Thirtyfootscrew’s Blog

Have you ever wanted to keep a particular window on top of the others?  I often want to watch video whilst I’m doing other things, either in Quicktime or more often a web video from YouTube or Vimeo – and thanks to Afloat I can (in fact I’m watching a Bruce Schneier talk right now).  I first discovered Afloat quite a while back but when Snow Leopard was released it caused issues with PlugSuit, I just checked back (because I wanted to watch the Schneier video whilst surfing) and now there’s a Snow Leopard version as well as the old version for anyone still on Leopard.

As far as I know it will work with any application and it’s totally free –  get it now and check it out.

written by thirtyfootscrew \\ tags: Afloat, Leopard, mac, osx, Quicktime, Snow Leopard, Tools, Utils, Video

I’m not sure quite why people that make operating systems think that we’re all too stupid to understand what a file extension is, we need to know these things and sometimes we need to change the file extension but both Windows and Mac users have file extensions hidden by default.  Here’s how to change this in Mac OS X 10.6, Snow Leopard…

1.  Select Finder > Preferences…

2.  Then tick the  ”Show all filename extensions” on the Advanced tab.

3. Quit the Preferences pane any you’re done.

written by thirtyfootscrew \\ tags: Apple, File Extensions, Leopard, osx, Snow Leopard

Like many an Apple user I’d been looking forward to getting my hands on Snow Leopard for a while, perhaps since Bertrand Serlet’s presentation at WWDC 2008 announcing “zero new features”.  That might sound silly but the vibe given was clearly that Apple weren’t planning to mess with the user interface too much but instead focus on improving performance and tweaking existing functionality and that sounded great to me given that Leopard already catered for almost all of my OS requirements.  So coupled with the “evolution not revolution” approach and the price announced at only $29 I was practically on the edge of my seat with anticipation.

The install ran well enough, I was a bit confused at first about whether the default mode was an “upgrade in place” or an “erase and reinstall” because the installer no longer offers a choice – the default is an upgrade in place so you don’t have to worry too much about losing all of your date (though it’s always worth backing up first).  On my old Black MacBook I chose to erase the disk manually and do a fresh installation, mainly because I don’t tend to store much data on there so it was easy to back it up and I wanted to see how it worked from scratch – I didn’t have to worry about losing the iLife suite either because I lost that in the upgrade from Tiger to Leopard anyway.  I was watching TV and doing other things so I don’t really know how long it took but it was probably a shade over half an hour for a slightly tweaked install, my 24″ iMac however took at least an hour but I did do an upgrade in place (too many apps to reinstall otherwise) and imagine that’s a little more complicated.  The only incompatibility I encountered (constantly being asked for Admin password) was something called Plug Suit, it came as part of Afloat – a great little utility to keep selected windows on top of everything else but sadly does not work with Snow Leopard, a few Googles later and I managed to remove the plugin (instructions here).

On first boot you could quite easily think “hold on a minute, this is Leopard” because nothing really seems to have changed, the Welcome video and the nebula desktop are exactly the same, I even went to About This Mac to check that the version number had been upped from 10.5 to 10.6 (it had) to make sure I was actually using Snow Leopard.  I really think Apple missed a trick here, for a company that’s usually so focused on marketing and user perception it seems bizarre to me that they wouldn’t take this opportunity to reinforce the value of the purchase in the customer’s mind by having an even cooler welcome video and a brand new (maybe very similar) default desktop background.  I also think there should have been a (skippable) video or slideshow demonstrating “What’s new in Snow Leopard” just to help people appreciate the benefits they’ve got from the time and money they’ve put into the upgrade, it’s not that it’s really much money or time but I consider the fact that Apple didn’t do something like this as a ball dropped.

So you’ve probably guessed already that in the first instance I was a little disappointed, I even went to Apple’s Snow Leopard Refinements site to see what I could test and play with to get some inspiration.  After using Snow Leopard for about half an hour though I was pretty certain of the speed improvements, even performing simple activities such as running the mouse along the Dock and opening TextEdit so I began to think to myself that for $29 (or in my case £39 for a 5-license Family Pack) the upgrade was worthwhile for the peformance increase alone.

It took a few days but I slowly began to realise that  I was begining to feel the benefits of Snow Leopard, beyond the performance increases it’s the little changes that started to make a difference in how I used the OS.  The most noticable change to me is that Exposé is now much cleaner and clearer, previously in Leopard the window arrangement was haphazard and therefore harder to comprehend in a split-second.  I noticed that rather than command-tabbing through apps I kept coming back to Exposé, the new grid based layout is much clearer and makes it possible to switch tasks in sub-second times.  I can’t really see what use I’ll get out of the Dock Exposé or the new Stacks as I’ve never really found a need for them in my workflow but they’re pretty slick and I guess it’s nice to know they’re there.  The same goes for many of the other features although I’m quite excited about the potential applications developers might find for some of the ‘under the hood’ functionality such as Grand Central Despatch, Open CL and the future of 64-bit computing.  I guess the new Quicktime is pretty sweet with its YouTube integration and screen/cam capturing but I’m not really planning to be the next LonelyGirl15 just yet so I’m not sure if I need that either.

If I were asked whether or not to upgrade right now I’d say almost certainly yes to home users but ‘wait’ to anyone that uses the Mac for their work, it’s still early days in terms of finding compatibility problems which is always a worry if your livlihood depends on your IT infrastructure.  Other than that, I think it’s a great OS and I’ll look forward to making the comparison to Windows 7 when I get my pre-ordered copy in October.

written by thirtyfootscrew \\ tags: 10.5, 10.6, Apple, Expose, Leopard, mac, macintosh, Operating System, OS, osx, Snow Leopard, Software, Upgrade, Windows 7

Everyone living in a shared house will eventually run up against the problem of sharing broadband, especially if you’re downloading music, movies, games and system updates.   I live with my girlfriend and a couple of days ago she was working from home and I really needed to download some Audible books for a long journey I had the next day, unfortunately whenever I tried to do this it kept knocking her off of her company’s VPN connection.  Now, I’ve seen download managers and bittorrent clients with bandwidth restrictions but nothing that would throttle a web browser so I did a bit of Googling and found this helpful post.  Basically I’d worked out that at full pelt I was getting 135Kbps and this caused a problem with the VPN connection so I figured that maybe a third of that (45Kbps) would be a fair amount of bandwith to take, to do implement the bandwidth cap I had to…

• Open up a session on OSX as the Administrator (I did this in parallel to my existing login).
• Open up Terminal.
• Type:

  sudo ipfw pipe 1 config bw 45KByte/s

  This sets up the rule limiting your bandwidth.

• Type:

  sudo ipfw add 1 pipe 1 src-port 80

  This enables the rule.

Once you’ve finished the downloading you wanted to limit you’ll need to flip back into the administrator profile and do this…

• Type:

  sudo ipfw delete 1

  This deletes the rule.

If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment. Please note that this only restricts Port 80 which is the general web traffic port, if you had other activity going on (Skype, Bittorrent) then you’d need to add a rule for each relevant port.

written by thirtyfootscrew \\ tags: bandwidth, darwin, Leopard, linux, mac, osx, sudo, throttle, unix

I decided to install Drupal on my web server and instead of downloading the install files to my desktop, unzipping them and then uploading them back to the web server (which takes ages over ADSL) I thought I’d have a go at downloading them manually over SSH. In effect SSH is a method of connecting to your Linux web hosting service as though you were actually at a terminal logged in to that machine, in effect you have complete control over your web space with the ability to use the array of commands available to all Linux users. Most web hosting companies offer SSH access on their decent packages and I definitely recommend it as a shortcut for various things such as deleting files, setting permissions and editing config files (yes, I actually like vi).  So, if you’ve got SSH access, how do you use it? First you’ll need to find out the Host Name, Username and Password from your hosting provider, then one of the following – depending on whether you’re a Windows or Mac user…

If you’re on a Mac running OSX you’re in luck, you already have an SSH client to hand, if you go to Applications then double-click on Utilities you get an array of useful applications – be careful here but the one we want is Terminal. Once you’ve launched Terminal type the following: “ssh username@system”, you will then be prompted for your password and you’re in!

If you’re on Windows then get yourself a copy of PuTTY, a small but fantastic little application that’s free for both commercial and non-commercial users.  As an aside, the PSFTP client on offer there is also a great secure FTP client.

Now, if you’re not used to having command-line access to systems and especially if you’ve no Linux skills at all I’d suggest you read some good starter materials and learn more about Linux – messing with the command-line is very dangerous and there is no undo feature!  I may start writing some posts about both the Linux and Windows command-line but in the interim please feel free to ask for advice, just leave a comment on this page and I’ll get an email, alternatively send me a direct message on Twitter.

written by thirtyfootscrew \\ tags: command-line, Drupal, linux, mac, osx, PuTTY, web hosting, windows

In case you hadn’t guessed I’ve just upgraded to the new Sony Ericsson W960i, now I’m still not 100% sold on the phone itself (more info to follow as I decide) but I’m jumping in with both feet and making it my primary phone right away.  In order to do that I need to be able to sync the phone with my Macbook (without which my life would fall apart), the problem is that blessed Sony Ericsson have thusfar failed to release a plugin for iSync.

Fortunately the Internet came to the rescue (see here), in case the file there gets knocked off of the file host I’ve decided to host the files myself here: Sony Ericsson W960i iSync Plugin.

All you need to do is extract the contents of the zip and place the entire ’Contents’ folder in the following directory under Macintosh HD:

/library/PhonePlugins/SonyEricsson_W960i_isync_plugin_v1_07.phoneplugin/

Restart iSync and you should be able to connect to the phone, it worked a treat for me and I even received a call whilst the phone was in the middle of the sync and the call had the real contact’s name on it!

I will submit a more detailed review soon but for now it’s worth noting that the aside from the lack of an iSync plugin (which I’m certain will come) the W960i does work as a Mass Storage device out of the box and charges from USB so whilst there’s no actual software it’s Mac-friendly enough that I can get away without switching on the dreaded Beige Box in the corner.

written by thirtyfootscrew \\ tags: Apple, Ericsson, iSync, osx, sony, Sony Ericsson, W960i

I told myself for months that I wasn’t going to upgrade to Leopard right away, instead I thought I’d wait to see what bugs came out of the woodwork and if there were any other annoyances. Even on release day I was still working to plan, none of the confirmed features were killer-apps for me until I heard the Macbreak Weekly panel saying that Leopard’s networking is so much faster and slicker.

I own two Macs, a 13″ 2GHz Core 2 Duo Macbook that’s my main machine and an old 500MHz G4 PowerMac with 512Mb of RAM that I rescued from a skip last year sometime. Obviously the Macbook would be fine but I wasn’t so sure about the G4 so when I finally went down to the Apple Store on Regent’s Street in London I asked one of the clerks in the store who assured me it would be fine (having asked how much RAM I have in it). So based on the clerk’s recommendation I bought a family pack (allows up to 5 machines) only to find out when I got home that Leopard has an artificial floor of 867MHz for the processor.  My emotions ran through a journey of being pissed at Apple to pissed at the clerk from the Apple Store to determined to make the damned thing work.

I did some checking on my own but couldn’t find the file responsible for the limits, thankfully I found a collection of sites with some helpful info:

Forums on Macrumours.com
Installing Leopard on an Unsupported G4
Installing Leopard to an external firewire drive

Unfortunately neither method exactly fit my situation so using info from there and some general knowledge I did the following…

1. Rip an Image of the Leopard Install Disk, make sure you pick Read/Write.
2. Mount the Image.
3. Make a folder on the Desktop called OSInstall.
4. Open Terminal (make sure you have full permissions, might be worth elevating to root temporarily).
5. Type: “cd Desktop”, then press enter.
6. Type: “cd OSInstall”, then press enter.
7. Type: “xar -x -v -f /Volumes/”Mac OS X Install DVD”/System/Installation/Packages/OSInstall.mpkg”, then press enter (this empties the contents of the package to the current folder).
8. Use TextEdit to open the “Distribution” file (don’t quit Terminal yet).
9. On line 15 change the “var minRm = 512;”  to whatever value of RAM you need (e.g. “var minRm = 256;”).
10. On line 39 change the beginning of “866000000″ to match your processor (e.g. ”400000000″ for 400MHz).
11. Save the file and quit TextEdit.
12. Back in Terminal type: “xar -c ./ -v -f /Volumes/”Mac OS X Install DVD”/System/Installation/Packages/OSInstall.mpkg” (this rebuilds the package including the file you just edited), you can quit Terminal now.
13. If you have dual-layer DVDs you can skip the next part and just burn a disk directly form that and skip the next steps, otherwise secure yourself an external firewire or USB drive.
14. Use Disk Utility to create a partition of 10GB on the external drive, make sure you use the Apple Partition Map if the disk is to be used with a PowerPC Mac.
15. Use Carbon Copy Cloner to restore your image to the 10GB partition (Disk Utility might work but for me it gave me loads of errors).
16. Boot from the drive (hold Option / Alt during boot to select the boot disk).
17. Install Leopard!

Well, the install launches and it’s taken ages so far and still says there’s 30 minutes to go but once it’s done and I’ve got some use out of the system I’ll let you know how it runs.

written by thirtyfootscrew \\ tags: Apple, Carbon Copy Cloner, g4, Hack, Leopard, osx, PowerPC

Many months ago when I started this blog I’d just acquired a PowerMac G4 having rescued it from a skip, I installed OSX and started using it.  I enjoyed the experience but the Mac quickly fell into disuse as I still had all of my regular apps, email, music, etc. on the PC.  I couldn’t have switched to the G4 as my PC was newer and more powerful and besides that I didn’t really want to abandon the PC as a platform, until now.

In order to make traveling easier and provide me with a little more flexibility I decided to get a laptop, I thought this would be an ideal time to make a first serious step into the Mac world so I went to the Apple Store on Regent’s Street (London), watched their “Switch at Six” talk and spoke with a few employees about the practicalities and after much deliberation I bought the 13.3″ Macbook.  Whilst the extra power of the Macbook Pro would be great I think the size makes it much less portable and when you start thinking about spending that much money on a laptop you might as well say “screw it” and buy an awesome desktop for the same money.

I’ve had it for a few weeks now and I’m enjoying it, I’ve found that I’m using the Internet much more for fun as I can sit in the living room with the TV on and talk to my flatmate at the same time, I also can just pick it up and take it out with me if I need to.  I plan to clear some space on my desk so that I can run a cable to my 22″ CRT to get a better experience for editing photos, etc. – but these are just benefits of having a laptop – so how am I finding the Mac?

Overall, it’s been positive, I’ve had difficulty overcoming certain hurdles (lack of right mouse button, the fact I hate Preview) but in general I love some of the cool features such as: pressing F9 tiles all of your open applications and allows you to pick which one you want to use and F11 pushes all of your apps to the side of the screen so you can get access to your desktop.  They’re only little things and probably exist in Vista but that’s one of my reasons for switching – based on everything I’ve heard to date I really don’t want Vista and am getting fed up of being tied to Microsoft software so this is my first step towards application freedom.  Now I barely use my PC and I’m wondering whether or not the Macbook will become my primary computer – time will tell I suppose.

written by admin \\ tags: Apple, apple store, macbook, osx, switch, switching, vista

Having had the Mac for a good few weeks now I thought it would be a good time to post my experiences back on the blog. Initially I still found the user interface confusing as OS9 is quite different from Windows, I also had my suspicions confirmed in that there is almost no application support for legacy operating systems. To get round this I decided to take the plunge and get a copy of OSX, this is a decision I do not regret in the slightest – it’s great!

The install for OSX ran like a dream, though I’m not really sure how long it took as I was watching TV in the other room for the bulk of it. Once it was up and running I downloaded all the patches (being a Windows user this made me feel at home) then got hold of the latest version of Firefox so I could start using the Mac in earnest.

So far I’ve found it very enjoyable getting to know OSX, most things seem to be where you’d expect and I love that funny toolbar that pops up at the bottom for launching applications – much nicer than the Start Menu. I decided to make the Mac my primary web-surfing machine and have moved it into the living room, saving my PC for more hard-core use as well as my email (I’m currently tied-in to Outlook).

Every second I use OSX I am mentally comparing it to Windows and it’s obviously way ahead of XP in terms of graphical niceties and general usability. That said, Vista is hot on it’s heels and in honesty the whole Aero/Glass thing beats OSX’s graphical style hands down, MS are clearly taking their cues from Apple and hoping to go one step further.

Of course, Apple will have a chance to bite back with Leopard so I’ll keep watching that space and I’m sure Vista will usher-in a whole new world of security issues and bugs that need fixing – comments I’ve heard from Steve Gibson on the Security Now podcast have been quite alarming and I’ve stopped using my copy of Vista Beta 2 because of security concerns. That said, I will hopefully receive Vista RC1 soon but I’ll try that one inside a virtual machine if I can.

On a final note I had a very helpful and friendly email conversation with a guy from my local Mac user group, if you’re reading this – thanks, I may be in touch again once I’ve gotten to grips with things a bit more. Also, I still find the Mac press to be over-zealous and have resolved not to buy magazines any more (barring useful cover disks) – I’ll get my news from the MacBreak Weekly podcast (yet another great podcast from TWiT.tv).

written by thirtyfootscrew \\ tags: Apple, mac, macintosh, noob, osx, podcast, vista, xp

Until the other day, the last time I used a Mac was circa-1994 when I got my hands on a Macintosh IIsi and some variant of the Macintosh Classic. They belonged to my parent’s employer who needed a bit of help with printing and other IT tasks and I was pretty good at figuring these things out. I enjoyed using the GUI, at the time my only PC was either an IBM XT or AT running DOS and a mouse was an object of desire way beyond the budget my pocket-money would stretch to.

I’m giving you this backgroun because the other day I had the chance to get a much more modern Power Mac G4 that was being thrown out of some offices near where I live. Obviously I jumped at the chance as it had been well over 10 years since I last used one and getting Mac skills back on my CV can only be a good thing. First impressions – I was underwhelmed. I must point out that this thing is running OS9 and not everybody’s darling OSX, this makes it very hard to get software that will run on it – Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, none of them have released browsers compatible with OS9 for quite a while. The main source of my disappointment is that it basically looks the same as it did back in the day, nothing really new or innovative seems to be there and I’m finding it pretty tricky to navigate. As a born-again noob I realise that things aren’t going to be plain sailing and I do need to invest some time to read tutorials and familiarise myself with the OS, what I don’t want to have to do though is go out an buy OSX to get some decent use out of it – from what I’ve seen though, there may be little option.

I also bought a copy of Mac Format magazine and one thing that shines out of it’s pages is the adoration Mac users pour on their systems, something that seems a little odd for a platform whose most recent innovation is that it can run Windows. I’m far from a Windows fanboy (why do you think I want to switch), it’s just that the realities of working in a commercial environment mean it’s the OS I am most familiar with – Mac users seem to be so absurdly protective of their environment that approaching it from an outsiders perspective seems quite tough. My next course of action is to go to the community and see if they can help, I mean websites, user groups, etc. I’ll post back if and when I get any further in my quest, stay tuned…

written by thirtyfootscrew \\ tags: Apple, g4, mac, macintosh, noob, os9, osx, power mac, switch