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Categories » ‘MacOS X’
April 23rd, 2008 by Peter
In contrast to my old iBook G4, my current MacBook Pro had constant problems with waking up from standby. After closing the lid, it took up to 60 seconds to get the flashing light in the front. When opening the lid again, the screen sometimes remained dark, but the machine was still active (key clicking etc.). Usually, I could only solve this problem by switching the machine off.
Since this effect destroyed my prepared lecture demo today, I was annoyed enough to search for a solution. The article by Phil Windley has the best explanation, and a working solution.
The short version:
pmset -g | grep hibernatemode- If you get something other than “0″ as result, do the following command:
sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0
- Reboot, enjoy.
- Remove
/var/vm/sleepimage and get 1-4GB of disk space for free.
The even shorter version:
Install SmartSleep.
Newer MacBook models perform a hibernation to disk when going to standby mode. The idea is to wakeup from the hibernation file when the battery went empty during standby mode. This causes the typical problems with hibernation (like long delays), and can be switched to traditional mode by using the described command. The sleepimage file is the remaining hibernation file, which you no longer need now.
December 13th, 2007 by Peter
If you read this blog entry because of the title, you know the problem. Some mail providers (like us) provide your server-side IMAP folders as a hierarchy below the INBOX folder. Especially in Apple Mail, this look ugly and inconvenient.
The technical reason is that all these providers use the Courier IMAP server, which has its own understanding of mail folder hierarchies. In order to get your folders into the root directory, you need to configure the mail client IMAP prefix as “INBOX”, as described for Apple Mail here and for Thunderbird here.
For Apple Mail, you desperately need to enable this setting before any caching takes place. The best solution is to delete your account, create it again with a wrong password, change the setting, and provide the right password afterwards. This leads to a new copying of all IMAP mails, but with the right directory structure in ~/Library/Mail. I never tested this for Thunderbird.
November 16th, 2007 by Peter
After reading several web pages, i found a working solution for using iTunes with a central music collection. The typical wish is to store all MP3 files on a SMB share, and let the different computers access the same iTunes library.
Changing the location of the MP3 storage is supported by iTunes, but it still maintains the music index on the local machine. This leads to the effect that one user can add new files with his iTunes installation, which are then not visible on the other installations, even though the new files are physically accessible.
The solution for this issue is based on the fact that iTunes uses one of the Windows special folders, called “My Music”, to store the user-specific index file. With TweakUI from the Windows PowerToys, you can change the location of the “My Music” folder. So, the following worked for me. We assume that you start with a local iTunes library and some accessible network share:
- Close iTunes.
- Create a new folder “music” on your network share, and move all your MP3 files to this folder.
- Start iTunes, and change the music location to the network folder. Make sure that iTunes stores new and imported files also in this folder. Let iTunes reindex everything.
- Create a new folder “index” on your network share, which will hold the index files.
- Close iTunes, and move the remaining content of your current “My Music” folder to this network folder. For me, it were only the files “iTunes Music Library.xml”, “iTunes Library.itl” and the folder “Album Artwork”.
- Use TweakUI to change the location of “My Music” to the “index” network folder. (“My Computer->Special Folders” option in TweakUI)
- Start iTunes, it should look like before. It takes some time to start and stop the application, since everything is now on the network. Try to avoid parallel access from two iTunes instances. This demands a real iTunes compatible streaming server in the net.
It may also work with a mixed MacOS / Windows network, since the index files are claimed to be compatible. Please, drop a comment if you tried it …
July 25th, 2007 by Peter
After loosing 4 hours of work with a crash of my favourite Latex editor, I looked for a way to get a stupid auto-save function in TexShop. For some strange reason, it is not part of the program. But deeply hidden in the help file, they describe a possibility to enable backup of modified TEX files before typesetting. Just type in the terminal:
defaults write TeXShop KeepBackup YES
June 20th, 2007 by Peter
This blog is currently only updated infrequently, since I spend as much time as possible in finishing my PhD. During writing, you face typically two major problems in Latex: pictures and tables.
I draw my pictures in Visio, since it was the only useful tool with some good UML 2 drawing (not modelling !) support. I export the pictures as PNG, and use ebb.exe from the MikTex distribution to create a bounding box file. The resulting picture can be used by both the DVI previewer and the PDF generator.
For tables I found a nice presentation which helps you in having nicely-looking tables also in Latex.
And for the motivation, I am a frequent visitor of PhdComics  …
June 8th, 2007 by Peter
My iBook has a Mac OS X installation that is configured to run in german language. Many Mac applications rely on the spell checker coming with the operating system, which always results in the same dialog (under “Edit” -> “Spelling”).
Most of the time I need to prepare english documents or Keynote presentations. You can switch the current dictionary for each application, by opening the spell correction dialog window, choosing a different language and simply closing the window.
If you want to avoid switching forward and backward in different applications, you can use the “multilingual” entry in the list of dictionaries. In this case, even the typing spell checker uses all dictionaries at all the time.
December 5th, 2006 by Peter
With all the discussion around Google’s web applications, Apple’s interface layout capabilities and the lack of (visible) innovation in Vista, it is interesting to see how Microsoft tries to get it’s part in these new businesses. Beside the questionable efforts for Windows Live and Office Live, this demo shows how much capabilities are inside the MS company …
http://labs.live.com/photosynth/
September 22nd, 2005 by Peter
After discovering some new cool tools for my iBook in the last days, I would like to give you the list of Mac OS X software which made it to my dock:
iTerm (http://iterm.sourceforge.net/)
SubEthaEdit (http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/)
SSH Agent for Mac (http://www.phil.uu.nl/~xges/ssh/)
TexShop (http://www.uoregon.edu/~koch/texshop/texshop.html)
Adium (http://www.adiumx.com/)
I am still waiting for my Keynote 2 package, maybe this will become the next entry … Office 2004 for Mac looks very nice, but is too slow on a 12” iBook in order to work efficiently …
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