So let’s say you have an extra Mac Mini laying around that is just not put to use, maybe the internal hardware pooped (oh, the worst pun for this isn’t it) out and it’s just good for nothing… well, don’t be so fast to flush that broken Mac Mini, you can turn it into a toilet paper dispenser!
I mean, I don’t know why you would, but I guess why not if you’re into geek chic decorating?
I have become dependent on many command line applications I have installed through the open source MacPorts effort, and if you have too you’ll really appreciate this guide. When upgrading Mac OS X to a new major OS (say, upgrading Tiger to Snow Leopard) you may notice that some MacPorts installations get screwy and no longer work… but no worries, this simple walkthrough on MacPorts.org shows us how to easily reinstall all of our existing MacPorts software in just a few simple commands. Highly recommended reading for all MacPorts users:
MacPorts: Migrating a MacPorts install to a new major OS version or CPU architecture
If you have a Hackintosh PC, you may have noticed that in “About this Mac” you’ll most often see ‘Unknown’ as the CPU type. Yes you can dig around in system files and set it, but wouldn’t you like the CPU to be recognized on it’s own? Now you can! Check out this thread at InsanelyMac Forums where a forum user built a version of PC_EFI with CPU recognition built in. Sweet!
[ InsanelyMac Forums via StellaRolla ]
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Ever heard of MD5 and not sure what it was or what that meant? You’re likely not alone, but MD5 is important, and, with a little explaining, easy to understand. Let’s explain a bit about MD5, MD5 checksums, what it is, and why you should know about it.
Have you ever wanted to make your MacBook or MacBook Pro’s keyboard lights dance to the music you are listening to? Has the thought never crossed your mind? Well me neither, but once I saw someone using this iTunes plugin on their MacBook Pro I was instantly hooked on the novelty. iSpazz is the name of the iTunes Visualizer Plugin and it works exactly as advertised, the keyboard lights will flash in sync to the music you’re listening to! It also has a feature to allow the screen’s backlight to flash too, but that just about sent me into a seizure like a bad Japanese cartoon so I’ll opt just for the keyboard lights. File this one under the ‘cool useless eye candy’ category!
Download the iSpazz iTunes plugin and drop it in ~/Library/iTunes/iTunes Plug-ins/ and from there you can select it as a visualizer option within iTunes.
Apple Computer now has a 9.4% Market Share in the USA, putting it in 4th place behind HP, Dell, and Acer and above Toshiba. 9.4% is pretty remarkable considering just earlier in the year Apple was in 5th place with a 7.6% market share, and this is in the worst economic climate the USA has seen since the Great Depression! Way to go Apple! The survey states that Apple has an ‘unofficial’ market share of 4% worldwide. I’d be curious to know what country has the highest market share, judging by the amount of Mac’s at your average Starbucks, it’s probably the USA.
[ IDC via Electronista ]
Apple has released a list of software that has been deemed incompatible with 10.6 Snow Leopard. If you haven’t upgraded yet it’s possible you’re afraid of application incompatibilities, and rightly so. It’s worth taking a look to see if any version of the apps you are dependent on make the list.
These apps will be moved to an “incompatible software” directory upon installation of Snow Leopard:
Is this the messiest desktop ever? I don’t know much about this photo, other than it shows a wildly chaotic Mac desktop with a few billion iChat conversations going on and that it’s taken by popular photographer Sam McGuire. If there was ever a need for Expose, I think this it it!
[ Sam McGuire via BallTilIFall ]
You can easily check the MD5 Hash of any file on your Mac, all you need to do is launch the Terminal and type the ‘md5’ command and point it at the file you wish to check the md5 has for.
First launch the Terminal application, located in the /Applications/Utilities/ directory on the Mac. Next you’ll want to point the md5 command at the file you wish to check md5 hash for. For example, the syntax to check the MD5 hash of a file may look something like this:
md5 big_huge_file.iso
You’ll be returned with an MD5 Checksum Hash that you can check against the source MD5 code provided to you (or that a friend shares, you found online, or whatever).
An example of what the md5 hash will look is something like this:
MD5(big_huge_file.iso)= 20665acd5f59a8e22275c78e1490dcc7
The part after the = sign is the MD5 hash code that you can compare against the source to be sure that the file has retained it’s integrity through transmission. This is very handy when downloading large files, or if you want to make sure a file has not been modified, corrupted, or tampered with.
Alternatively you can use the openssl command to check MD5 checksums on your Mac, like so:
openssl md5 big_huge_file.iso
The data returned to you will be the same whether you use the openssl command or the md5 command, it’s really just a matter of preference.
This simple md5 command works in Mac OS X and linux too, and it’s a simple way to verify what you are downloading or transferring has arrived intact.
This is a warning to all Snow Leopard users, be aware that a somewhat obscure Snow Leopard bug deletes ALL DATA from a user account, yikes! This will likely NOT effect you, but if you’re a Snow Leopard user you should understand the bug and the consequences. According to CNET:
“when logging into the guest account on their Mac first and then logging into their regular account, some users are finding all their data to be missing and their accounts completely reset.”
Apparently Apple is aware of this issue, and it’s not particularly widespread (suggesting it doesn’t happen all the time), but in any case Snow Leopard users should protect themselves and NOT use the Guest account for the time being! I’m sure Apple will release a bug fix rather quickly since this is gaining some mainstream press around the web.
If you’ve run into this problem and you’re freaking out, check out this page on CNET for a possible fix to restore data.
Personally, I love Snow Leopard and the only issues I’ve had are problems with Snow Leopard wireless connections.
One of my favorite add-ons for MacBook and MacBook Pro’s with the keyboard backlight is this awesome app from Lab Tick that allows you to manually control the keyboard backlighting via a menubar item that drops down with a little slider, kind of like how the sound menu item works.
Additionally, you can control the MacBook Backlit keyboard illumination via the function keys as well, but having the menubar item is very handy too, try it out yourself!
Labtick has been updated and works perfectly in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.
Control backlight via the Labtick Menubar Item:
* Lab Tick developer webpage here
* Direct Labtick download file (dmg)
Simply launch Labtick and you’ll find the menu bar item available, it’s a little slider that can adjust brightness of backlit keyboards up or down.
* F8 turns off backlighting completely
* F9 dims keyboard backlighting
* F10 brightens keyboard backlight
If you have an older MacBook Pro with a backlit keyboard, and you’re running Mac OS X Snow Leopard, then give Labtick a try. It’s pretty cool to have backlight controls right in the menu bar!
The Polaroid film effect is a fun and retro look for digital images, and now you can make Polaroid style pictures without Photoshop! The nifty app called Poladroid is cross-platform compatible and works exactly as advertised: simply drag any image onto the Poladroid app and out comes a Polaroid style image.
Poladroid allows you to easily create digital versions of Polaroid style images, right from Mac OS, Mac OS X, or Windows. It’s super easy to use and quite fun, and the productions look even more Polaroid-ish than Instagram filters does.
The app itself is a little quirky and sort of slow, but that’s partially because the developer built in a virtual ‘development’ process much like the real Polaroids, you can even shake them around (by moving the image around the screen) to develop quicker. If you’re impatient, simply right-click on the image within the app and select to have the image saved now. By default the Polaroid images are dumped into ~/Pictures but you can adjust the setting in the preferences.
You can easily reveal the Finder location of any recently used item from the Apple “Recent Items” menu by holding down the Command key as you access the Apple menu of OS X.
It’s Sunday, also known as Funday, so why not share some Mac loving cats! I know some of our readers strongly disliked the dogs love macs post from a couple weeks ago, so if you didn’t like that post then you probably won’t like this one, so just ignore it.
I’ve shared five pictures here, but you can see a whole bunch more of cats & macs at Cute-n-Tiny: 25 Mac Loving Cats
There is now a Photoshop app for the iPhone / iPod Touch and it’s called… Photoshop.com Mobile. The best part? It’s free! Free Photoshop?? For the iPhone?? Well, don’t go expecting a full version of Photoshop on your iPhone, it’s a relatively limited and simple image editor, but for quick photo edits on the go, it works just fine and has a nice clean interface. I imagine over time the functionality will increase and I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a feature rich paid option either, but until then here’s what you’ll get with the free iPhone version of Photoshop Mobile:
Image editing features of iPhone Photoshop include:
* Crop, Rotate, Flip
* Adjust Exposure, Saturation, Tint, Black & White
* Simple Filters including Sketch & Soft Focus
* Effects include: Vibrant, Pop (Andy Warhol style), Border, Vignette Blur, Warm Vintage, Rainbow, White Glow, Soft Black & White
There are some additional publishing features so that you can easily share and upload images to Photoshop.com after you have signed up for an account, but you’ll need to sign up for that login outside of the app itself which is kind of annoying. Instead of signing up for yet another photo sharing service, I’ll just stick to saving images to my iPhone Photo Gallery so I can share them myself via Flickr or Facebook.
I’ve been playing around with Photoshop on my iPhone 3G and it’s not the quickest app in the world (a friend with an iPhone 3GS reports it’s a lot faster on the 3GS model) but it definitely does what it advertises, and it’s more than adequate for the simple functions it includes.
It’s definitely nice to finally have Photoshop on the iPhone, although I’m not sure if this app warrants the “Adobe Photoshop” name, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction!
Here’s a comprehensive list of budgeting software for Mac, I originally created this list for a family member who is a recent switcher and was looking for some personal budgeting software for their new Mac, and I figured it was useful enough to share with everyone else.
Quicken – $69.99 – almost everyone has heard of Quicken, it’s basically the industry standard for consumer budgeting software. It works very well as long as you’re willing to keep the data recent, and it’ll hook up to some online bank accounts (or you can import data). It’s cross-platform compatible which is also a bonus if you’re a recent switcher.
iBank – $59.99 – iBank is very much a Mac app, it’s very attractive, easy to use, has an intuitive interface, and, well, it just plain looks good. You can easily import banking and finance data to help create a budget and track your finances and has a pretty cool feature that lets you visit online bank accounts through the app to import any data that otherwise wouldn’t be accessible. As an added bonus, it syncs with your iPhone so you can see all your budgets and finances on the road. From appearances alone, this app takes the cake (the screenshot above is iBank) and it’s also pretty feature rich. The main downside that I see is that it’s not really cross-platform compatible since it’s Mac only.
MoneyWell – $49.99 – MoneyWell is a lot like iBank, it’s feature rich and looks very attractive, it’s just a bit less well known. The ‘envelope budgeting’ feature looks pretty nice and would certainly be useful. Priced a bit cheaper than iBank, it’s definitely a good alternative, but again it’s Mac only.
Budget – $39.95 – I have smart friends that swear by Budget, so apparently it’s a great app. It’s certainly feature rich and full of stellar reviews, competitively priced, and has been around a while, but at a risk of sounding shallow, I just don’t think it LOOKS that good, especially compared to the some of the alternatives. If you can put the appearance aside, then Budget could be a great software option for managing your finances.
Squirrel – €14.99 – Free beta test – Squirrel won an Apple Design Award in 2008 for the best Mac OS X Leopard Student Product, which is no small feat. If it has Apple’s stamp of approval, it’s probably a pretty great app although I have yet to test it myself. It’s currently in development but looks pretty stable and has a lot of personal budgeting features, you can also try it before you buy it with a free download, so definitely check this one out. There’s also an iPhone version available for free! And yes that’s €14.99 – Euro’s not Dollars, which is about $22 at current exchange rates.
ChaChing – Free beta – Since it’s in Beta it’s hard to know much about this app, but it looks like it’s developing into a promising contender. It has an iPhone version that it syncs with too so that you can budget on the go. It has been recommended rather highly by friends that use it, and you can’t beat the free beta either, but nonetheless it is still beta software, so YMMV.
Mint – Free – Enter all your accounts into Mint and it’ll pull as much financial data as it can, back more years than you remembered, creating a pretty comprehensive list of personal financing trends and budgeting information. Completely web-based means it’s fully cross platform compatible and easily accessible from virtually anywhere with internet access, there’s also a pretty great iPhone app, and it’s all for free? Put all this together, and this takes the cake for the best Mac budgeting software.
A study from NPD tells us some interesting facts about Mac owners in the USA, highlights include:
* 85% of Mac owners also own a PC
* 72% of Mac owners use a notebook / laptop
* 66% of Mac owners own three or more computers
* 63% of Mac owners own an iPod
* 49% of Mac owners own a navigation device (GPS, but is iPhone included?)
* 36% of Mac owning households report incomes over $100,000
* 32% of Mac owners have a Digital SLR camera
* 28% of Mac owners have an iPod Touch
* 20% of Mac owners have a Flash-Memory Camcorder
* 18% of Mac owners have a 50″ or greater LCD TV
* Average Mac owners have 48 consumer electronic devices, vs 24 for the average Windows PC user
* Mac ownership/marketshare is up to 12% in the USA, from 8% last year
NPD goes on to surmise that the purchasing decisions of Apple / Mac owners are a significant indicator of trending popular products and adoption trends.
NPD via TheAppleBlog.com
