Mac Mode

The Efficient Mac User offers 11 tips for returning your Mac to it’s new, efficient form:

1. Clean out Startup Items
2. Turn off Universal Access, Bluetooth, Speech Recognition, and Internet Sharing if You Don’t Use Them
3. Clean Out ‘Other’ System Preferences
4. Check Out What ‘Build’ Your Software Is
5. Clean Out Unnecessary Code
6. Get Rid of Languages and Translations You Won’t Use
7. Cool Off
8. Evaluate Your Widgets
9. Keep an Eye on Activity Monitor
10. Clean Off Your Hard Drive
11. Run OnyX

I just ran through half of these and will do the others on my next break. The Intel Mac stuff doesn’t help me on my eMac, but the other tips are helpful.

Doing some maintenance on the Mac today:

- implemented a backup system to a partitioned network drive to share with Windows and Mac. I formatted the partition as FAT32 and used Windows File Sharing with permissions set for read/write. Works great, although there is only 32GB of space for backup, that should be plenty for my Mac. I have been concerned about this for a long time because I only have one Mac and if it goes down, I’d lose my work.
- setup a backup automator action that will copy/move my important files from the Mac to the backup network drive. Am also considering backing up some of the files to remote location by using the service Mozy. It’s free for up to 2GB.
- unchecked/disabled all the widges I wasn’t using. The only two I’m using at the moment are SysStat and EpochTimeConverter
- systat alerted me to a memory problem with VshieldCheck which is fallout from Virex. I Googled the problem and found O’Reilly had recommended uninstalling Virex clear back in May 2005. Woohoo, the eMac is cooking now!

Any other Mac system tweaks I should setup?

For awhile I’ve been wanting to setup printing on the Mac using the printer attached to one of our Windows machines and shared over the network. I had no idea how to do this on a Mac, so first I explored around the preferences menu looking for printer options. Looked like I already had a printer configured from some time in the past but it didn’t work so off to Google I roamed.

The following how-to post proved to be very helpful and blockquoted are passages from those instructions below, which boiled down to the following steps:

Windows
1. make sure Windows XP is setup to have printer shared.
2. determine the IP address of the Windows machine connected to the shared printer by using shell.

START -> Run -> Type: cmd
type:

Probably will be something like 192.168.101.xxx where xxx is the number of the machine.

3. Add OSX port to Windows machine:

Start > Control Panel > My Network Places > Network Connections. New task on the left: Change Windows Firewall Settings, then click on the Exceptions tab. Click on Add Port, enter “OS X printer” (or whatever you want) in Name and “515″ in Port Number. Leave TCP selected, click OK,

4. Make sure Windows Print services for Unix are installed:

Click Start and then Control Panel. Double click on Add or Remove Programs. Click on Add/Remove Windows Components. Double click Other Network File and Print Services. Select Print Services for Unix.

Mac OS X
1. Start terminal and type:

cd /usr/libexec/cups/backend/

2. Create symbolic link for CUPS by typing:

sudo ln -s /usr/bin/smbspool smb

If you get an “already exists” message, don’t worry about it, continue.

3. In your browser navigate to CUPS web interface at:

http://127.0.0.1:631

4. Select “Manage printers” and then “Add Printer.” Give your printers any name, location, and description. The description field will be displayed in your Mac field.

5. Under the device option choose:

LPD/LPR Host or Printer

6. In the device URI option type:

lpd://windows.ip.address/WINDOWS_SHARED_NAME

where WINDOWS_SHARED_NAME is the shared name of the Windows printer.

7. Burn a test print. I printed the teminal bash screen. Voila!

metrobilly writes:

If you run OS X on a notebook, you can quickly run out of space on your hard drive. Stopping short of getting a FireWire external HD, your best bet is to use some easy tips and apps to free up space on what Jobs gave you.

I don’t have an OS X notebook but the hard drive that came with the eMac is pretty small. The six tips offered could come in handy for keeping the HD cupboards clean.

It’s that update time again, including Mac OS X 10.4.4. Should see a screen something like this, if you haven’t already:

This is pretty neat, another feature in the System Preferences that I didn’t know about: how to setup stealth mode (thanks Pei). BTW, this is one of the best designed Mac blogspot hosted blogs I’ve seen. Pei has a custom Macnify Dashboard Widget too. I’ll be back.

Just learned how to make the dock icons get bigger when you hover over them.

1. In the dock bar area: CTRL + right mouse click
2. select “Turn Magnification On”

I saw this effect at the Mega Store (CompUSA + Good Guys) here in Puyallup on one of the machines and wondered how to make my dockbar do that. Was in a chat earlier today and a fellow programmer, splitz, showed me how to do this. Thanks Splitz!

Maybe this is something veteran Macheads know, but this Mac-wannabe just learned how to take screenshots by using:

Desktop screenshot
Apple/COMMAND + SHIFT + 3

Crosshairs select screenshot
Apple/COMMAND + SHIFT + 4

The default format is .TIFF which can be changed to something else by a little terminal magic:

Copy the “defaults write” line below, paste it into the Terminal window, and press Return.

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type jpg

The article shows changing from TIFF to pdf, but you can use other formats as well like png. To have the setting take effect you’ll either need to logout and login anew or enter the following terminal command:

killall SystemUIServer

The screenshot above shows the whole terminal process. Takes like less than 30 seconds.

One of the primary uses I have for the Mac is recording my favorite over the air talk radio shows using the Griffin RadioSHARK. I took some screenshots of the radioSHARK in an earlier thread. Griffin Technology

radioSHARK for Mac - 1.0.5 - This software will allow you to play, pause, and record live radio on your Mac. Please note that this software requires the radioSHARK hardware to function.

Once the shows are recorded, I’m using AC3dec to convert from AAC to MP3. Next, via the Mac System Preferences I allowed another Windows Machine to access these converted files so that I can then copy and burn them to CDs. For long drives, these recordings will be useful, as I’m a huge fan of talk radio.