partofus.org Mac-Tests

Unboxing an originally sealed Twentieth Anniversary Mac

Christoph Erdle — Wed, 28 May 2008 13:24:03 +0000

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.

via: macnews

System Preference: HotBox

Christoph Erdle — Thu, 15 May 2008 18:50:36 +0000

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:

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Desktop Curtain: Utility for presentations and screenshots / screencasts

Christoph Erdle — Sat, 03 May 2008 18:39:00 +0000

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.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

SmartSleep: Anpassen des Standby-Modus für MacBook, MacBook Pro und MacBook Air

Christoph Erdle — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 13:25:05 +0000

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.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Terminal tricks

Christoph Erdle — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 15:38:44 +0000

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

15:43:38 eddie@hermes: ~ (1) $

you have to insert the following line into ~/.bash_profile:

export PS1="\[\e[0;36m\]\t \[\e[0;32m\]\u@\h:
 \[\e[0m\]\w (\#) $ "

(Insert the above command in one line!)

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”:

export CLICOLOR="yes"

Background knowledge: Email encryption for Mac

Christoph Erdle — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 13:49:11 +0000

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.

All three email clients support S/MIME by default. You only have to import your certificates to use S/MIME encryption.

The usage of GnuPG with the different clients and key management will be topic in some of the next articles here at mac.partofus.org.[/english]

TeX for the Mac

Christoph Erdle — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 15:04:27 +0000

If you want to install TeX on your Mac there are multiple options how to do it. Let’s see what’s out there:

Concluding, my suggestion is:
Everyone who wants an always up to date TeX installation should use either MacPorts or Fink. They release updates more often than MacTeX. Choosing between Fink and MacPorts is based on the liking of the user: both include, not only for TeX, nearly the same packages in their repository.
i-Installer is a pretty useful tool for the installation as it includes many more additional programs which have to be installed by hand using one of the other options. But you should only use it if you have no need for support and bug fixes.
In my opinion the best installation method is using the MacTex package: it’s simple, quick and complete.[/english]

Antivirus for OS X: ClamXav

Christoph Erdle — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 13:17:39 +0000

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.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

iTunes info and control

etomsch — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 13:09:59 +0000

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:

— show/hide the information window
— play/pause
— previous song
— next song

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Address book plugin: Google Maps

Christoph Erdle — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 13:32:28 +0000

This time I have a really cool Plugin for Apple’s Address Book: Google Maps.With this plugin you can get maps and directions to a location directly from within the Address Book. In the context menu of an entries location field you find additional entries for the Google Maps service.

If one of those options is selected, your standard browser opens a new window with the corresponding Google Maps page.Rating: 5 out of 5 stars