Category Archives: Mac - Page 2

Mac OS X 10.6.5 upgrade freed 2 GB

Posted by on 11. nov 2010 No comments

When Snow Leopard first game out, it was promised to cut back on the OS footprint (in Gigs).

Now, upgrading to 10.6.5, I somehow had insight to take screenshot of disk usage right before upgrading and comparing to the after shot:

Before:

Mac OS X 10.6.4

After:

Mac OS X 10.6.5

As you can see – it freed over 2 GB of disk space. Now this is what I call a good upgrade. Not only adding features and fixing bugs, but at the same time cutting back in bloat.

Note: my Time Machine reported 7.03 GB worth of changed data that needs to be backed up. So get some, loose some. But as my backup drive has lots of space while MacBook has little, I consider myself a winner.

Address Book groups

Posted by on 9. nov 2010 No comments

Some time ago I found a rather useful way to use my Address Book contacts – group them and when you type the name of the group in Mail.app address field, it is expanded to all the contacts. But the problem was that when a contact had multiple addersses, I could not determine which was to be used for the group automatically and if I wanted to write to a specific address I had to manually adjust, which I forgot rather often.

Edit Distribution List

Fortunately Address Book has a way to specify the default address for any group (or distribution list as it is called). Just right-click on one of the groups, as shown below and pick “Edit Distribution List…”

Pick Edit Distribution List from options

Pick Edit Distribution List from options

Now a window pops up that shows you the entire list and all of the multiple addresses for each card. Just skim through the list and highlight in bold the default addresses which should be used automatically for this list:

Address Book Distribution List

Clik OK to save changes and your done.

iTunes, iPhoto and Migration Assistant

Posted by on 18. okt 2010 No comments

I migrated my MacBook to a new MacBook Pro 2010 release using Migration Assistant and just as many others, found that my iPhoto did not show any photos (only thumbnails) as well as iTunes did not show any music. The Finder did show the files though.

Don’t panic!

And don’t blame Migration Assistant for it. What has happened is that you are probably running older versions of iTunes and iPhoto (and probably OS X too for that matter) than you were at the other Mac. So, just run Software Upgrade (with restarts and everything) until it tells you that you are up to date. Then all should be well with iTunes and iPhoto too.

Credit: this tip was kindly pointed out by AndyField. Thanks!

MacFUSION workaround

Posted by on 13. apr 2010 No comments

Upgrading to OS X 10.6.3 broke the excellent MacFusion mounting app. For those like me, who depend upon SSHFS mount, there is a workaround using static sshfs mounting.

Read more »

iMovie and MTS

Posted by on 18. märts 2010 7 comments

A few times before I have imported my short clips from the Sony HDR-CX106 camcoder directly using iMovie camera import features. Now, that I had a bit longer videos on the camera, I got to thinking why it takes so long and how come it reports that 60 GB of my hard drive will fit only 1 hour or so full-quality video. It turns out that by importing, iMovie probably converts all the clips into HDV compliant format, thus MPEG2 and thus resulting in wasting my hard drive space.

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A Dream of Context Aware Devices

Posted by on 22. dets 2009 No comments
Watches as iPhone sidescreen (© iLounge.com)

Watches as iPhone sidescreen (© iLounge.com)

I have a dream. A dream of devices that somehow know what I want of them. A dream of devices that do not bother me with repetitive questions or reminders of the same event. A dream of devices that are Context Aware.

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iPhone AdHoc distribution

Posted by on 11. dets 2009 No comments

All the docs at Apple indicate that AdHoc provisioning is as simple as rebuilding your project with new distribution profile. But unfortunately it is not that simple. Read more »

Apache RedirectMatch is wonderful

Posted by on 24. nov 2009 No comments

I recently moved my blog from iWeb to WordPress (read this post) and was a bit worried about Google search results pointing to wrong or non-existant content. Reading Google help docs resulted in only a bit of help: I have to set up permanent (301) redirect to my new site and that should do it. The problem is that though I could move my blog to Apache powered server, iWeb and WordPress had a bit different URL layout, with iWeb having .html at the end and folders only to month deep.

But be not afraid – I found a solution with RedirectMatch keyword. Read more »

Location Aware Time Machine

Posted by on 16. nov 2009 No comments

My Time Machine backup is AFP based network share that is located at my office LAN, but regardless of my location, Time Machine tries to access this share and when it can, it starts backing up. This might not be that bad idea, but my home network upload is not that good, which results in waste of time and bandwith as TM never completes even the first step of calculating differences.

So, first I sought out for solution to disable access to AFP volume from the world, which would cut me off the whole volume, though. But then I stumbled upon this post, which in essential shows how to toggle Time Machine from command line. Combine this with Marco Polo and you get yourself a Location Aware Time Machine. Read more »

Mac Estonian keyboard Layout

Posted by on 31. märts 2009 No comments

Or how to use Ukelele to customize keyboard layouts.

For the impatient: download Estonian3.keylayout.zip

The Mac OS X version of Estonian keyboard layout and localized version found here, both lack the caret ^ symbol (in its usual place). Also I had an external HP usb keyboard, which again was incompatible with the internal keyboard (the ~ and | symbol keys were swapped). This was a big issue for me, because I often use both of them in scripts.
So, I turned to Ukelele and configured my own layouts. Read more »