Rich Text (HTML) signatures in Mail.app

I was recently asked to help with setting up an HTML signature in Mail.app. "No problem", I thought. Unfortunately after a few quick attempts I quickly discovered that Mail.app's signature system is atrocious. Typing in plain text signatures (all I've ever done prior to this) is easy. Entering an Rich Text¹ signature is not.

The problem is mainly that the editor window is difficult to use. For one thing it relies on the available-to-all-Cocoa-apps Fonts and Colors floating selection windows - which are elegant but seem to be constantly getting in the way just when you least expect it. Also using images in your signature is a pain because the signature window inexplicably doesn't display images you drop into it.

The line spacing in the signature window is also buggy. On several occasions while switching from one signature to another I saw random increases in line spacing as well as inserted line breaks in the middle of sentences. These random increases were cumulative, so after several switches the gap between two lines of text was several centimetres. I encountered similar problems with the "Always match my default message font" checkbox. Selecting and unselecting the checkbox repeatedly again caused the line height to increase to gigantic proportions.

The bug is difficult to reproduce but you can see a hint of it here:



After taking the first screenshot I selected and unselected the "Always match ..." checkbox. As you can see in the first image the image is at the end of line 1, but in the second image there are two line breaks between line 1 and the image.

In my search for a solution I found this hint at MacOSXHints. The 6-step method is a bit of a pain, but it works - albeit with a little tweaking:

1. In step 3 the HTML page you create must use FONT tags to control the text colour and size. Using CSS won't work. Nor will using a BODY TEXT tag.
2. In step 6 the easiest way to determine which signature file you need to replace is to modify the signature file you wish to replace and quit Mail.app. Now when you open the ~/Library/Mail/Signatures folder you can replace the most recently modified signature file.
3. And when you eventually send your signed emails, the body of the email must be in Rich Text format, otherwise your finely crafted signature will be displayed as plain text (and also without images).

This method results in HTML signatures in Mail.app which display correctly in Mail.app's signature window without any weird line spacing issues and display correctly in the recipient's email client. It also can't be broken by clicking the "Always match ..." checkbox. All of this is good news, but my main feeling after this is that the whole procedure really should have been much easier.


¹ Mail.app's Rich Text format is actually HTML.

Burning DVDs from AirDisk

To put it bluntly, think carefully before you try this. Yes, the AirDisk appears to be a normal network drive. However I just burnt a 4.2GB DVD full of jpegs (each approximately 2 - 3 MB) and it took over 6 hours! Throughout that period my Airport throughput meter (courtesy of the indispensable MenuMeters) fluctuated between 50 and 300KB/s transfer from the AirDisk to my MacBook Pro. I don't know why the AirDisk transferred data so slowly - normally I can achieve around 3MB/s for large files and half that for small ones.

iPhone frenzy

Well, it's finally been announced, and it has far surpassed the expectations of even the most optimistic Apple fan! I wrote a lengthy piece about it on my mobile phone blog. I bet Bill Ray is feeling pretty foolish right about now

Roll your own .Mac

Whilst browsing through my newsreader today I noticed an article on Lifehacker about replicating .Mac services for free. Long-time readers will now that Apple's infamous bait-and-switch routine with .Mac really irritated me. So this is right up my street. The original article is at 5thirtyone, and is well worth reading. The box.net revelations were particularly interesting,

Preventing iPhoto albums from appearing in your screensavers preference pane

While searching for a solution to iPhoto polluting my screensavers list with hundreds of albums I found this thread over on the Apple discussion forums. Since those forum posts will expire after a few months I am posting gryphonent's solution here for my own records. if you do read through the thread, be sure to look out for the amusingly smarmy posts by the improbably-named Al Van Malsen.

To disable the iPhoto screen saver from showing your albums try this:

1.) Launch the Terminal application
2.) Type the following command (all on one line) and hit return
defaults delete com.apple.iApps iPhotoRecentDatabases ; chflags uchg ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iApps.plist

I have done this on my computer and have not noticed any ill effects from it. Essentially the command deletes the "iPhotoRecentDatabases" key from the "com.apple.iApps.plist" preference file and then locks the file so iPhoto can't write back to it the next time you launch iPhoto.

If you do experience any strange behavior after trying this you can unlock the "com.apple.iApps.plist" file in the Finder's "Get Info" window or you can issue the following command in the Terminal application:
chflags nouchg ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iApps.plist

17" MacBook Pro in da house - one user's gripes

It's happened. I hinted at it several times before, but as of 7 days ago I am the proud owner of a new 17" 2.16GHz MacBook Pro with the 100GB 7200rpm drive. Once Apple announced the speed bump and price reductions across the line at the end of May I knew that it was time to splash the cash. Luckily for me the other half is a secondary school teacher, so we qualified for Apple's excellent education discount. Instead of paying £1900, we got the beast for a 'mere' £1750. Add in another £110 or so for a 1GB memory stick from Crucial (significantly better than the £200 Apple would have charged) and the grand total was around £1850. Not a small chunk of change by anyone's standards, but given that my venerable 667MHz Titanium Powerbook is definitely showing its age, it's a worthwhile buy.

Having had the machine for almost a week now, I can definitely say that the speed increase has been wonderful. Apps launch almost instantly. Spotlight is finally a useful tool. Web pages render with far more of that near-mythical 'snappy'. Programs that were as slow as molasses on the old laptop (Dreamweaver MX 2004 I'm lookin' at you) are now quite usable on the MacBook Pro even under Rosetta emulation. I am aware that these are all fairly subjective measurements, so as a test I whipped out my trusty old copy of DVD2OneX. The results were approximately what I expected, but it was still nice to see the results firsthand. Processing a 7GB DVD on the old Powerbook takes about an hour. Using the universal binary version of DVD2OneX on the MacBook Pro this now takes approximately 12 minutes! Absolutely fantastic, or as Jeremy Clarkson might say, "enough to give me a semi"

Despite all the good experiences of the last few days, there have been a few negatives. The MacBook Pro itself exhibits several of the problems reported by other people:

Heat
The MacBook Pro certainly gets quite hot. After a few hours of casual use the left palm rest gets very warm - not uncomfortable but enough to make your palm a bit sweaty! Also the strip of case between the keyboard and the screen (just above the air vent) gets extremely hot, to the point where extended contact is certainly uncomfortable, and even slightly painful. I have yet to run any lengthy CPU-intensive tasks, but I plan on remedying that situation in the next day or two. As long as it doesn't get any hotter than it is now I think it is fairly warm but acceptable.

Warped screen case
The case around the screen exhibits a slight warp when the lid is closed, i.e. when it is closed the gap between the screen and the body of the laptop isn't even. The gap is noticeably wider at the front corners of the machine than it is at the central latch area, i.e. perhaps 0.75mm at the latches and 1.5mm at the corners. This is also apparently a fairly common problem, but other than the slight annoyance of a cosmetic flaw in a £1850 laptop, it doesn't really bother me.
[Update: while taking these photos I've now concluded that the screen warp has at least partially corrected itself. As you can see from the photo above it is still noticeable, but it is not as bad as it was when I first unpacked the laptop.]

Other screen issues
I had previously noticed the new (compared to the Powerbook) hinge design during my last visit to an Apple Store. While I can see the logic of the new design in that it reduces the depth of the laptop, I wasn't so happy to find that I could no longer really use my laptop while standing up because the screen cannot fold back nearly as far as my Powerbook. This results in me having to bend down to properly read the screen.

Secondly, despite Apple offering a choice between glossy and matte screens, the matte screen of my MacBook Pro is noticeably glossier than the Powerbook's. Not a huge deal, but something I noticed immediately.

The third issue is the new hinge mechanism. It is far looser than the hinge on my almost-4-year-old Powerbook. Admittedly the MacBook Pro's screen glides very smoothly and is easily adjusted with a light push from a single finger while the Powerbook screen takes two hands to adjust (one to move the screen and one to hold the base of the laptop to stop it moving!). However there is a flaw - if you lie down on your back in bed or on a sofa with your knees bent, putting the MacBook Pro on your lap results in the screen falling down and closing itself! This was a feasible (and fairly comfortable!) position with my old Powerbook.

My final quibble is with the (admittedly cool) keyboard backlighting. This seems to be somehow connected to the ambient light screen brightness controller, in that when the keyboard backlight automatically turns off after a few minutes of non-use (despite being set to never turn off) the screen also gets significantly dimmer. I suspect that the light from the keyboard backlight is affecting the ambient light sensor for the screen brightness, so when the keyboard backlight switches off, the screen dims due to reduced ambient light. This may be the intended design, but I find it quite distracting.

Tiny return key, and other keyboard annoyances
I haven't seen anyone else mention this yet, but this is annoying the crap out of me. The return key on the MacBook Pro keyboard is positively tiny compared to one on the Titanium Powerbook. This is evidently so they could squeeze in an extra key (more on that later). I'm hoping that I will get used to the tiny key, but after a week it is still a bit of a lottery which key I will actually press when going for the return key. More often than not it is the backslash key. In fact the whole keyboard is taking some getting used to.

For some inexplicable reason Apple have also decided to move the tilde (~) key and replace it with a new key (which produces the § and ± symbols). Now I don't have a problem with this, but it certainly fucks up application switching. In the past we used command-tab to cycle forwards through applications, and command-tilde to cycle backwards. This was great when the tilde key was above the tab key, but is not so great with the tilde key's new position. It also screws up window switching within an application (command-tilde).

Strange noises
One of the major issues reported by hundreds of different users has been strange noises coming from their MacBook Pros. Most commonly this is reported as a high-pitched whine coming from the base of the screen, possibly from a power inverter. Others have reported a 'mooing' noise which seems to be related to a misaligned fan. I, of course, have a completely different noise What I get is a white noise/static sound coming from the right speaker. it sounds exactly like a vinyl record player on high volume when it is in between tracks on the record (i.e. a kind of hissing and popping noise). The noise lasts for around 5 or 10 seconds. It has only happened 5 or 6 times so far, almost always when I am booting the laptop or waking it from sleep. Rather worryingly, these are two things I rarely do - the laptop is usually powered-on and on a table 24/7. Strangely enough the strange noise has also occurred once when I was booting under Windows XP via Bootcamp. This makes me wonder if it is a hardware fault, rather than a speaker driver problem. The noise isn't solely restricted to bootup and waking from sleep though. I've also heard it once when launching an application. For me this noise is a show-stopper. If I cannot find a fix for it I shall be returning this machine.

Closing thoughts
I should note that this is far from a complete review of the 17" MacBook Pro. I'll leave that to others. This piece simply states my impressions of the laptop after a week of use. I should add that despite my extensive moaning above, this is far and away the fastest and slickest laptop I've ever used. It is, on the whole, a hell of an improvement on my aged Powerbook. The MacBook Pro looks great, and the performance is simply stunning. I will probably even get used to the keyboard eventually. It is just that for the hefty price tag I want a perfect machine. That means a laptop that doesn't get too hot to touch, doesn't have no stinkin' warped screen, and absolutely, positively, does not make inexplicable noises at seemingly random times.

Blocking a website with /etc/hosts in OS X

In an article on parental control of OS X, namely blocking children from accessing myspace.com, Dave Taylor proposes using the /etc/hosts file to accomplish the task. While experimenting with the method I found that I was unable to control the process, no matter what the contents of /etc/hosts.

After much trial and error I discovered that it is the lookupd process that needs to be restarted in order to respect changes to the /etc/hosts file. A reboot will accomplish the same thing, but twiddling my thumbs for several minutes through a shutdown and startup routine was not an acceptable solution.

In case anyone else has the same problem, here is the breakdown of this two-step process:

The default /etc/hosts file looks like this:

To block both http://myspace.com and http://www.myspace.com add a line such as 127.0.0.1 myspace.com www.myspace.com. Fire up Terminal.app and enter these commands:

Now you need to fire up Activity Monitor (Located in OS X's /Utilities folder) and force quit the process named lookupd. You will need to enter your administrator password.

Fire up a web browser and enter http://www.myspace.com. You should now find that the browser is redirected to the localhost at 127.0.0.1. This will be the contents of OS X's /Library/Webserver/Documents/ folder.

Reversing the procedure

First you need to remove the myspace line from /etc/hosts. Head back to Terminal and reissue the pico command you used earlier:

And delete the myspace line. Once again, hit ctrl-X, Y to save and exit.

You now need to again launch the Activity Monitor and force quit the process named lookupd. You will need to enter your administrator password again.

Open up a new web browser window and enter http://www.myspace.com. The browser should once again connect as usual.

Don't chuck out Virtual PC yet, the MacBook doesn't do Windows

Once again, Ars Technica dishes the dirt. It seems the lack of a BIOS on the MacBook means that it will never be able to run any current version of Windows. The MacBook uses Intel's far more capable Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) instead of a BIOS, but the only current versions of Windows which support EFI are the Itanium and 64 bit versions, neither of which will run on the 32 bit Core Duo processor. So, it's Windows Vista or nothing, and Vista won't be out until late this year at the very earliest.

In the article Ars also casually note that once Microsoft recompiles Virtual PC for the MacBook users will be able to run Windows apps at near-native speeds. However I have to ask how likely is it that MS will make the effort in a timely fashion? And how will Microsoft's hardware partners feel about the decision? Would they see it as unwanted competition for their PC systems? Or will MS place greater weight on the extra revenue and greater market share that will result if Mac users start buying copies of Windows? So many questions, when all I want is to be able to test designs in WinIE without enduring Virtual PC's geologic response time.

Mail.app nightmare over

Back in April, I posted a rant about Mail.app's handling of inline images. The gist of my tirade was that Mail.app insisted (nothing's changed - it still does) on displaying images inline, rather than as attachments. The problem here is that messages with inline images or PDF documents take an age to open. This glacial response time is infinitely more aggravating when there are several such emails to open in succession (for instance when searching for one particular image out of dozens emailed to you). Mail.app does offer you the ability to right-click an image and choose 'display as icon', but close and re-open the email and you'll find that Mail.app will blithely continue to display the image as if you'd never told it otherwise. Even worse, there is no global preference to alter this behaviour.

This glaring tidbit of user-interface idiocy is particularly frustrating for me since I was a long-time Eudora user prior to the arrival of Mail.app and Eudora has always, for at least a decade, clearly distinguished between inline images and attachment images. Those of you who have never used any email client other than Mail.app may wonder what I am blithering on about. The basic explanation is that 'inline' should mean that the image is displayed along with the text of your email, whereas an 'attachment' should properly be an image (or other file) that is sent with the email as a file attachment but is not displayed with the text of your email.

The 'official' description of the difference between 'inline' and 'attachment' can be found in this RFC document, the relevant part of which is:

2.9 Content-Disposition and Multipart

If a Content-Disposition header is used on a multipart body part, it applies to the multipart as a whole, not the individual subparts. The disposition types of the subparts do not need to be consulted until the multipart itself is presented. When the multipart is displayed, then the dispositions of the subparts should be respected.

If the `inline' disposition is used, the multipart should be displayed as normal; however, an `attachment' subpart should require action from the user to display.

If the `attachment' disposition is used, presentation of the multipart should not proceed without explicit user action. Once the user has chosen to display the multipart, the individual subpart dispositions should be consulted to determine how to present the subparts.

Thus concludes Mac History 101.

"So", I hear you ask, "why are you moaning about this again?". Despair not dear reader - there is a solution! I have recently discovered that I am not alone in my Mail.app nightmare. Adam Nohejl of Czech outfit Loki Software must have been a fellow resident of inline-hell, but unlike yours truly he actually did something about it, writing a wonderful piece of $6 shareware named Mail Attachment Iconizer. This program does one thing only, and by God does it well. Simply fire up the installer and Mail Attachment Iconizer will modify your copy of Mail.app and forever turn those inline images into image icons. Double click 'em and they expand into images or PDFs; double-click a second time and they revert to icons. Apple - are you watching? This is the way it should have been done from the start.

For those of you wondering why I switched from Eudora in the first place if it was so damned wonderful, the answer is that Eudora at the time did not make the transition to OS X very well and wasn't updated for at least two years. It also didn't have Mail.app's tight integration with Address Book and the iLife apps. Not to mention the fact that Mail.app is free, whereas Eudora requires an annual (annual!) payment for the ad-free version.

Mail.app single keystroke insta-quit

A headline in MacFixit's RSS feed caught my eye today. They report that pressing the control-T key combination in Mail.app's compose window (with your cursor in the message box) causes an immediate quit without any confirmation. I confirmed this on my PowerBook.

Update: MacFixit have posted a workaround

Airport Express 6.2.0 firmware update = no more internet

While adjusting some settings in Airport Admin Utility today I was prompted to update my Airport Express firmware to version 6.2.0. I knew that this firmware update was included with the OS X Airport 4.2 update from back in July 2005, but although I had updated my Mac's Airport software at the time I had never got around to applying the included update to the Airport Express's firmware. "What the hell", I thought, "perhaps it'll solve the occasional freezes I get" (every few weeks my connection seems to lock up, and resetting my D-Link modem fixes it).

Updating the Airport Express firmware was, as it turned out, a god-awful idea. After the update my internet connection immediately stopped working. I could see the Airport network and connect to it but nothing else worked. Internet Connect reported that I was connected to the internet. Network Diagnostics reported that my connection made it as far as my ISP but not to the internet itself. Several resets of the modem and Airport Express did nothing. Nor did a reboot of my Mac.

Eventually I fired up my trusty old dial-up modem and connected to the net to begin searching for clues. In the UK NASCR are a convenient source of dial-up services - no monthly charges and you just pay local-call rates on your phone bill. Having an account with them has saved me more than once!

After some slow-as-hell web browsing, I eventually found the solution. This comment on Versiontracker led me to discover many useful threads on the Apple discussion forums. Several people suggested that the Airport Express 6.2.0 firmware update breaks PPPoE on DSL connections, and reverting to 6.1.1 would fix it. I don't actually use PPPoE to connect, but I still thought that reverting was worth a try. Sure enough, after downloading and installing the Airport Express 6.1.1 updater, my Mac miraculously had an internet connection again!

Comment
This is ridiculous. This firmware update was released over 2 months ago, but I found several recent references to this connection problem in just 5 minutes of browsing of Apple's forums (at a snail's pace, mind you!). If this is such a common problem why hasn't there been a fix? It's hardly as if DSL connections are uncommon.

As an aside, surfing the net via dial-up modem was an edifying experience. For one thing I discovered that my very own website loads extremely slowly on dial-up! I used to pride myself on small fast webpages suitable for dial-up connections - evidently a few years of broadband has desensitized me to the needs of my dial-up brethren! I shall rectify that, but the whole episode also makes me appreciate my 2 megabit connection more than ever!

(Better late than never) DoubleCommand on Tiger!

Don't take the title the wrong way - I'm incredibly pleased that Michael Baltaks has updated DoubleCommand! It's just that happened a month ago and I've only just noticed it! This was the final piece of the jigsaw in my migration from Panther. DoubleCommand allows many unusual key remapping combinations, but for me it is the ability to remap a PowerBook's enter key to a function key, in order to allow for one-handed pageups and pagedowns, that makes it indispensable. DoubleCommand is donationware.

eWeek embarrasses themselves

The venerable eWeek, normally a fairly reputable online news outlet, embarrasses themselves with an apparently serious comparison of Apple's OS X Tiger and Microsoft's Windows Vista. What's that I hear you say? What sense does it make to compare Tiger, which has been available for 6 months, with Vista, which will be available in 18 months? That's a very good question, and one to which I know no answer.

Mighty Mouse!

Apple introduces the Mighty Mouse! I first learnt about this $49 USB mouse via Tech Ronin, and after reading a little more, all I can say is that it sounds great! You've gotta hand it to Apple, they don't do things by halves.

Buttontastic
As you can see in the image, the Mighty Mouse keeps Apple's favoured 'simple mouse' philosophy. They have kept the appearance of a single mouse button, but by using the touch sensitive technology used on the iPod's scroll wheel users can assign the left and right forward quadrants to react as left and right buttons. This is apparently customisable, so presumably a single button will still be the default behaviour. In addition to the touch-sensitive main buttons, the mouse also has two old-fashioned buttons on either side of the body. The idea is that the user squeezes the mouse to activate a user-defined function (this is likely intended for Exposé ). A good idea, but perhaps a step too far in attempting to be original. The squeezing motion certainly doesn't sound all that comfortable, and apparently the buttons are not individually programmable. I think simply adding a third button assignable to Exposé might have been a simpler and less RSI-inducing approach. Speaking of third buttons, the division of what is presumably a single large touch-sensitive area into two sections seems purely arbitrary. Look out for unofficial hacks to divide the touch-sensitive area into three or more discrete 'buttons'.

Balls to that
Not content with simply improving button aesthetics, Apple have also taken the scroll wheel concept a step further by implementing a "Scroll Ball". Don't get me wrong, scroll wheels are great - I don't function well without them. But the current implementations for scrolling sideways - such as positioning the cursor over a window's horizontal scroll bar before using the scroll wheel - are simply unsatisfactory. Granted, Apple themselves appear to concede that the scroll ball will only work in certain 'scroll-ball-enabled' apps - iPhoto, iMovie HD, Final Cut Pro, GarageBand and Logic Pro are mentioned by name on Apple's Mighty Mouse page. The ball does not seem to be pressable in the way some scroll wheels are.

Click chirp beep swoosh
Yet another (as far this technology geek is aware) "innovation" is embedding a speaker into the mouse. This is to provide audible feedback of various mouse functions, primarily clicking to add feedback to the touch-sensitive 'buttons', but likely also including scrolling and dragging. This will clearly be divisive, with some loving and some hating it. Hopefully users will be able to control the volume, if not completely silence it if they wish.

Still smilin'
Apple have been seen exercising their sense of humour in public on a few occasions recently, but giving a high-profile product a name like Mighty Mouse takes the cake. For those of you too young to remember, Mighty Mouse was a superman-clone (but obviously a cartoon mouse instead of a being from Krypton) who featured in an eponymous Saturday morning TV show with its origins in the 1940s. This was incidentally a particular favorite of mine as a pre-teen. Apple credit the Mighty Mouse name on their page, with acknowledgment going to Viacom International. Interestingly, while 'borrowing' Apple's image of the (computer) mouse used at the beginning of this article I noticed that the name of the JPEG file was "mightymousehero". Which I thought was a nice touch.

Why no blue teeth?
The burning and obvious question - why isn't this mouse Bluetooth capable? Some are speculating (fairly wildly in my opinion) that Apple are waiting to sell a few million of these mice before introducing a wireless version. That doesn't quite ring true - I see a design issue as carrying heavier weight here. Perhaps the batteries increase the mouse's size too much. Or perhaps the Apple design philosophy requires something more elegant than batteries or a power cable, such as a recharging dock, but a dock pushes the price up to unpopular levels. I prefer the latter explanation, and wouldn't be surprised to see a "pro" wireless version, with snazzy Apple dock (and obligatory pulsating light), available next year sometime.

Good mouse? Bad mouse?
On paper, Apple's new super-hero mouse packs a KABAAM-like punch. It is cunningly innovative in so many ways that it simply screams Apple quality. The price tag isn't overly outrageous, and given the fact that it is Windows XP/2000 compatible it will surely lure some curious PC users into a test drive and, if all goes to Apple's master plan, perhaps encourage them to consider an Apple option when it comes time to upgrade the home PC. It's not all rosy though - initial reports suggest some problems with the touch-sensitive buttons, for instance not being able to 'press' one button while a finger is still touching the other. This will likely be fixed in a coming software update. A more serious complaint I've read is that some find it difficult to 'squeeze' the side buttons. The mouse is also only compatible with OS X 10.4.2 and later, which rules it out for those Mac users still happily using Panther and Jaguar. Still, if you are running the latest version of OS X, and need a new mouse, this Mighty Mouse appears to be worth a try.

Update: c0nsumer has posted an initial review with images and screenshots.

Final update, I promise: Engadget have posted links to no less than six reviews of this mouse. When was the last time you ever heard of a mouse getting this much attention?

Tri-booting Intel-Macs

Read it while you can: How to install OS X, Win XP and Linux on an Intel-Mac. Probably won't be long before they receive an Apple "Cease & Desist" letter! Via MacSlash.

Update - 8 hours later: Apple has had a quiet word with the author resulting in him removing the article. Unfortunately, as is ALWAYS the case, the rabbit is out of the bag and there ain't no puttin' it back. Don't these companies ever learn? It is impossible to suppress anything on the internet, and trying to do so gives you a lousy reputation. Apple is, sadly, particularly obnoxious in this regard.

OS X anti virus

Although there are famously no viruses on OS X other than artificial "proof-of-concept" examples, OS X Guide have posted a tutorial on how to use the open-source Clam anti-virus. Apparently the main reason is so that you don't inadvertently pass on Windows viruses. All very well-intentioned, but surely by the same rationale we should be scanning for OS 9, Symbian, Windows Mobile and Linux viruses...

Password assistant

I've used Keychain Access for quite a while now, both to store logins and passwords for websites and for personal information such as banking and identification details. So it was a bit of a surprise when I finally clicked that key-shaped button next to the password field: Pretty nifty, especially in this day and age when ordinary people have to come up with more and more non-trivial passwords.

Developers' Intel-Macs much faster than expected

AppleInsider published a fascinating article yesterday, which contained some great information about the speed of the $999 for-developers-only Intel-based Macs. My favorite part:

"It's fast," said one developer source of Mac OS X running on Intel's Pentium processors. "Faster than [Mac OS X] on my Dual 2GHz Power Mac G5." In addition to booting Windows XP at blazing speeds, the included version of Mac OS X for Intel takes "as little as 10 seconds" to boot to the Desktop from when the Apple logo first displays on screen.

SlashDot discussion here.

Drastically reduce mailbox disk usage

Thanks to this hint on MacOSXHints today, I have just reduced my Mail.app mailbox from 860MB down to 460MB in about 10 seconds. Apparently this only applies if you imported your pre-Tiger mailbox. Still, this is the kind of hint I love

More WebKit and SVG news

Some news about the future of SVG in Safari. I made a few notes about this a few days ago.

Tiger Notes, vol. 4

Finally, Mail.appetizer has been updated to work with Tiger! There is a new compatible beta available for download! Cue angels bursting into song...

The last major (for me) item is still DoubleCommand.

Google toolbar for Mac Firefox

Although this unofficial hack already exists, this unconfirmed mailing list post states that Google are about to release an official Google Toolbar for Firefox.

Dock icon visual feedback

The OS X Dock has been the subject of a love-hate relationship from many Mac users since the launch of OS X. The 'magnification' effect has been dismissed by many who, claiming it does nothing to make the Dock more usable, dismiss it as marketing-department eye candy designed to wow would-be customers at Apple Stores. I must admit that despite initially loving the magnification effect, I have long since disabled it after getting fed up of dock icons magnifying themselves out of my way while I was trying to drop a document on them.

Another widely condemned "feature" is the Dock's cute bouncing behaviour when a program is launching or a background program needs your attention. While both behaviours do serve a limited purpose, there needs to be some configurability for those who desire it. I know that I for one would appreciate a setting to stop an attention-seeking background application's icon bouncing after a certain number of bounces. Toast 6, when it is hidden, commits this bouncing sin at the end of a disc burn and is a prime example of a situation where this setting would be a blessing.

Finally, there is the 'puff of smoke animation when removing Dock icons'. The less said about that the better.

"So", I hear you say, "is there anything good about the Dock?" The answer is yes! As amply demonstrated by the rotating 3-D cube of the CPU monitor X3, the Dock is capable of significant graphical gymnastics and is not limited to manipulation of the original program icon. The image to the left doesn't do X3 justice, the cube (X3 comes with a variety of icons) rotates through several dimensions and the speed of rotation correlates to CPU activity.

While X3 with its significant CPU drain may be overkill (somewhere around 10% on a 667MHz G4), the majority of Dock icons could still do with some sort of visual feedback, showing relevant information whenever an application is hidden. Irrespective of any other failings the OS might have, some Windows programs do this very well by displaying relevant information in the taskbar button when minimised. The amazing wish-there-was-a-Mac-version DVDShrink is a great example, showing elapsed and remaining time in its button.

Having said that, a few select OS X applications do make good use of the Dock's abilities. Prime amongst these is Apple's own Activity Monitor app, which has no less than 5 different animated Dock icons for displaying CPU, hard disk, and network activity. These icons display several different items of information each in the form of charts, but at a cost of measurable CPU drain. A further drawback is that the more frequently updated charts, for instance the CPU history meter, the Disk activity meter and Network activity meter, can be visually distracting.


Less intrusive but still useful is the 'display a single variable' approach used by Apple's Mail, and Ranchero's NetNewsWire. Both use their Dock icons to show unread material in the form of a number displayed on the icon. This approach is more than adequate for these types of programs, although some sort of font size control (particularly in Mail), would be nice.


A different approach is to use the Dock icon to display a progress bar, as seen in Toast and DVD2OneX. This is in my opinion the best use of Dock icon feedback and should really be mandatory behaviour for any program which has lengthy delays when processing data. MacTheRipper will apparently have a similar Dock icon progress bar in its next revision, but interestingly the DVD2OneX readme includes thanks to the MacTheRipper author for the progress bar code!


Finally we have Dock icons which merely display whether a certain state is true or false, for instance Virtual PC's Dock icon shows an OS X style spinning wheel on the PC monitor when saving a session, while Transmit's Dock icon shows a small arrow to indicate if it is uploading or downloading. In both cases a progress bar would make so much more sense, but I guess any feedback is better than none at all and I should be happy the authors have at least made an effort!


And that is, to the best of my knowledge, all of them. It seems like such a paltry selection given the thousands of OS X applications out there. Can anyone add any other programs to this list?

Update: I forgot about the fantastic BluePhoneElite. I usually have the Dock icon disabled so I had forgotten the feedback it gives (I use the menubar feedback instead). The Dock icon shows a signal meter and a battery meter consisting of graduated blocks similar to Nokia phones.


Update: I also forgot iCal! The Apple calendar program's Dock icon is deceptively sophisticated and displays an image of a paper desktop calendar which shows the correct month and date. Luckily most of us don't need a calendar to know what month it currently is - the month on the iCal icon can be very difficult to read.

Scalable Vector Graphics on a Mac

I was browsing around today (using Safari 2.0 on Tiger) when I came across this entry on Jacques Distler's Musings blog which produced a 'missing plugin' message:


A quick google told me that "image/svg+xml" was the MIME type for Scalable Vector Graphics, developed by Adobe and Macromedia back when they were separate entities (Adobe offers standalone SVG viewers an SVG plugin for download here). Further searches revealed that WebKit does not support SVG, so getting it to work in Safari wasn't likely.

I then fired up a few more browsers to see which, if any, of them worked. The WebKit-based Shiira 1.0 unsurprisingly did not show anything. However both Opera 8.0.1 and Firefox 1.0 do support SVG and displayed the image. Control-clicking the SVG brings up the zoom menu.


The image at normal size



The image zoomed in

Update: thanks to Jacques's comment below, I have now installed the Adobe plugin mentioned above. This is what the image looks like now:

Tiger and OS9 warning

Alice Wang over at Techie Geeky Mac Stuff reports on a serious problem with booting to OS9 on a Mac with Tiger installed. Presumably this only applies if you performed an upgrade install of Tiger. If like me you erased your hard disk and did a clean install then, well, no need to worry - you don't have OS9 on your drive anyway.

Tiger Notes, vol. 3

When copying a file in Tiger, the progress box and the text within it have both become smaller. I like it.

Spotlight has taken over the world. It is now quite fiddly to do a simple Finder search for one named file in the folder you currently have open. Update: MacOSXHints recently noted that enclosing your search term in double quotes ( " ) seems to restricts the search to 'by name' only.

The truly awesome mail notification plugin Mail.appetizer no longer works, although Mail didn't actually notify me of this until after I had updated to 10.4.1.

DoubleCommand still hasn't been updated. Web browsing feels broken without one-handed page downs.

Major Tiger bug destroys data

While doing some research on using SuperDuper as an alternative to the not-yet-Tiger-compatible Carbon Copy Cloner, I stumbled across this warning from the authors of SuperDuper. Despite the warning being a week old, I haven't seen any mention of this anywhere else. This lack of publicity would be unusual for what should be a major Apple news story so it may be that this is a false alarm, however it's always better to be safe than sorry. The essence of the bug is that mounting sparse disk images over 1GB in size will corrupt the image, destroying all data in it.

Spotlight refinements

The venerable TidBITS posted an interesting note on adding qualifying keywords to Spotlight searches. It seems they had just complained about the lack of information when Apple updated a Spotlight Tips page. The keyword tips are useful, if a bit cumbersome to type, but the highlight of the page is the reappearance of Apple's sense of humour:

Widget weakness

The Unofficial Apple Weblog has a reference to an interesting article on stephan.com on virus-like activity via Dashboard Widgets. The danger exists if you are running Tiger and have Safari's Open "safe" files after downloading option checked. See the stephan.com page for a (harmless) example.

Happy tenth birthday, DragThing!

DragThing, one of the greatest accessories in Mac history, is celebrating its 10th birthday! The author James Thomson has posted a great history of the program which is well worth a read. There's a lovely 'coolware' anecdote in there as well

The article will be updated regularly over the next 10 days with even more DragThing trivia, and also contains a link to a US$10 discount page.

When I started reading the article I was convinced that I had been a DragThing user since System 7, but after looking at the comparison 'about page' screenshots, I now suspect I jumped on the bandwagon with DragThing 2 and OS 8. I seem to recall that my first use of DragThing was when it shipped with my PowerMac 6100/60 which would place it sometime in 1994/95, but the year seems wrong so perhaps I'm thinking of my subsequent Mac, the 8600/250 (bought in late 1997). In any case, I have used DragThing without interruption since then, right up to DragThing 4.5 which is installed on my Mac right now. I've been so happy with DragThing 4.5 for the last couple of years that I haven't even tested any newer version! Sorry James!

Tiger notes, vol. 2

Spotlight is still slow. Top tip of the day: don't make any spelling mistakes in your spotlight query.
Solution: possibly re-install QuickSilver and use it solely for launching apps.

Safari RSS no longer works with HSBC's online banking site. Safari didn't work at first too. That finally got fixed by the 1.2 update. Back to square one.
Solution: use FireFox.

DoubleCommand no longer loads.
Solution: Daring Fireball notes that Apple have added some of DoubleCommand's functionality, but alas not including the ability to remap a PowerBook's 'enter' key. The developer's says on his site that he is aware of the incompatibility, but is unsure when a patch will be available.

KeyChain Access has changed for the worse. It now takes several extra clicks to make clipboard copies of certain information.
Solution: none yet.

Not specifically Tiger related, but since my copy of iClock vanished after installing Tiger I took the opportunity to upgrade to iClock 2. However there is a major problem - this new version has an annoying iClockWarnings icon taking up valuable dock space
Solution: none yet. May try and revert to the old iClock.

Quartz Composer

Stumbled across an interesting blog entry on Quartz Composer today.

Update: Someone's already launched a dedicated site.

Tiger review revisited

Not to be outdone by Ars, AnandTech have published their own Tiger review. It's a good review, and very detailed (although not to quite the geek level of the Ars review).

Tiger notes

My Tiger notes so far:

Spotlight is quite slow on my 667MHz G4. Using it to launch apps (granted, not it's primary function) is several times slower than with QuickSilver.

Dashboard is fast. Especially once you remove all animated Dashboard widgets since they hog so much CPU - the analog World Clock widget eats around 5-10% of my CPU, but the third-party Dash Monitors is by far the worst culprit (up to 40% CPU in full graphical mode).

Automator is fast (and awesome). My favorite workflow so far is Mail Images.

iPhoto was broken. Trashing plists and library did not fix it.
Solution: delete and reinstall.

iSync crashes upon launch. Trashed plists. Now launches but crashes as soon as I attempt to connect to the phone.
Solution: None yet.

Little Snitch was broken.
Solution: install new 1.2b3 version.

iClock had vanished.
Solution: downloaded and installed newest version.

Fire crashes on launch.
Solution: Apparently recompiling from source using XCode2 will fix this. I've switched to AdiumX.

MySQL acting strangely. After a reboot mysqld sometimes (but not every time) jumps to 100% CPU and gets stuck there.
Solution: force quitting mysqld and manually restarting in terminal fixes the problem (until your next reboot).

BitTorrent official client crashes on launch.
Solution: use Tomato Torrent Bits on Wheels (having to find a new BT app led me to discover Bits on Wheels. It's much more informative than both the original client and Tomato. Azureus provides similar information, but the obvious java-ness really grates on me).

Ecto behaves strangely. For instance Command-Shift-U used to insert a hyperlink of the clipboard contents. Now it sometimes does this, but at other times it does nothing.
Solution: Upgrade to new 2.3 version.

Safari annoyance eliminated, finally

They've finally fixed my Safari bugbear!

Tiger review like you've never seen

Nobody reviews like Ars Technica. They've just posted an in-depth Tiger review here - just to give you an idea of how thorough this is, the pdf version is 106 pages!

Upgrade to Tiger, PHP and MySQL broken

I quickly noticed after upgrading to OS X 10.4 that PHP includes were not executing and MySQL queries were once again producing the dreaded 'cannot connect' error message which 10.3.9 had introduced:

Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/tmp/mysql.sock' (2)

Fixing the broken PHP was easy. I simply installed Mark Liyange's PHP 5.0.4 package. Tiger ships with 4.3.10.

For the MySQL error, for reasons I have not yet looked into the previous solution (repairing the ownership of the /usr/local/mysql/data folder) did not fix the problem. And trying to load mysqld in the Terminal showed that it not have permission to access the /usr/local/mysql/data folder. Since changing its ownership to the 'mysql' user did not help, I tried changing to it my user account instead (in my case the command was sudo chown -R thoughton data/.) Bingo, that did the trick! Everything works again.

A word of caution, this is just a quick fix while learning the ins and outs of Tiger, I wouldn't be surprised if doing this has opened up some huge security hole - so do it at your own risk and always keep a backup.

Tiger in da house

It's arrived!

MySQL broken by 10.3.9?

I noticed today that my MySQL install seemed to have broken. I was getting an error when I tried to post a new entry via Ecto, and after poking around a bit I discovered that any query involving the mysql database (such as a site search) produced the same error:

Further investigation seemed to indicate this was a permissions problem. The only thing I've installed recently has been the OS X 10.3.9 update, so I'm guessing it happened then. After much googling I found the fix.

Change directory to your mysql directory:

And enter this change ownership command:

And voila! Everything works again.

Tiger benchmarks

There's plenty of news out there about the forthcoming Tiger release on 29th April 2005 so I wasn't planning on mentioning it here, but the French site MacTouch has an article comparing Jaguar and Tiger (English Google translation here) with a particularly interesting graph of speed benchmarks for both systems running on a variety of Macs.

Mail.app inline image annoyance

I've noticed for a while that Mail.app seems to insist on displaying image attachments inline. This is fine for small web-optimised images, but becomes intensely annoying when you are trying to read several emails in succession, all of which have one or more large (1MB+) image attachments, because Mail takes several seconds to open each email due to the huge image that it insists on displaying inline.

I had always intended to figure out a solution, but today when I actually sat down and looked for one, I had nasty surprise. There is no solution. Apple really needs to sort this out, it's enough to make me consider ditching Mail.app.

Pausing DVD2OneX

I recently discovered, quite by accident, that DVD2OneX will pause its processing if you put the Mac to sleep! This may be old news to some people, but until these last few weeks I had virtually never put my laptop to sleep before, so discovering this was a real bonus. I've been wishing the program had this ability every since I started using it! That said, the ability to pause processing without sleeping (so the user can do something else in another CPU intensive program) would still be useful!

PowerBook Motion Sensor goodness

If you have a recent PowerBook with Apple's motion sensor, check out this series of software for some amazing, albeit frivolous, demonstrations of it in action.

Build your own Salling Clicker

The Unofficial Apple Weblog commented on a very interesting MacDevCenter article today detailing how to control iTunes from an internet-enabled mobile phone via a WAP browser and OS X's built-in Apache webserver. Great stuff, but hang on a minute ...

If you already own the incredible Salling Clicker, you're probably wondering what all the fuss is about. With Clicker you can already do everything described in the article without typing a single line of code. Furthermore you can view album art and playlists on the phone, which really has to be seen to be appreciated. And to top it all off it's not only iTunes - Clicker also has controls for iPhoto, DVD Player, Keynote and PowerPoint, as well as numerous third party plugins (admittedly of varying quality).

Given the all-round awesomeness of Clicker, it was the ability to script apps other than iTunes that really intrigued me about the MacDevCenter article. One such use I will be looking into is toggling P800 Manager's internet sharing. Since Clicker can activate the BlueTooth connection from the phone, this would eliminate the need to physically visit your Mac to start P800 Manager's internet sharing. It may be that P800 Manager is not scriptable, in which case I'll be looking into applescripts which enable internet sharing over bluetooth.

Back to the MacDevCenter article, the use of a web interface was also interesting - on the plus side it is not range-limited like the BlueTooth-based Clicker is, but on the down side internet access on a phone costs money (quite a lot in most cases). I suppose if you have an unusually large home the web interface may be the best option, but I for one cannot imagine any other need for the greater range.

One free alternative that comes to mind is sharing your Mac's internet via BlueTooth to access the web from your phone, all in order to surf to your Mac's webserver and control iTunes. How's that for convoluted? But we're now back to limited BlueTooth range, which kind of defeats the purpose. I think I'll be sticking with Salling Clicker, at least for iTunes control.

Keyword Assistant updated!

I mentioned in this entry that Keyword Assistant, an indispensable iPhoto plugin, was broken by the upgrade to iPhoto 5. Have no fear, life is good again - author yesterday released an update which works with iPhoto 5. Phew!

DragonBurn does something useful

If you've ever inserted a blank CD-R or DVD-R, you'll know that OS X has a built-in disc burning ability. It also comes bundled with the Disk Utility application for, among other things, burning disk images. Despite this, Roxio's Toast 6 is still generally considered as one of the "must buy" apps due to it's much more extensive support of various CD and VCD formats, not to mention dual-layer DVD support. Given these facts, I've always wondered what it was about DragonBurn that made it worth US$50. It appears that this is one of the reasons.

iPhoto 5, hero and zero

My copy of iLife '05 has arrived! The app I was looking forward to most was iPhoto 5, in particular the long-awaited addition of folders to help you organise your albums. However there are apparently numerous problems: MacOSXHints, MacInTouch, Accelerate Your Mac, and MaxFixIt have all had reports. The MacOSXHints article in particular specifically concerns a problem with folders. This problem did not affect me for some reason - although MacOSXHints has included a solution if it does start to occur.

My own experiences so far have been generally good, with the one glaring exception of exporting photo galleries for the web. Don't get me wrong, iPhoto's web export works pretty much as it always has (pretty well, but not great), but neither of my preferred web-export plugins, BetterHTMLExport and PhotoToWeb, work with iPhoto 5. They look like they're working, but no images get exported. BetterHTMLExport's webpage states that the developer is aware of the problem.

Also a concern is that iPhoto 5 seems to be noticeably slower than iPhoto 4. In particular opening images used to be instantaneous. Now you have to sit and wait while iPhoto displays your selected thumbnail for a second or two in the centre of a large empty black box before the full-size image fills the window. I've also heard that it is almost useless on a Mac with a G3 processor - most of the editing functions do not work and navigation is painfully slow.

26/1/05 - Update: At some point in the last few hours BetterHTMLExport was updated to version 2.1 and is now compatible with iPhoto 5!

27/1/05 - Further update: Ack! I just noticed that Keyword Assistant has vanished! I refuse to even attempt to assign keywords without this wonderful piece of software. Luckily it appears that there is an iPhoto 5 version going through beta-testing right now.

OS X on PocketPC

This is pretty cool.

MacTheRipper defeats ARcoSS

Last month I mentioned the new ARcoSS protection scheme appearing on some DVDs in Europe. At the time I said there were no Mac DVD rippers which could defeat ARcoSS, but that the MacTheRipper team were working on it. Well, they've done it . MacTheRipper version 2.6 includes, among other things, the ability to rip ARcoSS discs.

QuickImageCM updated

QuickImageCM has been updated to version 2.4 This is a significant new release - it is about 3x faster, has improved quality, adds a progress bar (and a cancel button! woohoo!), support for labels, and other goodies. I discussed QuickImageCM and DropIcon back in October.

Safari interface annoyances

One of Safari's more annoying user-interface decisions is the "Safari can't find server" error message.

If you open a link in a new page or a new tab and encounter this error, when you switch to the page or tab in question, you cannot close or refresh the page or tab until you dismiss the error message. This is simply terrible interface design, and not worthy of Apple. Whoever is responsible for Safari's UI, please do something about this! The error message should appear in the title bar, or address bar, or simply as a webpage saying "Server not found", not as a drop-down sheet that has to be dismissed.

Windows evangelist twists truth

The amusing rantings of rabid anti-Apple evangelist Paul Thurrott at his tabloid-style site occasionally make the news, but today he's managed to exceed his usual level of selective truth-telling.

The article in question is entitled MSN Toolbar Suite Preview and starts by laying this groundwork:

At the Professional Developers Conference 2003 in Los Angeles last year (see my exhaustive coverage of that show), Microsoft chairman Bill Gates touted the searching innovations that would go into Longhorn, the next generation Windows version that's now due in mid-2006. In a way, by detailing the new desktop search features Microsoft was working on so early, Gates had thrown down the gauntlet. In today's PC world, desktop search is a miserable, slow affair, and as Microsoft executives are fond of pointing out, it shouldn't take longer to find a file you know is on your hard drive than it takes to perform a Web search.

At least he's got the "miserable, slow affair" part correct. Anyone who's ever tried a simple search to locate a specific file on both Mac and Windows systems will know that one platform is vastly superior. I'll give you a hint, it isn't Windows.

But wait, Thurrott has more to say. This is the bombshell:

However, Gates was also giving his competitors a leg up on Microsoft. And since announcing its Longhorn desktop search intentions, Microsoft's worst fears were realized. Other companies began copying the Microsoft desktop search strategy, knowing that the never-ending Longhorn delays would help them get to market sooner and appear to be nimbler and even more innovative, though it's sort of astonishing how transparent that latter claim is. Chief among these competitors are Apple and Google.

I'm not even going to attempt to analyze this. Apple and Google stole the idea of indexed searching from Microsoft. You read it here first! It is so patently false that anyone with the slightest amount of computer experience should realise it. One more time, in case you missed it ... he's accusing Apple and Google (Google!!!) of stealing search technology from Microsoft!

PS You may be interested to know that LaunchBar 3 was released in August 2001. Draw your own conclusions.

MovieGate joins the DVD transcoding crowd

The French app MovieGate has quietly included DVD transcoding options in their latest release (English translation here). Given that it uses the same open source tools, I would expect the results to be similar to ffmpegX's DVD9>DVD5 tool.

iSilo for UIQ goes beta

The popular Palm and PocketPC ebook reader iSilo has been released as a beta for UIQ! This is noteworthy since they already have an OS X converter.

Forward Delete on a Powerbook

Back when I first got this PowerBook (667MHz DVI Titanium), it took me a few months to figure this out. You can forward delete by pressing function-delete. A dedicated key would still have been nice...

Airport disconnecting when switching users

Since getting the Airport Express and going wireless, I've noticed that I get disconnected from the Airport network when I use Fast User Switching to switch over to my iTunes user (I used this MacOSXHints hint to set up a large second shared iTunes library on an external hard disk). After a bit of research I came across this mailing list post. Switching to my iTunes user showed that I could not make any changes to the Network settings. This was when I remembered that I had set the iTunes user to Simple Finder to see what was so simple about it. Switching back to my main user showed that I couldn't make changes to logged in users, so after a quick switch back and logout of the iTunes user, I set it to Full Finder, logged back in, opened up the Airport tab of Network preferences and entered the appropriate network name and password. Note: the password box only appears once you've chosen a network. Voila! No more disconnects when switching users.

P910i Mac-centric review

I recently discovered a MacBidouille review (English translation here) of the P910i from a few weeks ago. The nice thing about this review is that it is Mac-specific. I mentioned the P910 back in July.

tintin++ 1.93.5

Igor asked me to compile his latest version today - I had a look at my previous write-up on the process, but I needn't have worried - it installed without a hitch.

Ars reviews launchers and docks

Ars Technica does their usual magnificent job.

Ripping a DVD, defined

I noticed in my RSS feed today this CultOfMac entry about Shepmaster's 'Ripping a DVD' tutorial. CultOfMac have also posted a rebuttal by one Alexander Malov.

The cause of this misunderstanding is a misuse of terms. 'Ripping' a DVD is merely copying a DVD to your harddisk - something you cannot do via drag and drop due to the CSS encryption on the DVD. As well as decrypting CSS, a good ripper should also remove any Macrovision protection and DVD region coding. Modern rippers like YadeX and MacTheRipper can also remove the more recent RCE protection. If you live in Europe, you also have to worry about the newly implemented ArccOS protection system. As far as I know, the only ripper able to defeat ArccOS is the next version of MacTheRipper, which is due Real Soon Now™.

What Shepmaster's tutorial is describing is ripping a DVD, followed by re-encoding the very large (usually 5 to 8 gigabytes) ripped DVD's mpeg2 video and (usually) ac3 audio streams into a much smaller 3ivX video and AAC audio file. This final file isn't playable on a normal DVD player, and is usually sized (by controlling the bitrate of the 3ivX) to fit onto 1 or 2 CD-Rs. On a 667MHz G4 I would expect this process to take anywhere from 12 to 24 hours.

What Alexander Malov's rebuttal is describing is ripping a DVD, followed by transcoding the mpeg2 video stream into another, lower bitrate, mpeg2 stream (small enough to fit onto a single layer 4.7 gigabyte DVD-R), and burning it onto DVD-R with Toast. This final disc is playable on a normal DVD player. On a 667MHz G4 I would expect this entire process to take about 2 hours.

Also worth noting is Alexander Malov's final comment suggesting DVDBackup. I simply cannot agree with this. MacTheRipper and YadeX are both well-supported, full featured, modern rippers. 0sex (that's a zero) is a slightly obsolete ripper but useful for its imaging functions. DVDBackup is irrelevant these days. All the other rippers can do everything DVDBackup does, but DVDBackup cannot remove RCE or ArccOS and has reported problems on OS X 10.3. I've personally experienced this problem, but to be fair it seems to only affect people who did upgrade installs of Panther.

But I digress ... the basic issue here is that Shepmaster's tutorial, despite being extremely thorough, has a misleading title. The tutorial itself is superb but strictly not for beginners. I can also personally verify that this particular tutorial has been on his website for at least several months, probably closer to a year.

Great OS X apps

I noticed on an entry on MrBarret.com mentioning Dan Frakes' list of great OS X apps from his latest book. I've only been browsing through the list for a short while but I've already found a few great apps I'd never heard of before.

The True Story of Audion

I heard about this over at John Gruber's excellent Daring Fireball site - the True Story of Audion is a truly wonderful piece of Mac storytelling. I don't think I've ever felt so equally moved and delighted by what is essentially an article on the history of some computer software.

OS X polyphonic ringtone converter

I noticed the creatively-titled Polyphonic Converter listed on Macshareware.net today - it's for converting midi files into polyphonic ringtones for modern phones. The good thing about this is that there are thousands of midi files freely available all over the web.

Butler acting strangely

For the last couple of weeks Butler has been acting strangely. The launcher functionality is unaffected, but whenever I try to access the preferences they zoom off to the bottom left of the screen leaving only the titlebar visible. If I move the window back into view it I only see a portion of the window, and the window is not resizable, so the hidden items are totally inaccessible.

This seems to be a bug of some sort in Butler itself. The user guide discusses the problem here. The fix works, but only for a few days, then the problem reappears. It's sufficiently annoying that I am considering switching back to QuickSilver or LaunchBar.

More iSight stuff

While prowling around for iSight related goodies, I found this somewhat frivolous but in-depth article at MacDevCenter. It covers pretty much everything you would (and a lot you wouldn't) expect to do with an iSight. A lot of great stuff, but for me the highlight was iChat Streaming Icon, which among other things can turn your buddy icon (as it appears to your buddies) into a video of yourself! It's tiny and slow, but it's live! No more need to set an 'away from keyboard' message, they can see from your icon that you're not sitting in front of your Mac!

iGlasses for iSight

In an attempt to have video conferences with family back in Hong Kong I bought an iSight last week. The device has received almost universal approval and as expected my early tests were all positive. I am looking into the actual video conferencing software, but in the meantime the iSight's one major flaw has been poor performance in low light situations. For whatever reason, there is no way to control any of the iSight's settings from within iChat or OS X itself so there is not much you can do about it apart from turn on more lights. Kensington's SightLight is marketed as a cure for this, but a much better solution is to install the $8 iGlasses. This amazing app provides a wide range of controls for the iSight, from exposure to white balance. The results are astonishing - the sample screenshots on the product webpage are not exaggerations!

Airport Express

Well, my new Airport Express arrived yesterday. There are plenty of reviews around, so I'm not going to reinvent the wheel. The plan is to (eventually) set up wireless internet access for my laptop, but I'm still waiting for my ethernet ADSL modem to arrive (to replace the USB one that comes with BT's broadband service).

All I've used the Airport Express for so far is AirTunes. Again, this has been covered extensively elsewhere, so all I'm going to say is "Wow." This is one of those gadgets that make even non-geeks sit up and pay attention.

USB Printing via Airport Express

As well as setting up the Airport Express and AirTunes, I've been attempting to attach an old USB Lexmark Z52 printer to the Airport Express unit. This printer works when plugged directly into my Mac. However when I try to print wirelessly to it the print job spools to 100% and then stops itself. Opening the print queue shows my print job has stopped itself with a message which reads "Printer: Jobs Stopped".

Despite some extensive searching, I couldn't find the solution. I tried reinstalling the Lexmark drivers from Panther disc 2, a tedious job, but to no avail. This discussion describes my exact symptoms, but the given solution didn't improve my situation at all. After spending a couple of frustrating hours reading the Apple discussion forums, I stumbled across this page which lists Airport Express compatible printers, and the Z52 is not listed as being compatible. However I couldn't be sure since the Lexmark page on Airport compatibility has been down for the last several hours. To be honest, it's a relief to find out. At least I know how to fix the problem now! (The Z52 was a hand-me-down, and virtually not worth using in any case due to the extortionate cost of ink cartridges).

Edit: while typing up this entry, I attempted to print this page in order to double-check the exact wording of the print queue error. The printer name had a small exclamation mark next to it so I clicked 'Printers' and 'Rendezvous' and choose the Lexmark Z52 again. This created a new printer, and lo and behold, the damn page printed out! This is almost too annoying for words - I must have deleted and recreated the printer a dozen times using this exact same method without result, and now the damn thing decides to start working for no apparent reason. It's good to know it works, but I will still be replacing the printer shortly - it's too big and the ink costs almost 20 times as much as Canon cartridges.

Quick Icon Thumbnails

In order to quickly create a thumbnail icon for images I've been a long time fan of the great freeware contextual menu extension QuickImageCM. Simply right-click the icon and choose QuickImage:Add Thumbnail Icon and you have a great thumbnail icon. However despite its convenience, QuickImage suffers from a few problems. For slower Macs with a few contextual menu items installed there can be a delay of a few seconds before the menu appears. This delay increases with the number of icons selected, so if you try and right-click a selection of a few hundred images, the delay can run into minutes, during which you cannot do anything else while waiting for the menu to appear. This is extremely frustrating, so I set out to find a drag and drop solution.

Enter the $15 shareware DropIcon - this app is a good solution for the problem. This software hasn't been updated since 2001, but it seems to work well on OS X 10.3.5. I've tested it with over 500 images at a time without any problems, except a few images (perhaps 1 in 100) end up with erroneous black and white thumbnails. Running DropIcon on these problem images again did not fix the problem. I ended up using QuickImage on them to get the correct thumbnails.

Update: I recently discovered a program called dropBatch iconMaker. Apparently it's highly regarded.

Flippin' ecto!

I've heard good things about some blogging software called ecto and decided to try it out today. Installing it was a bit of a pain, it turned out I needed some files that were included in a full Movable Type 3.x install but not included in an MT 2.661 upgrade install. I ended up in the ecto support forums where with some very prompt help from the author managed to get it working.

I've now been playing with the software for a couple of hours and, essentially, I love it. There are a few areas where it it still manages to outfox me, most of them are to do with ecto's WYSIWYG Rich Text editing interface. There is also a plain HTML interface, which is mainly what I've been using. Even though the entries in plain HTML look the same as they do in the Movable Type entry screen, ecto's interface is infinitely better, largely because of the vast speed increase the whole blogging procedure undergoes.

Other highlights have been ecto's clever HTML tag shortcuts For instance you can copy a destination URL into the clipboard, switch to ecto and highlight the phrase to be hyperlinked, press command-shift-U and hey presto you have a hyperlinked phrase. Simpler stuff like command-I and command-B work as well (this sounds like nothing, wait until you've have typed <i> and </i> a few hundred times). Also worth a mention is the highly illuminating graphical breakdown of the program in the ecto support forums.

It's Symbolic!

I occasionally need to FTP into my home Mac in order to retrieve some file or another. The Mac is set up with two hard disks with certain default folders (like music and pictures) both residing on an external drive with aliases in my internal drive's home folder. However when I FTP in, these aliases don't work, which means I have to trawl through a whole load of folders to get to the appropriate folder on the external disk. This is pretty annoying For a while I've been vaguely aware of symbolic links, and had always intended to look up the syntax for creating one, but with the usual million other things to do it was only recently that I noticed an app on VersionTracker that puts a symlink command into your contextual menu. Just like that, problem solved! Now when I FTP into my home folder instead of seeing a file called 'Movies alias', I see the actual directory. Update: I've recently read a few reports of people deleting a symbolic link, and not realising this will delete the original item as well. Be warned

Ogg and the Music Man

When Mireth Technology, the makers of MacVCD and iVCD, released Music Man (formerly MacMP3CD) a few days ago I was curious to see if it would simplify the process of converting songs from my MP3 collection to 48Kbps Ogg files for my P800 phone. My current method involves batch converting MP3s to WAV with MACAST MP3 Converter and then converting the WAVs to Ogg with Ogg Drop X.

After installing Music Man as per the instructions, I discovered that in order to convert MP3s to Oggs I would need to install the LAME MP3 encoder as well as the Ogg Vorbis Quicktime component. I already had the Ogg component installed, and after a quick read of this I was ready. Note: installing LAME 3.96 resulted in an error at the end of the make install process - the error was make: *** [install-recursive] Error 1, however the encoder seems to be installed correctly, since Music Man MP3 conversions now work correctly.

All of the above only took 20 minutes or so, and soon after that I was merrily converting MP3s to Ogg in just one click. Very handy, although watching the output folder shows that Music Man converts the MP3 to WAV before reconverting to Ogg, so the actual workflow appears to be similar to my previous two step process. However, I was disappointed to discover that Music Man does not apparently allow you to set the bitrate of your output Oggs. They appear to be 128Kbps files, which is too large for me to consider using on a mobile phone with only a 128MB memory card.

Dual Layer DVDs on OS X 10.3.5

Insanely Great Mac reported today on an article on the French site MacBidouille about burning DVD-R dual layer discs on a Pioneeer DVR 108 using OS X 10.3.5. You can find an English translation here. Points of interest include support only by Toast and DragonBurn (no Finder or iApps), and Toast 6.0.7 only being able to burn a maximum of 8GB onto the disc (which took 27mins).

Compressing sparse disk images

After recently getting a bargain on a no-name 256MB USB key drive I wanted to store an encrypted password-protected disk image on it. However after playing around with Disk Utility for a while, I discovered that although a 'sparse' disk image sounded like what I wanted, it actually wasn't! The problem with sparse disk images is that although they aren't fixed in size and grow as you add more stuff to them (which is what I wanted), when you delete the same stuff they do not automatically shrink! Technically this is understandable since the 'deleted' data hasn't been zeroed and is actually still on the 'disk', however it wasn't what I was hoping for.

So after much fruitless searching, I appended a question onto this existing Apple discussion in the hope for an answer. However after re-reading the discussion and having a look at the hdiutil man pages I eventually managed to refine my search enough to turn up an article on MacOSXHints which had exactly the solution I needed!

The answer is simple! Simply fire up the terminal, and type:

hdiutil compact (with a space at the end)

and then drag and drop your sparse disk image file into the terminal window. Note that you need to type a space after the word 'compact', before you drag the image icon to the terminal window.

Depending on the size of your sparse image the process will take a few seconds to a few minutes. Get info should now reveal that the image file no longer 'remembers' the size of the deleted files.

Note: when specifying the size of an encrypted sparse image in Disk Utility you are specifying the maximum size.

Improving spelling in TextEdit (and other Cocoa apps)

After years of ignoring TextEdit's insistence that I was spelling words incorrectly, I set off on a Google search to find out how to replace the default American English dictionary with a British English one. However I soon discovered that it was my omission all along - all I needed to do was choose the Edit:Spelling:Spelling menu item and I could change the dictionary to a British English one! However my time was not completely wasted, I discovered a very slick (and free) improved spell checker for OS X named cocoAspell, an OS X implementation of the open source Aspell. Aspell has a wide selection of additional European language dictionaries available for download.

And before anyone asks, the answer is no, I don't know why the Croatian dictionary is ten times the size of the others...

One Mouse, Many Macs

The folks over at Forwarding Address: OS X today mentioned an app named teleport, an amazing-sounding preference pane that lets you move your mouse from the monitor of one Mac to another Mac just by moving past the edge of the screen. If you've ever used two Macs you'll know how cool this is! I no longer have two side-by-side Macs, but I'm looking forward to trying this out. Be warned, some of the comments at both the Forwarding Address page and the MacUpdate page mention bugs, but by and large the comments are extremely positive.

On-screen bezels with LanOSD

Another gem from the codepoetry page - anyone who has ever used Applescript will absolutely love LanOSD. Essentially you can pass it information to display in an on-screen bezel (like the OS X volume bezel) along with a choice of icons.

In-depth Analysis: The Colour Palette

A MacOSXHints report today points to a great exposé of the OS X colour palette. The same author has also done a similar examination of Panther's fonts window.

Converting audio tape to CD

As mentioned on a couple of occasions recently, I've had to do this a few times now, both for unique live music tapes and family archive interviews. The following method has given me good results and is very easy, albeit somewhat time-consuming.

First off, get yourself a copy of Rogue Amoeba's US$16 utility Audio Hijack (Ambrosia's free WireTap might also work, but it crashed when I tried it). Plug the output from your tape deck into your Mac's line-in port.

Next you'll need an app called LineIn, which is included with the US$32 Audio Hijack Pro. Download the trial version of Audio Hijack Pro and install it. Find the Audio Hijack Pro application icon and control-click it. Choose Show Package Contents. Browse through Contents/Resources and find the LineIn app. Copy it to your Applications folder. You can delete Audio Hijack Pro now if you like.

Fire up LineIn and press play on your tape deck. You should now hear the tape through your Mac speakers. Launch Audio Hijack, select LineIn as the application to be hijacked and click Hijack. Click Record and start playing the tape at the same time. Audio Hijack will now be recording an AIFF file onto your desktop. This is a realtime process, so if your tape is 45 minutes long, recoridng it onto your Mac will take 45 minutes.

Optional: Once you have finished recording what you want, use QuickTime Player to cut the AIFF into tracks (QT Pro required). Save each one as a dependent file.

Optional: Use Bias' excellent SoundSoap to remove all the tape hiss from the AIFF file(s). This application is expensive (US$99), but the difference it makes to non-musical recordings is astounding. Note: to save yourself a lot of sitting around and clicking, you may prefer to run the entire AIFF track through SoundSoap before cutting it up into tracks.

Drop the AIFF(s) into iTunes. Arrange as a playlist. If necessary, open up the iTunes preferences and assign a value of 0 seconds as the gap between songs. Burn.

Edit: Don't forget to delete the AIFFs from iTunes' library afterwards. A 90 minute tape converted to AIFF will fill up around a gigabyte.

Audio Hijack Pro & 10.3.5

I was at the in-laws' house today attempting to record a family history audio tape (via line-in) onto my laptop for later conversion to a CD. I have done this for them before, but after much frustration I came to the conclusion that Audio Hijack Pro no longer works properly. Everything appears to be fine, but the recording doesn't actually start.

At the time I assumed the problem was a conflict between APE and the new OS X 10.3.5 upgrade I installed yesterday. The console log shows a permissions error involving Unsanity's Application Enhancer (APE) which doesn't seem to be able to execute superuser commands. A quick online search didn't turn up any answers but lack of broadband at the in-laws' place prevented any real thoroughness. In an attempt to work around the problem I downloaded Ambrosia's free utility WireTap to record the tape, but my whole laptop froze and started repeating a ringing noise when the recording got to about 95MB (about 30 minutes into it). By this point I had run out of time and had to postpone the whole exercise.

Some further research once I got home into the Audio Hijack problem showed that Unsanity are on the case, and have released a free upgrade to Audio Hijack Pro 1.3.2 to address 10.3.5 compatibility. I'll be trying again in a few day

Edit: Tried again on 17/8/04 - and it works

New OS X, New iSync

The new OS X 10.3.5 update is out. I was hoping that this, in combination with the new iSync 1.5, would fix my P800 sync problems. Alas not...

Encrypted emails

Interesting article on MacMerc this week describing how to enable encrypted and digitally signed emails in Mail and other Mac email apps. I'm waiting for my certificate now, although to be honest I can't imagine anyone I know encrypting their emails

My Desktop

I rearranged my desktop recently and have now concluded that I like this layout:

Presenting ... Tim's Really Useful Desktop™ - the guided tour

Starting on the left side of the screen, and working clockwise...

1. Since I have a Powerbook and it's wide-aspect screen, I moved my Dock to the left side. I use it solely as a list of running apps - I don't keep any commonly-used apps permanently in the Dock - if I need to launch something regularly I use Butler.

2. The Konfabulator widgets are, from left to right and top to bottom: iTunes Bar, The Weather, mini Calendar, FTP Mini, WhoDoesWhat, one-liner, upTimeRecord, SiteCheck, mini Digital Clock, and Word of the Day (all available from the Konfabulator Galley). I also use the National Rail timetable widget when I'm catching a train later in the day. In my opinion most of these widgets exemplify the virtues of Konfabulator - they look good and display some regularly updated information in an easily seen place (use Expose to get windows out of the way if necessary). SiteCheck, which simply carries out periodic checks to see if a specified website is responding, and Word of the Day, which updates once a day to display a new word and its definition, are two great examples.

3. My menubar contains, from left to right: the Konfabulator menu, iClock, the Bluetooth menu, MUMenu, the Modem menu, all four MenuMeters modules (modem throughput, memory usage, disk usage, and CPU load), the Battery menu, the Keyboard layout menu, the Eject menu, the Volume menu, and the WinSwitch FUS menu.

4. The two white windows near the center of the screen are Butler windows. The big one is the launcher window (it fades out once you launch something, in the image it is awaiting keyboard input). The lower one is the iTunes track window. This fades in when a new song starts and displays the track name before fading out again. I had to be quick with the screenshot before it faded out

5. On the right is a DragThing dock, configured to have no tabs and to automatically hide. In the image the mouse is on the right edge of the screen, so the dock has expanded and become visible. Move the mouse away and the dock shrinks back into the edge of the screen. I use this as my 'drop box' dock. It's full of drag-and-drop apps (think Stuffit Expander) and various folders that I often move items to.

6. On the bottom of the screen is another DragThing dock, this one configured with tabs and ten layers and also set to automatically hide. Each layer is labeled Applications, Utilities, Internet, etc. This is my secondary app launcher. Almost every app in my Applications folder is also in this dock. Having them categorised sometimes helps me find what I want, especially if I cannot remember the app's name (my Applications folder currently contains 322 items). In the image the dock is minimised, since the mouse is over on the right edge of the screen.

This layout has been a pleasure to use so far. Some of the Konfabulator widgets might go (the upTime module hasn't been particularly useful!), and although I previously used MUMenu on a daily basis I now use NetNewsWire to keep abreast of new releases along with regular news, so that will probably go too. Other than that, to quote Ronald McDonald: "I'm lovin' it"

A bit of Butler

After a comment in a recent entry, I had my first experience playing with Butler today, and I think I am starting to see why so many people rave about it. This donationware software is now up to version 4.0b15 (it was formerly known as Another Launcher). Why did I wait so long before trying it? Mostly because I didn't like the sound of the name (either one) ;-)

Butler Basics

The basic idea, that of a keyboard-based application launcher, is similar to LaunchBar and QuickSilver, however there are some extras thrown in. Launching an application is a matter of hitting the hotkey (ctrl-space by default) to bring up the launcher window and typing the first few letters of your desired app. Folders, web bookmarks and email addresses are also recognised and will open the appropriate item (or compose a new email, as appropriate). The search algorithm seems much the same as LaunchBar's. Both are better than QuickSilver. The launcher window snaps into existence when you press the hotkey and looks pretty good too. Speedwise Butler is definitely faster than QuickSilver on my Mac. It may even be faster than Launchbar.

A myriad of extras

If Butler has a drawback, it's that it does so much. The configuration and preferences windows are quite intimidating at first. In addition some of the extras seem a bit superfluous. Surely the whole point of a keyboard launcher is to use the mouse less, so the inclusion of a launcher menubar item, a bookmarks menubar item, and a web search box in the menubar comes across as a little odd. They look pretty, but in my opinion don't add much convenience and take up more space in my already crowded menubar (although you can choose to put all the menubar items into a docklet if you prefer). I can only assume that some people (ones who can't type, presumably) use Butler for these menubar items and don't use the keyboard functions at all.

Another Butler extra is controlling iTunes with hotkeys (play, previous, next, etc.), and there is also the option of enabling a bezel which fades in and displays the track details each time a new song starts. This level of iTunes control would usually be the result of a standalone app or control panel (PTHiTunesNotifier (RIP) was an early example, and there are dozens of Konfabulator widgets to control iTunes in the same fashion). However, unlike both QuickSilver and LaunchBar, Butler does not recognise iTunes playlists (not an issue for me, I don't use them).

In my opinion by far the best extra is easily Butler's web search hotkey. This very nice feature is faithful to the whole keyboard-launcher concept. Press the hotkey (Ctrl-Opt-W by default) and a white bezel appears centered on screen containing a web search box. Just type away and hit return, and watch your Google or Dictionary.com results appear in a Safari page. I can see myself getting a lot of use out of this one

The Land of Ogg

Until a few weeks ago I never gave the Ogg Vorbis format a second thought as a music format. I always knew it could achieve the same quality as mp3 in less space, but so what? Hard drives are bigger and cheaper than ever. Then came my awakening (cue choir breaking into song) - I got my first phone which can play real music. The limited storage on a 128MB memory card suddenly made the Ogg format rather appealing.

A bit of digging around on the Mac software sites turned up an OS X app named Ogg Drop X. This is a nicely done drag-and-drop Ogg encoder. It works well, can batch encode Oggs at a variety of bitrates and has good metadata tag support. Unfortunately the program is intended for ripping CDs to Ogg and as a result it only accepts the uncompressed music files you'd find on a CD (AIFF / WAV format). I'm reliably informed that audiophiles would recoil in horror at the thought of re-encoding an mp3 as an Ogg, which is presumably why this program doesn't offer the option. So you're stuck with creating your Oggs direct from CD, or using something like QuickTime Player to convert your mp3s back to AIFF prior to using Ogg Drop X.

Update: If you have a batch of MP3s to convert, using QuickTime Player to convert those MP3s to AIFF is a painstaking process, primarily because you have to sit and wait for each conversion to finish before starting the next one. After a few conversions I was heartily sick of it so I set off in search of a better solution. Enter the freeware app MACAST MP3 Converter. This a batch converter for MP3 to AIFF/WAV conversions.

However in the default mode, MACAST MP3 Converter's output AIFF and WAV files are not accepted by Ogg Drop X. To fix this, select AIFF in MACAST MP3 Converter's pull-down menu, click options, select Custom, click Set, and then select Compressor: 24-bit Integer. The output files will now be compatible with Ogg Drop X.

Finally, MACAST MP3 Converter isn't totally bug-free. The notable one is that it appears to consume all available CPU power, even after the conversion has finished. So don't forget to quit the program once you've finished your conversions!

Who says size doesn't matter?

As far as size is concerned, mp3s at 128kbps (generally accepted as CD quality to the untrained ear) weigh in at about 1MB per minute, or just over two hours on a 128MB memory stick duo. However an Ogg can achieve very similar quality at half the bitrate. Since space is at a premium, I have chosen to encode my Oggs at 48kbps. In my opinion the quality is still totally acceptable, and this means we can fit almost six hours of music on a 128MB MS Duo. In practice I generally only keep a couple of albums at a time on my P800, for a total size of about 40MB.

Playback on the P800

The bad news is that there isn't a lot of choice. As far as I'm aware there is only one Ogg player available for the P800, and that is OggPlay. The good news is that OggPlay is a quality piece of software! It can not only play Oggs (you'd hope so!), it can do so in both flip-open and flip-closed modes and it's clever enough to mute the music if the phone rings. It's also skinnable - there are various skins available on the developer's site.

Crappy P800 headphones

I've heard the bundled headphones that come with the P800 are less than satisfactory (I wouldn't know since my phone from eBay didn't come with them!). But since they have the pickup-hangup button on them you are kinda stuck with them if you want to receive phone calls while listening to music. All is not lost however! On a recommendation I bought this headset adapter. What can I say - this is a nifty little device. It consists of a spring-loaded retractable wire connecting the P800 to a combination microphone, pickup-hangup button and headphone miniplug adapter, and it comes with a detachable single earpiece for your handsfree conversations. The clever part is that you can unplug the single earpiece and plug your high-quality third-party headphones into the miniplug adapter, and still use the pickup-hangup button and microphone on the adapter itself.

GPRS in the UK

GPRS is mighty expensive in the UK, just a month or two ago I looked into it on my T-Mobile pay-as-you-go plan and prices started at £1.50 per megabyte or £40 a month for 'unlimited' usage (discretionary 100MB cap, 12 month contract). This is way too much for me to use it for my regular email, let alone browsing the web.

So when I noticed this I thought, what a great idea!. A text-based web browser almost makes me want to sign up for GPRS so I could use the P800 as a mobile modem for the laptop. I'd still have to lug the laptop around along with the phone though. All I need now is a similar program for the Symbian OS.

P800 ringtones

The P800, unlike it's newer sibling the P900, cannot play an MP3 as a ringtone. It is restricted to normal ringtones (which are MIDI based, i.e. they only reproduce the melody of a song, not the actual sound or any lyrics) and WAV files. Unfortunately, a WAV file is by definition uncompressed, which makes them enormous when compared to the phone's memory. An average MP3 that is 4MB in size, when exported to WAV with QuickTime Pro at the default settings (48KHz, 16bit, stereo), will weigh in at around 50MB in size! How can we reduce the size of our WAV file? Luckily for us, since the file is only for a phone's ringtone, and given the limited speaker in the phone, we can drastically reduce the fidelity of the WAV file to the minimum possible and still have a recognisable song. Using the minimum settings (8KHz, 8bit, mono) when we export to WAV, our output file comes out to about 2MB in size. This is of course for the entire song - for a ringtone we only need about 15 seconds of the song which at the same settings will somewhere in the 100KB range. To cut out the section of the song we want, use the 'bookend' markers underneath QuickTime Player's position slider to select the portion of the song you want to keep, copy it, and paste it into a new empty QuickTime Player document. We can then export to WAV from this new document. To export to a WAV, simply choose Export (this requires QuickTime Pro), select WAV, click Options and choose 8KHz, 8bit, mono. If you have a lot of MP3s to convert you may wish to have a look at SoundConverter, a great drag-and-drop audio conversion application. It is free for input files under 500KB in size, otherwise it costs US$10. What I do is cut my MP3s in QuickTime Pro, save them all, and then batch convert the lot with SoundConverter (once your MP3s are cut down to size they should be quite a bit smaller than 500KB).

RegExp and Konfabulator's one-liner widget

I've recently been trying out one-liner, a handy Konfabulator widget. This is a highly customizable widget that uses regular expressions to extract data from a user-specified webpage and display it on screen with regular updates. The suggested uses are to keep track of new comments on a site such as VersionTracker, or to keep track of the latest version of an application. This latter use is what I like it for.

Some history: a few years back, VersionTracker made their name by offering a free service to check for updates of all your installed software. It was a bit slow (at the time everyone had dial-up connections) but it worked very well and was a big timesaver. Rather than Get-Info on each application (or worse yet, launch it just to check the version number), you could just run VersionTracker's app and it would tell you which of your installed apps had an update available online. Unfortunately, VersionTracker now want us to pay for this program (now called VersionTracker Pro, obviously). Worse yet, it's not even a traditional "pay-once" program. We now have to pay US$50 every year to use the service! This is known in some industries as a "bait and switch" scam ;-) but in the computer world it is unhappily quite common (mac.com anyone?)

Back to one-liner. What I wanted to do with it was to set it up to check for updates to a few apps that I regularly use (and have some minor issue that I'm waiting for a bug-fix for). After a bit of reading, including this nicely done RegExp tutorial, I was able to put together some generic expressions to parse VersionTracker entries for the information I want (i.e. the latest version number). Simply create a new entry in one-liner and enter the following values (use the VersionTracker URL of the application you want to watch):

Update: I realised VersionTracker have a different page for each version, which makes tracking the newest version difficult. MacUpdate only keeps the latest version which simplifies things a lot.

Parse Target URL (use the MacUpdate URL of the app you want to track):
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/13341

RegExp1(A):
/<title>(.*)<\/title>/[1]

Title:
/<title>(.*)<\/title>/[1]

Display:
A

This will make one-liner request the MacUpdate page and display what the current version number of the software is. You can set the interval in the one-liner preferences. This is the result (the bottom five lines are the result of this technique):

A good place to ask RegExp-related questions is regexp.org.

QuickSilver steps up

I have been a long-time fan of LaunchBar , the whole concept is amazing and has truly changed my daily computer usage. Simply hit the activation key (ctrl-spacebar by default) and type a few letters from the app's name and Launchbar presents you with a list of possible apps to launch. Every extra letter further condenses the results. It is intelligent as well, learning to recognise which apps you mean. And it's fast - the whole procedure of launching an app takes as long as typing a 4 letter word. For instance launching Apple's DVD Player is merely a question of typing ctrl-spacebar, d, v, return! The on-screen list updates with every keystroke so you can see what app you are choosing, but often-used apps will automatically float to the top of the list.

However, there is a new upstart on the scene! QuickSilver is very similar to LaunchBar, but it looks prettier There are a selection of interfaces for it, but I think it's safe to say the bezel interface is the slickest. The activation key brings up a bezel centered on your screen and as you press keys the icon in the bezel changes. The bezel looks very similar to the built-in OS X application switcher - itself a rare example of a feature that Apple swiped from Windows rather than the other way around (no matter what the developers of LiteSwitchX would have you believe).

All-in-all, QuickSilver has all the functionality of LaunchBar, but it looks more "OS X-like". The sole problem was that QuickSilver was for a long time noticeably less responsive than LaunchBar, however this appears to have been fixed in the latest B25 version of Quicksilver. This new version is very snappy and compares nicely to LaunchBar in terms of speed. It also doesn't suffer from the quite frankly far-too-slow indexing rigamarole LaunchBar goes through at startup.

Dashboard vs Konfabulator

With all the recent 'controversy' over how Apple's new Dashboard feature (highlighted in the WWDC OS X 10.4 "Tiger" preview) copies Konfabulator, I'm surprised no one remembers a very similar 'controversy' from late last year over Apple's application switcher and LiteSwitchX. If you ask me, John Gruber's comments regarding the earlier debate are just as applicable to the current argument.

Backing up the P800

Although using iSync to sync with the P800 backs up all your contacts and calendar to OS X's Address Book and iCal respectively, it is probably a good idea to have a backup of the entire memory contents of the phone - if only to backup the contents of Jotter and PIM apps like HandySafe! Furthermore, it appears that when I finally get around to having the P800's firmware upgraded the procedure will erase all of my phone's data.

Unfortunately the included PC Suite software is for the PC only. The only Mac solution at the moment is to run it in Virtual PC. All I did was fire up Windows XP under VPC and then plug in the P800's USB Cradle (aka the SyncStation). XP should detect the new hardware (this may take a while, depending on your Mac's speed). You may need to select the cradle in the USB section of VPC's settings.

Once XP detects the cradle, insert the SonyEricsson CD that came with the phone. VPC should detect the inserted CD and autostart the PC Suite installation process. Obviously if you downloaded a newer version of the PC Suite install that instead. Just follow instructions, the software should install without any problems.

You should now notice a connection icon in the system tray at the bottom right of XP's screen. Stick your P800 onto its cradle and you should see the connection being established. This might take a minute or two. Be patient. VPC is slow. Choose Start rograms:Sony Ericsson 800 and fire up Backup and Restore. Cick Backup and off you go!

One caveat: I have yet to try and restore the phone. Watch this space

More Mobipocket Conversions

Some of my ebooks are in html format. I briefly experimented with reading them on the P800's web browser but the files are quite large and really thrash the P800's CPU. The phone is barely usable while the html file is open, at least with the default web browser. I was unable to access the html file with Opera.

I found a slick hint at MacOSXHints which details how to use txt2pdbdoc and the pdftotxt portion of xpdf to add the ability to export documents, via the Print command, in the pdb format. This means you can export any text from almost any document (it only exports text, not images), be it a webpage, a spreadsheet, a pdf, or an email. Note that the author had some trouble getting backslashes to display in the main hint, he's posted a correction here.

This solution, while extremely elegant, does have its downfalls. For one thing single carriage returns seem to be lost in the conversion, so you end up with extremely long paragraphs. This can be a problem, especially for novels with lots of dialogue. I had hoped to use this method to easily convert some pdf and html ebooks I have. I was unable to find a fix for this, so I am stuck with exporting the text from pdf and html ebooks manually.

For pdf ebooks I've just been choosing the File:Save as Text command in Acrobat Reader and then converting the resultant text with PorDiBle.

For html ebooks I've been opening the html file in Safari and choosing Edit:Select All, and then choosing Safari:Services:TextEdit:New Window Containing Selection. I then save the resultant TextEdit document as an rtf file and drop it onto PorDiBle. Note, according to this slightly dated Doc Converter review, earlier versions of PorDiBle could convert html files. Unfortunately this no longer appears to be the case. The review also mentions MakeDocDD, which I plan on experimenting with, but my initial test resulted in the app crashing.

Both of the manual conversion methods above produce properly formatted ebooks, within the limitations of PorDiBle (notably it's inability to translate some common higher ASCII codes, '...' is a particular bugbear of mine).

This may seem like a lot of trouble, but given that reading a novel takes ten hours or more, the two or three minutes it takes to convert an ebook becomes entirely acceptable. Especially when you save all your conversions to replicate your entire library in pdb format!

Finally, in the course of my experimentation I decided I needed an OS X pdb reader rather than bluetoothing the books over to the P800 to check the formatting. A quick google search turned up eReader. There doesn't seem to be a lot of competition, but eReader doesn't suffer for it. Everything works, it looks decent, and performance is good. What more could you ask? The Pro version includes skins and changeable fonts and font sizes.

Update: I recently discovered the OS X version of Palm's very own DropBook. It works well but like PorDiBle has problems with certain unusual higher ASCII characters.

OS X Internet sharing with a P800

On the face of it, this shouldn't be a problem. After all, it apparently works on Windows.

My early efforts at this stemmed largely from this hint and this hint at MacOSXHints. However I was unable to get it to work. I was continually getting this error in my Console log:

Failed to open /dev/tty.Bluetooth-PDA-Sync: Device busy

but I cant for the life of me figure out what device is busy.

I then spent a few days fiddling with this method from TechnoHappyMeal, but after a lot of frustration I gave up on it. At the time I had decided that because my internet connection was coming through a USB port I wouldn't be able to share it over bluetooth (the various scripts that were developed in this and the MacOSXHints threads above all only specified built-in-ethernet or airport connections).

I left it for a while but then I heard about an app called Bluetooth to Internet Utility. It looked promising, but unfortunately it seems to have been broken by one of the recent OS X system updates. (In step 3 of installation it tries to open Sharing Preferences but instead opens Universal Access Preferences and then pops up an error window).

Then a few days ago I read about an app called P800 Manager which has an internet-over-bluetooth option. This app looks like it has (almost) cracked it. For one thing it can establish (and maintain indefinitely) a bluetooth connection with the phone (the phone's bluetooth icon shows a two-way connection, which none of my previous attempts had managed to do). Almost there! However when I fire up Opera on the phone it appears to manage to send out a page request, and I can see some data being downloaded over the broadband modem (courtesy of MenuMeters), but the data does not reach the phone. I'm not sure what is going wrong, but I am investigating the phone's settings and the Mac's port settings.

Update 9/12/04: I recently went wireless with an Airport Express which involved replacing my USB broadband modem with an ethernet one. This has solved my problem - P800 Manager's internet sharing works now! I still get occasional drop-outs of the bluetooth connection (which requires a restart of the P800 Manager sharing process), but I'm confident that is a P800 firmware problem fixable by getting a firmware upgrade.

Converting Ogg (ogm) and Matroska (mkv) video

So ... you've obtained an .ogm or .mkv video file and you want to convert it to something else (in my case either a DVD or a SmartMovie .avi for the P800). These .ogm and .mkv files are Ogg media files and Matroska video files respectively. Both are container formats like .avi or .mov and can contain various types of video and audio.

The Mac video Swiss army knife ffmpegX does not (yet) like ogm or mkv containers, so you need to demux the video and audio streams before converting them. The apps you need to demux are OGMTools and MKVToolNix by Shawn Holwegner. These are both ports of Linux apps by Moritz Bunkus. This means they are command line apps, but don't worry! They couldn't be simpler to use.

Just download the installer packages, unstuff, and install. They will install several ogm and mkv tools into your /usr/local/bin folder. You don't have to worry about that, all it means is that they are easily accessible. Now all you have to do is open a Terminal window, and (if you have an ogm file) type:

ogmdemux (including a space at the end - do not hit enter!)

Now drag your ogm file into your terminal window. This will fill in the correct path to the file. Hit enter to begin the demux process.

or (if you have an mkv file)

mkvextract tracks (including a space at the end - do not hit enter!)

Now drag your mkv file into your terminal window. This will fill in the correct path to the file. Do not hit enter. Continuing on the same line, type

1:video.vid 2:audio.aud

Hit enter to begin the demux process.

For both .ogm and .mkv files the demuxing process will take a minute or two for a 700MB file. When the process is complete, you will have the demuxed audio and video files in your home folder.

Once you have your separate audio and video, ffmpegX should be able to convert them to whatever format you desire - unless your audio is in the ogg vorbis format, in which case I would recommend you download and install this Ogg Vorbis for Quicktime plugin, and then use iTunes to convert your ogg to an mp3. To convert your ogg launch iTunes, option-click the Advanced menu, choose 'convert to mp3' (if this says something other than mp3 you need to change your iTunes import preferences), and finally choose your ogg.

Note: ffmpegX should be able to recognise your .vid and .aud files, but if you need to you can use ogminfo and mkvinfo to find out what type of video and audio are inside your ogm or mkv.

Edit: correction to the mkvextract instructions thanks to Jasper's comment below.

eBooks on the P800

One of the reasons I took the plunge and upgraded my old Nokia 8250 to the new P800 is that I wanted a portable device to read eBooks on. I had originally gone onto eBay looking for an obsolete £30 Palm and ended up with a £150 P800 phone, but that's another story...

One of my early finds on the P800 was MobiPocket Reader. This is a great eBook reader which can handle many (but not all) popular formats. The one major drawback is that it does not like gzipped text files (oddly enough the default reader that comes with the P800 handles them with aplomb). Since a gzipped text ebook can be 30% the size of a plain text ebook I really wanted an easy way to compress my many plain text ebooks into a format MobiPocket would like.

Enter Pordible. This is a slick OS X drag-and-drop app that converts text or html files into a compressed .pdb (PalmDoc) file. PalmDoc is not quite as space efficient as gzipped text, but it's pretty good. And it is compatible with MobiPocket

One final note: after bluetoothing a .pdb file over to the phone, I found that it would only get imported into MobiPocket's library if MobiPocket was not loaded. If MobiPocket was already open in the background, it would read the .pdb file, but would leave it in the Beamed messages folder. My workaround is just to remember to quit MobiPocket before bluetoothing a new ebook over.

Encoding for SmartMovie

Okay ... I've made some progress on SmartMovie. After spending hours reading every scrap of information I could find on the net, I've come up with a couple of processes for encoding SmartMovie files on OS X. There seems to be some sort of obscure bug in ffmpegX which means we have to demux and process our audio seperately before remuxing the final file.

Note: depending on the aspect ratio of your source movie, these are the resolutions you want to aim for when resizing (step 4 below)

4:3 -- 272x208
3:2 -- 320x208
1.66:1 -- 320x192
16:9 -- 320x176
1.85:1 -- 320x176
2.35:1 -- 320x128

METHOD 1
Pros: Works on a wide variety of formats
Cons: Needs QuickTime Pro, only works on movies you can open in QT Player

Required software:
DivX 5.1 Mac codec
ffmpegX 0.0.9h
QuickTime Pro

1. Open the movie in QuickTime Player.
2. In the Movie menu choose Get Movie Properties (cmd-J)
3. Select 'Video Track', select 'Size', click 'Adjust'
4. Drag the corner of the video until it is the correct size for your aspect ratio (see chart above), click 'Done'

Exporting video from QT Player
5. In the File menu choose 'Export', select 'DivX AVI', click 'Options'
6. Uncheck 'Audio', set framerate to 12.5, click 'Settings'
7. Set 'Encoding bitrate' to 120kbps, click OK
8. Click 'OK'
9. Change the name in the 'Save As' box, click 'Save'

Exporting audio from QT Player
10. In the File menu choose 'Export', select 'Sound to AIFF'
11. In iTunes, option-click the Advanced menu, choose 'Convert to mp3', choose your AIFF file. An mp3 version of your AIFF will appear in your iTunes library.
12. Drag the mp3 from your iTunes library onto your desktop, delete the mp3 from iTunes

Finishing up with ffmpegX
13. Drag the mp3 from your desktop onto the ffmpegX icon
14. In ffmpegX select the 'Audio file to mp3' preset
15. In the Audio tab enter an Audio bitrate of 32kbps, click Encode
16. In the Tools tab, click the first 'Browse' button, choose the AVI file you created in step 9
17. Click the second 'Browse' button, choose the mp3 from step 15
18. Choose AVI in the drop-down menu next to the 'Mux as...' button
19. Click 'Mux as...'

METHOD 2
Pros: Does not require QuickTime Pro, can encode directly from a vob
Cons: Limited to mpeg 1 and mpeg2

Required software:
ffmpegX 0.0.9h
0sex (only if you wish to encode a movie from a vob file)

Doing everything with ffmpegX
1. In the Tools tab, click 'Browse', choose your mpeg or vob file, click 'Demux'
2. Drop the video file (the m1v or m2v created in step 1) onto the ffmpegX icon, choose the 'Xvid' preset
3. In the Video tab, set bitrate to 120kbps, 12.5fps, screen size according to the aspect ratio of your source movie (see table above), click 'Encode'
4. Drop the audio file (created in step 1) onto the ffmpegX icon, choose the 'Audio file to mp3' preset
5. In the Audio tab, set bitrate to 32kbps, click 'Encode'
6. In the Tools tab, click the first 'Browse' button and choose the avi file created in step 3
7. In the Tools tab, clock the second 'Browse' button and choose the mp3 file created in step 5
8. Choose AVI in the drop-down menu next to the 'Mux as...' button
9. Click 'Mux as...'

After both methods you should end up with a file named 'yourmoviename.muxed.avi'. This movie should play at full screen in SmartMovie.

Using the values I've given above you should get about 10mins of video per 9MB file size. The video shows some compression artifacts and the audio is slightly tinny, but both are acceptable. You can experiment with changing the video and audio bitrates to achieve whatever quality is suitable. For example for a music video you would probably want to increase the audio bitrate to at least 64kbps, while for high speed, wide angle footage (like sports) increasing the video bitrate will help.

A 21 minute episode of the Simpsons encoded with the above settings comes out to 18.1MB (12.1MB video, 4.8MB audio, plus overhead)

OS X URL Handlers security hole

This problem has cropped up in the last few days. There has been much discussion about it, including on Slashdot here and here. The general consensus seems to be that the best solution is to use Rubicode's DefaultApp as documented on Daring Fireball.

P800 - second opinions

I've now been playing with the P800 for a few days, and have discovered some other things about the phone, both good and bad.

On the positive side of things:

Mobipocket Reader is a fantastic application for reading ebooks.

VICS Video Player is a promising-looking program, although it's still in beta. This program apparently can play video at full-screen resolution at 25fps! It seems to occasionally crash (although it may just be that I am low on memory) but when it works is a real eye-opener. The one drawback is a proprietary video format which you can't encode on a Mac.

On the negative side of things:

I've discovered what seems to be a major (from the point of view of an OS X user) problem in the last few days. It appears that if you don't have some way of sending an email from your phone (such as GPRS), there is no way of transferring a file from the phone to a Mac. From my readings it appears that the most common way to do this is to browse the phone (from a PC) via the SyncStation and just copy the desired file off the phone. As noted earlier this doesn't work on a Mac. But when I try and send a file via bluetooth from the phone (which should work!) I almost always get an error - actually, I've only succeeded once!

Cool phone, pity about the Mac support

Over the weekend I bought a three-month-old Sony Ericsson P800 mobile phone on eBay UK and it just arrived today! These phones can be had for a bargain right now, due to the recent introduction of this phone's successor, the P900.

The phone is, on the surface, awesome. It has a large 320x240 screen (Edit: it is actually a 320x208 screen) and, unlike most PDA phones, is shaped pretty much like an ordinary mobile phone. The screen is touch-sensitive screen with handwriting recognition (there is a stylus embedded in the side of the phone) and the Symbian OS it uses has a decent selection of third-party software. The major drawbacks are a proprietary memory card (Sony Memory Stick Duo - which is limited to 128MB at the moment) and the lack of Nokia's T9 predictive text input system.

However there is another major drawback to this phone - lack of OS X support! Firstly the included USB SyncStation stupidly does not work with OS X. You'd think you could just plug it in and browse the contents of the phone (as you can with other USB storage devices such as an Archos). Secondly the compatibility (via bluetooth) with iSync is atrocious. It is possible to sync the phone with OS X's Address Book and iCal, but only barely. To reliably sync even once you have to follow the steps in this Apple KnowledgeBase article - including a restart of your Mac system! After the one successful sync you will be unable to sync until you again go through the whole rigamarole.

I will keep on experimenting with the phone and report back here - I've added a P800 category to keep track of my exploring.

Remapping the enter key

Apple PowerBooks don't have extended keyboards - not even the 17" model which clearly has room for one. While I don't really miss the lack of a numeric keypad (as far as I'm concerned they are primarily used as as direction keys in games!) on my 15" 667Mhz model, I've always wished that Apple had managed to squeeze dedicated page-up and page-down keys onto the PowerBooks, rather than making you press the 'Function' key and an up/down arrow key. But what is really aggravating is that there is only one 'Function' key, and it is on the left side of the keyboard! This means that you need two hands to page-up or page-down.

As a result, ever since I got this laptop, I've been trying to remap my Enter key to a Function key so I could page up and down with one hand. I thought I had found a clue in this MacOSXHints story, but it turned out to be aimed at remapping Exposé activation keys. After more searching on the same site I eventually discovered this old story, which led me to DoubleCommand. What can I say - this kernel extension has answered my prayers and is a must-have for any PowerBook owner! It can not only remap the Enter key to a Function key, it can also remap other modifier keys as well as the caps-lock key. Not only that it can make your Mac react like a PC when you press the Home and End keys. On the Mac the Home and End keys have traditionally moved to the beginning and the end of the document, while on the PC they move to the beginning and end of a line. I've always found the PC behaviour to be more useful. Note: this seems to work in all apps I've tried, except TextEdit.

Postfix fix!

Good news: a contributor at MacOSXHints has found a solution to prevent postfix from breaking down whenever you repair permissions. Three cheers for clvrmnky!

iPhoto tip

After using iPhoto for about 18 months now, I only just discovered today that I could remove a photo from an album and delete it from the library by selecting the photo in the album and pressing option-command-delete. No more trawling through the library looking for unwanted photos for me! I don't know when this was introduced but back in iPhoto 2 I did a lot of googling for this feature and it apparently didn't exist in that version. I'm using iPhoto 4.

Postfix broken ... again

I recently used Carbon Copy Cloner to back up my 30gig startup drive to an equal sized partition on my external 160gig. CCC is set to repair permissions on the source volume prior to cloning, and whattya know, Postfix didn't work afterwards. Applying the earlier fix got it working again.

tintin++ on OS X

Finally got tintin++ working on OS X! I think it's more to do with Apple switching to the bash shell than anything else. I did this on OS X 10.3.3, but this should work under any version of OS X 10.3. Pre-10.3 installations use the tcsh shell instead of the bash shell. tintin++ reportedly does work under tcsh, but it needs some special configuration to make it work (I've tried many times but always failed). Also note I am a unix novice and this is written for people like me

What is tintin?
tintin++ is a mud client for unix-based operating systems. It features triggers, aliases, tickers, paths, variables, gagging, and many other advanced features.

Getting the software
The first thing you will need is a compiler. Most users of OS X wouldn't know a compiler if they tripped over one, so it's not included in a default install. To get your compiler you will need to download the OS X Developer Tools (also known as Xcode 1.1). This is avalable at the Apple Developer Connection (free registration required). Note that the Xcode package is approximately 600 megabytes in size - we only need a tiny piece of it but this is the easiest way to get it). Note: recently-purchased Macs may come with an OS X Developer Tools CD.

Next you will need a unix package known as readline-4.3. This is available here.

Finally you will need the tintin++ package. The original tintin++ (v1.86) does not seem to be developed anymore (and the old homepage is dead), but my buddy Scandum has been working on updated version (v1.91) which is available at here.

Once you have all the software, you're ready to go!

Installing everything
1. Mount the Xcode disk-image. Launch the installer, follow the on-screen instructions for a default install.
2. Launch Disk Utility and repair permissions! This is recommended after installing any OS X system software.
3. Unpack the readline.tar and tintin.tar.gz packages by dropping them onto Stuffit Expander (installed by default with OS X). This will produce two folders, one called readline-4.3 and one called tt.
4. Copy the readline-4.3 and tt folders into your home folder.
5. Launch Terminal (inside /Applications/Utilities/).
6. Now you're going to compile readline. In the terminal, type the following:

cd readline-4.3
./configure
make
make install

You may get a couple of errors, but don't worry, you've just installed readline (enough of it for tintin anyway!). Congratulations. Type exit and quit the terminal.

Note: The readline install sometimes produces a load of messages about not having permissions to write in /usr/local/ This didn't happen to me - I don't know why - but it happened to another buddy Jeff. His solution was to type su and his root password before typing make (you may need to enable the root account and set a root password in NetInfo Manager [inside /Applications/Utilities/] - you should probably disable the root account after finishing this install).

Further note: Jeff has since told me that the permissions issue was due to him having just installed OS X and never having logged out since installing. After logging out and back in he was able to install readline without resorting to su.

7. You also need to compile tintin. Launch Terminal again and type the following:

cd tt/src
./configure
make

You've just installed tintin++. Congratulations again. If you get an error while compiling tintin saying it cannot find readline in either of the two usual locations, there's something wrong with your readline install (most likely you had the permissions issue described above).

Using tintin++
You can navigate to the tintin directory and launch it by typing

cd ~/tt/src
./tt++

.

Once tintin has loaded, you can connect to a mud by typing:

#ses sot sotmud.net 23

where sot is the name of the session you are starting and sotmud.net (port) 23 is the address of the mud you are connecting to.

Note: To exit from tintin press ctrl-c

Getting started with login scripts
Create the file run by typing the following:

cd ~/tt/src
pico run
./tt++ run.scr

save the file (ctrl-X, Y, <enter> and make it executable by typing:

chmod 755 run

Create the file run.scr by typing the following:

pico run.scr
#read run.tin

save the file (ctrl-X, Y, <enter>
Create the file run.tin by typing the following:

pico run.tin

To auto-load a login alias called 'loginsot' every session, type the following:

#alias loginsot #ses sot sotmud.net 23

An alternative here is to bind the login command to the F1 key (#help macro for more information) by typing:

#macro {\e[11~}{#ses sot sotmud.net 23}

save the file (ctrl-X, Y, <enter>

What did that accomplish?
After all of the above typing ./run should start up tintin, and read in the contents of run.tin You can then type loginsot (or hit F1, depending what you did at the end of the previous step) to login to the mud address you defined.

While you have a session open you can now type: #config and set the configuration to your liking, and once done type: #write run.tin This will save your configuration in the run.tin file, so it'll be loaded whenever you use run.

Adding an alias for speedy launching
Launch Terminal and type:

pico .profile

This edits a hidden file (.profile) in our home folder. Use the down arrow to move down to the end of the file. Add the line:

alias tintin='cd tt/src;./run'

save the file (ctrl-X, Y, <enter>

You can now launch tintin (and your run.scr script) by opening a new terminal window and typing tintin.

Additional help
While in a tintin session typing #help will give you detailed help on making the most of tintin++. Also don't forget to look in the docs folder (inside the tt++ folder) at the example scripts. Finally the tintin messageboards has some useful discussion about older versions of tintin (most of it is still applicable).

Postfix problems

Well ... I've already broken my Postfix installation. All I had to do was repair permissions! I noticed a bunch of Postfix related stuff in the repair log and, sure enough, I couldn't use my SMTP anymore.

After much googling I found this page which contains the following fix:

sudo chown -R postfix /private/var/spool/postfix
sudo chown root /private/var/spool/postfix
sudo chown root /private/var/spool/postfix
sudo chown :postdrop /private/var/spool/postfix/public
sudo chown :postdrop /private/var/spool/postfix/maildrop
sudo chown :postdrop /usr/sbin/postqueue
sudo chown :postdrop /usr/sbin/postdrop
sudo postfix start

Now it all works, but presumaby repairing permissions will break it again! We'll see.

Continuing in the spirit of experimenting with an 'always-on' internet connection, I've been playing with setting up my own FTP server courtesy of PureFTPd-Manager. This app makes the set up ridiculously easy, and after some teething problems with my firewall, all is well (time-saving tip: if you want your clients to be able to use passive FTP you will either have to open all ports from 1024 - 65535 on your server's firewall, or you will need to manually specify which ports your server will use for passive FTP, and then only open those ports on the firewall).

Postfix on Panther

I've become sidetracked. MySQL is on hold because after playing with Apache I got interested in setting up a mailserver on my laptop, especially since BT Broadband do not offer an SMTP service. I had been testing SpyMac's free SMTP but it doesn't always allow me access if I haven't checked my SpyMac mail recently.

However there is a solution - sending mail with my own SMTP server and not relying on any ISP. Prior to version 10.3 OS X came with sendmail installed but disabled; it now ships with Postfix installed but disabled. So I needed to enable Postfix. Graham Ordorff covers OS X and mail servering (including Postfix) in intricate detail here, whilst John Brewer has written a slick tutorial here concentrating on setting up Postfix with authentication. Reading through these two tutorials enabled me to get Postfix up and running for my outgoing mail. For incoming mail I still rely on Fastmail's excellent free service.

Update: since getting Postfix working I've discovered (via FreshGoo) that the easiest solution may be Postfix Enabler which is available here on Bernard Teo's excellent weblog (he also has a Sendmail Enabler for pre-10.3 installations).

Broadband revisited

I discovered that the BT broadband is actually going at almost full speed. The connection is reported as a 288000bps connection, but it seems that OS X is detecting the upstream and not the downstream. I didn't figure this out until trying out the excellent broadband speed test at the ADSL Guide. My downstream results were 444kbps (estimated at approx 480kbps with overheads) and the upstream results were 245kbps. Both values are pretty close to what they should be with a 256up/512down ADSL service.

Finally, a 24/7 connection

The broadband modem arrived today. Setting it up was pretty simple, just plug it in and a few clicks. BT's OS X installer even works (their dialup one didn't, I had to manually open up their coookie to configure that). It only seems to be able to connect at 256kbps though, instead of the advertised 512. I'll give it a few days and see how that goes, since some ADSL modems need to be 'trained'.

Setting up the Apache webserver that's built into OS X was very easy. One click fired up the server, but then I had to spend a few minutes googling to finding out where the root directory was (inside /Library/Webserver/Documents/ if you're wondering). I then set up an account with no-ip.com to forward emandtim.no-ip.com to my broadband connection's IP. no-ip.com make a nice little utility which will monitor your connection and regularly report your IP address to no-ip.com (and thus update the emandtim.no-ip.com redirection). Pretty slick for a free service. I'm now downloading the 600MB Apple Developer Tools - apparently I need them to set up MySQL. With my half-speed broadband it's going to take 4 or 5 hours.

DVD clips onto VHS

Emma recently asked me if I could compile a selection of clips from amongst our DVDs that would illustrate various aspects of life in the future for her Religious Studies students. After thinking about it for a while and viewing a few scenes we decided to rent a few more select titles. We find the DVD-by-post service of LoveFilm very useful as the local Blockbuster is quite small and only has a limited selection of non-chart titles.

The final caveat was that Emma had to have three identical copies of these clips which ruled out me just sitting there pressing the record button on the VCR at the correct times!

Getting hold of all the clips

I started by figuring out which DVD chapters contained the scenes we wanted and then using Cinematize to export those chapters. The process is very quick (a couple of minutes each) and you end up with mpeg2 QuickTime files. The extracted clips are interesting - there is a faint dithered effect you don't get when watching the DVD itself, but the quality is otherwise excellent. It's as if it is a perfect copy but with a smaller colour palette.

I could have used a plain vanilla DVD ripper such as 0sex instead, but I would ended up with vob files or elementary mpeg streams which I would have had to do more work on to get them into an editable format. The quality may have been slightly better without the dithered effect, but Cinematize was the quick and dirty option. Additionally Cinematize lets you preview which chapter it is that you're extracting (although the preview is limited to fifteen or thirty seconds which isn't always enough). With 0sex you'd have to skip through the film beforehand and write down the chapter numbers.

Editing out unwanted material

The one other odd thing about the mpeg2 clips that Cinematize outputs is that many mpeg editing programs will not accept them as 'true' mpeg2 files (for instance the mpeg splitters mpgtx and Gumby). I eventually solved that by using Goldberg to cut out the unwanted parts of each chapter. Goldberg doesn't seem to be a 'true' mpeg splitter, but it does the job if you aren't worried about file sizes (using Goldberg to cut an mpeg in half will only reduce its size by ten or twenty percent). Note that you need Apple's mpeg2 decoder for Goldberg to play mpeg2 files.

One clip that we really wanted to use had one instance of foul language which we had to cut out. This is harder than it sounds. Since I had iMovie experience from doing the wedding video I at first tried to use that before discovering that iMovie isn't designed to handle widescreen formats. After much trial and error I ended up imported the clip into Final Cut Pro (which I've never used before) where I was able to reduce the volume to zero to blot out the offending word. After this single edit I re-saved the clip as a QuickTime file. Importing an mpeg into FCP and re-saving loses some quality, but the final result is still pretty good.

Creating titles

Finally I used iMovie to create some titles on black backgrounds to place in between each clip. These just contained the name of the movie to inform the audience what clip was coming next and also to serve as spacers in between clips so searching via fast-forward would be easier. Unfortunately as iMovie only operates in 4:3 format, there is a bit of a flicker when Cellulo changes resolution as it moves from a widescreen clip to a 4:3 title. In hindsight instead of using iMovie I should probably have tried to figure out how to do the titles in widescreen format in FCP.

Getting it all onto VHS tapes

Emma's school doesn't have any DVD players, so I had to get it all onto three VHS tapes. The simplest solution I could think of was to simply put all the clips and titles into a playlist in Cellulo and then connect my laptop to the VHS recorder via the S-Video output for a straight analog recording. On the playback settings for the FCP-edited clip I had to set the playback size to 110% of screen size since the FCP output had a thick black border around it and enlarging it made it fill the screen.

I could have obtained a prettier final result (with cross fades between scenes, fade-outs at the end, etc.) if I had imported the whole thing into FCP to edit and author as a DVD, but that would have probably take ten times as long for a minor benefit. After recording the DVD onto VHS tape the quality of each clip would have been the same as my current method but it would have pretty transitions between scenes. Oh well, it would have been nice but not worth all the extra work.

Site update

Updated the website and added fancier galleries courtesy of iPhoto4 and BetterHTMLExport.

Powerbook Superdrive self-install

The DVD/CD-RW drive in my laptop started malfunctioning due to a crapped out CD laser, probably from burning too many SVCDs! After some research I replaced the faulty drive with a Matshita UJ-815 CD-RW/DVD-RW/DVD-RAM drive. Getting the new drive to fully integrate with OS X was tricky, so I took a few notes along the way...

Installing a UJ815 DVD-RAM drive in a Powerbook G4 under OS X 10.3

This was inspired by djjuice at the SpyMac.com forums and AirForceRed at the MacNN.com forums. AirForceRed's original post was here. djjuice's original post was here, but djjuice himself has apparently edited out the revealing passage. It was so difficult finding information about this procedure but in the end so satisfying getting the drive to work under OS X 10.2 and later OS X 10.3 that I wanted to save the method for posterity (and in case the original thread at MacNN ever vanishes!)

Important Note: Before you start this process make sure you have the DiscRecording.framework mentioned by AirForceRed and djjuice.

You will also need a T8 Torx (star-shaped) screwdriver. I ordered one online, but in a pinch a set of mini flat-head screwdrivers will do the job.

The Hardware

First you need to obtain a Matsushita UJ-815 (also known as a Matshita UJ-815 or a Panasonic UJ815) DVD-RAM drive. I got mine at DFWDepot for a grand total of US$342.96 (which included the approximately $60 charge for next-day UPS delivery to southeast England). I dealt with Terry Harrison and apart from what I believe to be an honest mistake with shipping charges (albeit still unresolved - watch this space) everything went smoothly.

Update: the mistake DFWDepot made may have been honest, or maybe not, but in any case in addition to the UPS charge of approximately $60 for shipping from the US to the UK, UPS tacked on another $75 charge for the local delivery from the local airport to my house. This second charge was apparently to pay for a local courier company (it wasn't UPS who actually delivered it to my door). I had to pay the second charge in cash on delivery.

The next step is to install the drive. There is a slick installation instruction document (in PDF format) available from MacResQ. The document for older (400-667Mhz) SVGA Powerbooks is here, while the one for newer DVI (667+Mhz) Powerbooks is here. My torx screwdriver took a lot longer than the drive itself to arrive, so I ended up opening my Powerbook with the 4th largest screwdriver in a typical set of 6 mini-flathead screwdrivers. After that it was easy, with the possible exception of the power cable (unplugging it is slightly fiddly, I used to screwdriver to carefully lever it out), and the whole process only took a few minutes.

The Software

Once you've installed the drive you need to find out what it's called by your system. Fire up Terminal and type

drutil info

The drutil tool will display the name of your newly installed drive. For the UJ815 you're installing this should be 'DVD-RAM UJ-815A'. Remember this information exactly (copy and paste it into TextEdit if you think you can't be exact).

Now turn your attention to the DiskRecording.framework you acquired earlier (you did remember to acquire it right?). Control-click it and select 'Package Contents'. Dig down through the folders and find a file called DeviceSupport.drprofile (it's located in Versions / A / Frameworks / DiscRecordingEngine.framework / Versions / A / Resources). Launch TextEdit and open the DeviceSupport.drprofile file and do a search for 'DVD-RAM'. The first instance you find should look like this:

<key>DRDeviceProductName</key>
<string>DVD-RAM SW-9571</string>
<key>DRDeviceVendorName</key>
<string>MATSHITA</string>


You will be replacing the text DVD-RAM SW-9571 with the text that the drutil tool returned earlier (DVD-RAM UJ-815A). Once you've done that, save the file.

To finish the procedure you need to replace the existing DiskRecording.framework with the one you've modified. The easiest way is to boot into OS9 and then just replace the old version (found at /System/Library/Frameworks) with your modified one.

Reboot into OS X and you're done! Disc burning in the Finder should work now.

Notes

The drive is very noisy at first when you eject discs, and the disc doesn't eject all the way (it 'sticks' a little so you have to give it a light pull to get it out). However after using it for a few weeks the mechanism loosens up and both of these problems go away. The drive is now considerably quieter than the old combo drive it replaced.

Note that if you later update your system software you may have to repeat this procedure (if the update replaces the framework), although hopefully Apple will recognise this drive in the next version of OS X 10.3.

Update: I recently upgraded to OS X 10.3.2 on a fresh install of Panther and copied over my old home folder, including preferences etc. Somewhat surprisingly, the DVD-RAM drive works in the iApps and the Finder under the new install. It seems that it is now supported in 10.3.2, although the framework seems identical to the old one, and System Profiler still claims the drive is unsupported. YMMV.

OS X screensavers

When I first started using Mac OS X back in 2002 I became fascinated with the high quality screensavers that were appearing for the platform. I created a small webpage about them here. The project was mainly to test out an OS X themed webpage design, but a few of the authors contacted me with offers of free software for review purposes, so it worked out quite nicely! Note that the page was written back when I had the typhoon8.net domain (hence the title), and that it hasn't been updated for many months.

Powerbook G4!

I got my Powerbook G4! Quite the upgrade from the old PowerMac 8600/250. Now that I have a DVD drive I've become interested in transcoding DVDs into Divx and SVCD formats. Matt Haveri's SVCD FAQ provides a comprehensive and up-to-date coverage of the subject of SVCD on the Mac