Today I had to combine twi PDF files into one. A quick search on MacUpdate revealed the following tools:
joinpdf (command line tool, different GUIs included in the package) and Join PDFs (Apple Script GUI):
because of the command line interface it could also be used in scripts, can merge and split files, but also extract pages from PDFs, Java
PDFLab:
I couldn’t get it to run properly on OS X Leopard, the application crashed immediately after adding a PDF file, last update January 2007
PDFsam (PDF Split and Merge)
Java, GUI not in OS X stile, but functional, output format can be choosen from PDF version 1.5 (Acrobat 5) up to 1.7 (Acrobat
Combine PDFs uses only OS X provided CoreGraphics libraries, no Java involved, typical Mac GUI, can only merge but not split PDFs
I recomend to use Combine PDFs if you only want to quickly merge files as it’s the easiest one of the above to use (drag & drop), if you also want to split documents you should use PDFsam.
Alfred Diblasi shot an original Twentieth Anniversary Mac (TAM) from 1997 on ebay. That’s left alone is really cool, but it’s getting better: the machine came unopened and never used.
Hotbox of Brian Kendall is a small background application to show any area you marked in fullscreen mode. You are not bound to static content, but can also use it to zoom into parts of running videos. The utility is controlled via a central hotkey (default: ⌥⌘1) and uses OS-X’s built-in zoom functionality.
Configuration of the tool is done via a newly installed preference pane in OS X’s system preferences:
Is your Mac Desktop cluttered? You have to give a presentation? You don’t want the auditors to see your desktop?
The simple solution: hide your desktop! At this point the little tool Desktop Curtain comes into play. It lets you completely overlay your desktop with an image, or change the background image and still display your desktop icons without the need to reconfigure your desktop settings: after the presentation simply quit Desktop Curtain and your previous desktop is magically back.
To access the settings dialog you can right-click on the desktop after Desktop Curtain got started, or relaunch it.
But I have to deduct 1 point for having to drag & drop a new image into the settings window instead of using a default file selection dialog.
Sending mobile macs based on Intel chips into sleep mode sometimes takes ages depending on RAM size as the whole RAM has to be written back to disk to prevent data loss even if the battery goes down completely. With some settings you can put things right, if you don’t want to wait this time and can afford to set the additional data security aside. On the terminal the following commands can be used to configure the sleep mode (for further information refer to Stewing Over Save Sleep and Save Sleep Revisited):
To get the current state (default is 3):
pmset -g | grep hibernatemode
To change the setting:
sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0
The following values are possible:
0: battery buffered RAM-only mode
3: battery-buffer RAM and save RAM to disk (default setting)
If you want to use the RAM-only setting you should issue the following command afterwards:
sudo rm /var/vm/sleepimage
This frees up additional space (= size of installed RAM) on your hard disk which was used by the sleep image. If you set back the sleep mode to the combined mode the file will be recreated when your computer goes to sleep the next time.
The second link mentioned above describes a configuration, which sets the sleep mode depending on battery load: if the battery is low, writing the RAM to disk is automatically reactivated when the computer goes to sleep.
But that’s all plain command line hacking. There’s also a nifty solution to be integrated in the Mac’s System Settings: SmartSleep of Patrick Stein combines the terminal hacks with a nice user interface.
Everybody using the Macs command line interface frequently can customize it with some very simple steps.
Customize Prompt
To customize the default bash prompt you have to edit the environment variable “PS1″. The standard prompt of Mac OS X looks like the following:
hermes:~ eddie$
You can use multiple further options on this prompt e.g. to show the time, command number, coloring parts of the prompt. If you want to create a prompt like
15:43:38eddie@hermes: ~ (1) $
you have to insert the following line into ~/.bash_profile:
You can get further infromation from the bash man page. A detailed tutorial to customize the prompt is also available. You can find an overview about the different color codes at the Bash Prompt How-To. Also you should read the complete How-To to tame bash.
colored output for “ls”
To color specific files (symbolic links, directories) you can call “ls” with the option “-G”:
hermes:~ eddie$ ls -G
You can define this command as an alias inserting the following into ~/.bash_profile to activate the colored output by default:
alias ls="ls -G"
Alternatively you can set the environment variable “CLICOLOR”:
In the discussion about governmental surveilance, telecommunications data retention, and fighting terrorism in Germany everybody, not only citizens of Germany, should be aware of that also your email communication is affected. Not only the connection data (who correspondet with whom when) is concerned, but also, based on the so called TKÜV all providers with more than 1000 customers/accounts have to implement a special interface for government agencies to divert the contents of email communication and save it there. Even if you, like German Minister of the Interior Dr. Wolfgang Schäuble, can say that you are “decent” (german: anständig), for sure nobody is pleasured knowing that potentially every single email could be saved and analyzed by strangers without his knowledge. Weiterlesen »
At the moment there are very few viruses, trojaners or other malware out there which chose Mac OS X as their host operating system. But it’s still not a bad idea to install a virus scanner on OS X. A popular scanner on Linux/UNIX, and therefore OS X, is Clamav, a open source scanner. ClamXav provides a simple GUI to control the scanner. Included in the installation image is not only the GUI but also the complete clamav scanner engine so that no further software installation is necessary. Weiterlesen »
A small and nice tool for iTunes control with keyboard shortcuts independent of the active application is GimmeSomeTune. A service startet at login-time starts GimmeSomeTune with iTunes to activate the controls. With easy to use keyboard shortcuts it’s possible to control basic iTunes functions like play/pause, skip and some more. For more convenience GimmeSomeTune activates a Growl-like interface to give information like artist, song title and the album cover of the playing song.
The installation of GimmeSomeTune is as easy as every software installation in Mac OS X. Just open the Disk Image and drag the application in your Application Folder. At the first start it’s recommended to activate the configuration item to start GimmeSomeTune with iTunes. The standard configuration gives you some important shortcuts to start with like:
<Command-Option-=> — show/hide the information window
