Muskoka Mac User Group » 2005 » April
As some of you may have noted, I have been very thick skulled trying to make DVDs of photos. To solve my problems, I have invested in a new G5. And do I love it! But, I found a few tricks which I will pass along:
1. All DVDs are not the same. I did not know that. Please note that Apple wants you to use DVD-R, not DVD+R. (The discs must have the minus sign.)
The Help and Tutorial on iMovies and iDVD both say that “DVD-R is the recommended disc format for use . . .” However, in Help, under Burning your DVD, it also says that “iDVD supports writing to DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R and DVD+RW. Make sure that your SuperDrive or other optical drive supports burning discs in the disc format you choose.”
The techie at Apple flatly stated that I had to use DVD-R.
2. Apple finds that Verbatum brand works best.
3. The CD/DVD icon does not automatically show on your desktop when you use a disc for the first time. This is probably because the CD/DVD preference was not turned on:
System Preferences under the Apple menu; from the View menu, choose CDs & DVDs.
4. My first chore was to back up all of my documents and photos onto DVDs, as per Brian’s admonition a the last MMUG. I had no problem dragging the documents folder onto a DVD icon and burning it. However, when I tried to drag 2,000 photos, it did not want to do it. From the iPhoto Help there was an even simpler method:
• select photos (select all)
• Choose Share > Burn Disc
• Insert CD-R or DVD-R
• Click the Burn button
The chore was done much quicker than in the old “drag” system.
Hope this helps someone else.
Bill
Just a posting for any of you who have ever considered using a Windows keyboard on a Mac. With the new Mac mini coming sans keyboard and mouse it’s an apropos commentary.
For the record, a Windows USB keyboard will work fine on any USB Mac running OSX (and likely OS9 but I haven’t tried it) with the following issues…
- The Windows logo-d key becomes the Apple key
- The alt key becomes the option key
- The f12 key becomes eject
- Any extra keys the keyboard might have probably won’t work, or at least won’t do what they are labelled for.
Of special note is that this means the Apple and Alt keys are ’switched’ for a touch typist. Not a big issue for a first time Apple user or hunt and peck types, but for the rest of us it’s a nightmare.
There are two free utilities (that I’m aware of) to fix this (and a couple of other related keyboard changes)
uControl and Double Command.
Check out their websites for all the gory details.
In addition to getting an inside look at Tiger, we have a guest coming who is an audio recording engineer and big fan of Garageband. His name is Scott Pelling and he will be providing us with a quick intro to Garageband 2 and some of the tricks he uses to make it do what would take hours with standard recording equipment. See you there!
Hi All
Hope you’ve subscribed to the iCal calendar for the group by now. If not, I’ll mention we’ve got some neat stuff to talk about at the next meeting! Tiger will be out… Google Maps are cool, ImageWell is a nifty little app I tripped over that’s free and you all should download it…. Be there!
I know some of you have much larger photo albums than I do. Saw this program mentioned elsewhere and thought it was worth a mention.
One of those items you’d never think to go looking for….. I have no personal experience, just saw a favourable comment.
iPhotoLibraryManager
I pointed out in the last meeting that I have replaced the ugly hard drive icon on all my Macs with an icon that looks like my Mac. i.e. My iMac has a picture of itself as it’s icon on the desktop.
It’s a nice little touch that I don’t know why Apple doesn’t do right from the factory.
So, where did I get all these icons? Go to www.widgetwidget.com and look for the ‘MagnumOpus” link on the left. There they are – icons for every piece of equiptment Apple has ever produced, including a bunch of prototypes and odds and ends that never made the market. He’s got lots of other icon sets in various themes too, like The Lord of the Rings and Sky Captain and the World of Tommorrow, so be sure to look around. They all look great! It’s an easy fun way to personalize and jazz up your computer and documents.
Ya I know this is a Mac users group – but some of you are forced to work with/on that ‘other’ OS from time to time. This page has great advice for Windows users explained in plain english. If you have a Windows machine, or know someone who does – make sure they read it !
Hi everybody
Apple has released a new update for Panther – we are now up to 10.3.9 ! This will likely be the last major update to Panther with Tiger due out so soon. At any rate, I have copies of the combo updater I can burn off to a CD if anybody needs it. I know some of you are stuck on dial-up like me 
I should note there were two minor issues reported __occasionally__ by people that upgrade.
One is a problem with certain Java applets. The fix is to (re)install the 2005-02 update. See here for the official Apple notice on the problem.
The other problem is that Safari takes control of any ‘feed://’ links you click on – even if you have an RSS feed reading program installed. See here for more info on this one. The easy fix if you are familiar with ‘vi’ is here by Sandy McArthur – but I’ve reproduced it below since searching that page is a pain.
The feed URL problem can be fixed if you're willing to edit your Safari binary. This could cause other problems but here you go:
1: open a terminal and run: cd /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/MacOS
2: Backup the safari binary: cp Safari Safari.backup
3: Edit the binary: vim Safari
4: Search for "feed": /feed
4.1: The cursor should be at the start of a the word "feed" followed by some gibberish and "feeds" and then more gibberish and "feedsearch"
5: Change the word "feed" to something else, I changed it to "xeed" by pressing "r" and then "x".
6: Save your edits with ":wq"
7: Restart Safari and give it a feed url to see if your edits worked: feed://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt/blogger_rss.xml
Note: The above will probably void your warrenty and kill puppies. Don't do it unless you are knowledgable enough to fix it if you break it.
Posted by Sandy McArthur at April 19, 2005 10:43 AM
Let me know if you trip over any other issues and I’ll keep running notes here for everybody
Backup up your files lately? Taken a copy off-site yet?
No, this isn’t a recording, and no, this isn’t a repeat post.
I’ve just had my second hard-drive failure in less than a month. I’m walking, talking, living proof this will happen to you… sooner or later. Both machines were relatively new (one only a month old!) Two different hard-drive manufacturers, two different technologies (one IDE the other SATA) and they both blew up on a Friday morning. Lucky me. I think the computer gods were laughing at me after I gave the little backup speech at the last meeting.
The first failure was a real pain to recover from. The machine in question was not only my personal workstation, but the company internal web-server, an offsite document repository/duplication server and a local backup server. I was using a complicated combination of Retrospect, rsync, psync [comes with Carbon Copy Cloner], SilverLining and good old Finder drag n’ drop for backups, and it wasn’t enough. The document repository and website pages were all adequately backed up, but all the custom changes I’d made to Jaguar (and there were lots of them) were not. Worse yet, my own documents, mail messages etc. all hadn’t been backed up in four days (the time of the last offsite copy). In the end, Disk Warrior was able to recover most of what I couldn’t reconstruct, or restore through Retrospect, SilverLining and the sync tools, but it was a painful time-consuming process.
As a result of all that I made some changes. After all, those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it right? (Toynbee I think). Thank goodness I did. Since I switched from Jaguar to Panther at the same time, some things had to be changed anyway, and it helped my focus on platform independence too. You have to remember that the hardware you backup on isn’t likely to be the hardware you restore on.
First off, I moved the internal website and document repository to a linux box in the server room. The custom hacking I was doing to a Mac to make it do the job wasn’t necessary on a linux machine, and simplified the setup of both it, and my own computer. Simpler is better.
The unix style sync tools in combination with crontab were awesome. They did their job perfectly, and restoring anything I’d backed up with them was easy and reliable. A++.
SilverLining did OK too. At some point it had quit overwriting the current backups and created new ones nested inside the old ones (although that may have been operator error) so some picking and choosing had to be done, but no data lost. A solid B.
Retrospect was a pain in the rear. I couldn’t do anything with the backups I had until I had another Mac the software installed. I couldn’t install without calling for an updated license key. And when i finally got that all sorted out, it turns out it that in attempting to backup the damaged hard-drive, it trashed it’s backup! All of the previous versions of the documents in it’s backup set were gone too, and without even a log entry to indicate a problem. I know these guys have been doing Mac backups for years, and I’ve used it successfully in the past, but this time when I needed it the most it failed big time. I just don’t trust it anymore. An F.
So, under my new setup, psync and crontab back all the local Macs up to my Mac, and then my Mac backs up itself to a local Mac with some extra hard-drive space every night. The laptop users still use Silverlining with a custom reminder script I created to backup when they are in the office and have a second, and rsync backs up the now external web-server. I had Retrospect running nightly on the local copies so I’d have incremental historical copies of documents too. Offsite copies created every Friday morning via drag n’ drop (although I’m considering psync here too)
How did all my changes work out after the second hard-drive failure? A stock Panther install, reinstall the dozen or so applications I use daily from my offsite backup and a quick reverse psync and I’m up and running. All I’m out is a couple of Friday morning mail messages. Hmm, I wonder what I can do about that for next time. RAID maybe?
At any rate, my recommendations I made at the meeting the other night stand. Make backups. Take ‘em offsite. Carbon Copy Cloner and SilverLining are both free and good. Psync is easiest to install as by installing Carbon Copy Cloner and then turning the ’syncronize’ option on. rsync and Apples own software restore are built into OSX if you prefer using them. A spare hard-drive and automated scheduled software is easiest, but a CD burner and some patience works ok too. Do something before it’s too late.
(How to Download those ‘View Only’ Video Clips)
The Problem
Movie trailers are a great way to preview upcoming movies. At $12 a crack, nobody wants to take a chance on going to see a movie you aren’t interested in. The problem is, the Quick Time software Apple provides with most Macs will not let you save these trailers, only view them “at the website.” If you don’t have high speed at home, or want to share the trailer with your buddies – they want you to purchase Quick Time Pro ($30 US last time I checked). In my case, it sticks in my craw to pay to so I can keep copies of advertising on my own computer!
Now don’t get me wrong – feel free to spend the $30 and you will probably get a nice slick Apple solution that works every time…. or follow along and learn how to do it for free with just a minor amount of sweat.
The Concept
It turns out when you view the QuickTime movie trailer – it’s downloaded to your computer as an ‘invisible’ file that is put in your ‘Temporary Documents’ folder. All we have to do is find it, make it ‘visible’, and change the file type to a regular QuickTime movie. Computer enthusiasts can ignore all the stuff below as that should be all the info you need. If you are the kind of person that would rather just read the answer in the back of the book – that’s what follows.
The Process – Step By Step
I originally presented this as a Powerpoint slide show at a Muskokamug meeting, but I didn’t want to post it on the internet that way as many of you won’t have Powerpoint. I’ve transferred them to jpeg images so you can view them in your browser. It’s a little clunky – but hey – you get what you pay for!
Click on each step to see the details.
Step One, OS9 only Download the freeware program called “Invisible File Copier”
Step Two, OS9 only Expand the download (if it didn’t automatically) and put it whereever you keep your misc. programs. No ‘install’ required.
Step Three - Go to www.apple.com/trailers/
Step Four Pick your movie and resolution
Step Five Wait for the Movie to download
Step Six Watch the Trailer-[optional]
Step Seven, OS9 only Launch Invisible File Copier
Step Eight, OS9 only Open the Temporary Files Folder and double-click to open
Step Nine, OS9 only Locate the movie – will be called QTPluginsomethingorother
Step Ten, OS9 only Drag and drop to the Desktop. Make sure you hit the start button!
Steps Seven to Ten for OSX Launch a Terminal. From the command line,
Type cd /tmp/$UID to go to your personal area inside the /tmp directory.
Type ls -al to see the contents.
Type cd TemporaryFiles to go to the “TemporaryFiles” directory.
Update: Note somewhere along the update trail this changed, I’m not sure when (anybody else know?) .
It used to be Tempory\ Files (with the odd \ character – it is required because of the space between Temporary and Files).
On updated computers its run together without the space.
Type cp QTPluginwhater ~ to copy it to your Home directory. That squiggle mark is a ’tilde’. It’s short form for /home/myusernamedirectory in Unix. You will find it to the left of the number one on the top of most keyboards.
Update: If you have the Developers Tools installed (and Panther? I don’t have a Jag machine with the Devel Tools installed right now)
you can make invisible files visible with the SetFile program.
So, that means you should be able to do something like
echo $UID so you know what your UID is,
/Developer/Tools/SetFile -a v /tmp/yourUIDnumberHere/QTPlugin*
Then change to the finder, hit shift-apple-G, type /tmp/yourUIDnumberHere/TemporaryFiles in the popup box,
and then just drag n drop the QTPluginwhatever files to your desktop
Step Eleven Rename the file to “whatever.mov”
Step Twelve Enjoy!
If you have any suggestions or changes for this document - contact me and let me know!