated that it’s not yet Intel compatible and there’s no ETA.]

Teleport: Sharing Keyboard and Mouse over IP

matonmacs — Sun, 29 Jan 2006 00:22:00 +0000

As I mentioned before, my previous computer is a G4Powerbook. I was previously using the mac version of the open source, cross-platform virtual keyboard and mouse sharing software SynergyKM to share my desktop keyboard and mouse with my notebook (in fact I still use Synergy at work where the server is a PC). While there is a universal binary out, I was having some trouble with it so I turned to a Mac only alternative called teleport. As you can see below you arrange the machines’ desktop so that it matches the actual physical layout of your computers. When you move the mouse to the edge of the screen it automatically jumps over–including copying the clipboard. A bezel appears on the server mac indicating that the mouse and keyboard are controlling the other machine. In short, teleport “just works” and is a much more mac-like program.

So now I can control Clare with my preferred Logitech MX 1000 and Macally Icekey and I can have a threeway! Highly recommended.