Tag: osx

Choose: AFP or SMB

2009-01-11 rolfje No Comments

I recently upgraded the operating system on my trusty Mac Mini G4 home fileserver from Tiger to Leopard. In addition to the out-of-the-box backup, I no longer have to use SharePoints to manage my network shares. In Leopard, I can just right-click them and arrange the sharing.

In doing so, I decided to switch on both SMB and AFP sharing for all shares. The idea was that my Macs all would use AFP automatically, and all Windows machines would see the SMB mounts. After a few hours, iTunes began acting up on me, because it decided to switch between the SMB and AFP protocol (or so it seemed). Finder also seems to have some trouble listing network shares if the exact same name on the same server is shared with two different protocols.

Because there are people on my network with Windows machines, I decided to switch off the AFP protocol and only go with SMB. I haven’t had problems since.

If you’re sharing drives like I’m doing, go for SMB. It may not be the technically superior solution, but it will “just work”. You can easily switch to AFP when the world is freed of Windows machines. 😉

Uncategorized

“Instruments” – Application monitor

2009-01-02 rolfje No Comments

Did you know that your installation of Leopard comes with a built-in performance monitor? It’s called “Instruments” and you can attach it to any process currently running. In the screenshot you see here I attached it to an instance of Eclipse while running some unittests.

Instruments has some nice templates for you to choose from, and you can monitor CPU activity per thread, disk I/O, User Interface activity, Object allocations, and leaks. Just so you know, it might come in handy.

Apple, Software

Eclipse 3.4.1, OSX and Java 1.6

2008-12-28 rolfje 2 Comments

Eclipse application icon

I recently downloaded Eclipse 3.4.1 for Mac OSX, and tried starting it using the eclipse.app icon. It did not work, and I noticed a message in /var/log/system.log telling me that the JVM could not be loaded.

Apple, Software

Hex color picker for OSX

2008-12-24 rolfje No Comments

If you’re working on some source code and you quickly need to insert a hexadecimal color code for a color you currently have on your screen, then here is a neat little trick I found:

First, install Hex Color Picker by Waffle software. It will add an extra option to the built-in OSX color picker to show you the selected color in Hex.

To reach the color picker, you usually start up any application which uses the standard OSX color picker and just choose “choose color”. What you can also do, is have the OSX color picker behave as a standalone application in 3 simple steps:

Read More “Hex color picker for OSX” »

Apple, Software

A Bigger Time Machine without Changing History

2008-09-07 rolfje 104 Comments

I had a 160GB drive holding my Time Machine backups. Because I wanted to backup external disks, and still wanted to be able to travel about a year back in time, I bought a 1TB USB disk. Stephen Foskett wrote a great article about how he migrated his TimeMachine backup to a larger disk, but it’s lengthy and misses one essential step.

I decided to give you the short version, this blog post describes how I migrated Time Machine to the new disk without losing any data in 11 easy steps.

Apple, Software

OSX: Formatting a 1TB USB Drive

2008-09-07 rolfje 7 Comments

I just bought a Maxtor Basics 1TB drive, and found that I could not seem to format it using the Leopard Diskutility. Then, I found this page which contained the golden tip. I’ll save you some reading:

Open Apple’s Disk Utility
Click on the drive (not the partition in it, if there is any), and select “Partitioning”.
Select “1 partition” and then press “Options”.
You’ll see that “MBR” is the default, which is what’s causing the problem. Select the middle option “Apple Partition” and you’re good to go.

Screenshots included. It’s in Dutch, but the location of the buttons are identical for all languages.

Apple, Hardware, Software

Remove formatting from clipboard

2008-09-05 rolfje 1 Comment

In Windows, there is a great tool called “PureText” which sits in your tray, and can remove formatting from copy/paste actions if you want to. In stead of pasting into notepad, and then copying it again, you now can use the Windows-V combination to paste without formatting. It works in any program, and I’m a fond user of this little gem at work.

In OSX, you can do this with a key combination, Option-Shift-Command-V. Besides being the silliest and most awkward key combination ever to do a simple paste-action, it does not always do the job properly. I found this great tip where a simple applescript removes formatting from the items in your clipboard.

Apple, Software

Get an Onscreen Keyboard in OSX

2008-04-29 rolfje 1 Comment

Always forgetting how to do accents on characters, or where the euro sign (€) is? Use the on-screen keyboard and see where the special characters are while holdin down the option key, or the shift-option combination. Read the small tutorial on HackAddict.net on How to Get an Onscreen Keyboard in OSX.

Orange highlighted characters are the combinations. So do an Option-E, let go, and then an “o” to get “ó”. Have fun finding all the combo’s. Using the keyboard viewer is faster than the character palette, and in addition learns you the key combinations for often used characters.

Apple

OSX 10.5.2 Solved SMB problems (for me)

2008-03-16 rolfje 1 Comment

In a previous post on this blog, I indicated that the 10.5.1. update of Apple’s OSX did not fix my network and SMB problems with my Iomega drive. In the comments underneath, some readers kindly pointed out that Iomega’s K104w11 Firmware update is available for the Iomega drive I have. Now that 10.5.2 is out, I reconnected the Iomega drive to my network. And suddenly the world changed…

Apple, Hardware, Software

Easy Image Resizing in OSX

2007-12-31 rolfje 1 Comment

A little heads-up for Apple OSX users who have lots of images to resize. There’s a free tool available to do this at http://www.eagle-of-liberty.com/resizeemall/. It’s donationware, if you like it you can send the author money by paypal.

I’ve used it, and it works as advertised. Drag a bunch of images on the application, and batch-resize them without touching your originals. You can save the images with a postfix, and even in a different format if you like. Very easy for mailing a bunch of photo’s.

Apple, Software