Dedicated to my late brave, beautiful and silly mummy, Debra Ross. I love you mumster.

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Category archive for apple

Because archives are so much easier than having just hundreds of posts on the home page. I learned that the hard way.

Free and open source Mac software goodies

2008.10.07 – 11.51

One of the most common questions I’m asked by people moving over to the Mac (or FreeBSD as the case may be) is what software I use. Truthfully I’ve been mulling over creating a series of blog posts that I can update with new software as I find it for a while now. For want of a better phrase, my recent wipe and reinstall of Mac OS X Leopard on my MacBook Pro and subsequent reinstalling of software gave me the kick in the arse I needed to get this series of posts rolling!

This first post lists all the graphical free and open source software I use and love on my Macs. Over time I’ve been slowly replacing proprietary software with these gems and, while I admit I still need to use commercial software at times, this software is what I use to get virtually all my work done. Not only that, but they’re free as in beer and speech!

Part two (coming soon) consists of free and open source command line Terminal applications you can automatically install from MacPorts that I swear by and love using.

NOTE: This list is not exhaustive, it’s merely a list of free and open source software that I personally use and am endorsing! If you feel I’m missing something important though, feel free to post a comment.

I also understand there’s some overlap in functionality, i.e. Perian and VLC. This is because I’ve always believed in using the right tool for the job, not just using a particular tool because you happen be using it already.

Free and open source software for Mac
Icon Application Use
Camino Fast, lean Mac native Mozilla web browser
possible replacement for Safari, Firefox
UnifyCamino Makes Camino look more Leopard-ish
possible replacement for Tiger-ish Camino
MacVim Advanced Mac native Gvim text editor
possible replacement for TextEdit, Gvim
TrueCrypt Highly secure disk image encryption, supports AES, Twofish, Serpent
possible replacement for Disk Utility encryption
The GIMP Sophisticated photo and image editing
possible replacement for Preview, Photoshop
Inkscape SVG vector graphics editor
possible replacement for Illustrator… almost!
Juice Receiver More sophisticated and more flexible podcast client
possible replacement for iTunes for podcast downloads
Perian Super duper codec pack for QuickTime
possible replacement for dedicated DivX player
VLC I dub it my anime player ^_^
possible replacement for some QuickTime video
Handbrake Slick tool to rip DVDs
possible replacement for… coasters
MacPorts Easy way to install *nix software
possible replacement for… manually compiling!
Xquartz More current X11 for GIMP etc
possible replacement for default bundled X11
By Ruben Schade | Also posted in free and open source, mac os x, reviews | Comments (0)

My kingdom for a bigger notebook hard drive

2008.10.01 – 17.13

An ominous sign of things to come?
An ominous sign of things to come?

It’s crunch time: alas after months of neglect and with so many assignments and projects active and being worked on at any one time, my internal 149 gibibyte (aka 160 gigabyte) hard drive has finally been maxed out. Bummer!

Having used Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD and Mac OS X on computers with drives that are nearing breaking point, I do appreciate how incredibly stable the BSDs and Mac are under capacity stress. By comparison the general wisdom with Windows (at least when I still exclusively used it before 2003) was that you must reserve at least 10% of your drive at all time to maintain stability, NTFS included. By comparison, this MacBook Pro has been close full for a while now and still only EyeTV and the slow as molasses Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac applications are capable of crashing it.

As I’ve discovered the hard way though, notebook computers present their own set of storage challenges! For most of my life I’ve been a desktop computer user; it was only in 2006 when I made the decision as a computer science student studying overseas that a souped up notebook computer would make more sense for taking around to different houses and around campus than a new desktop.

Of course the problem with said notebook computers is that you can’t just easily slide in an extra hard drive when your existing one starts to fill up! Sure you can buy external drives, but they still won’t match the performance of the internal drive. What happens then is I tend to backup material to the external drives, but projects I’m compiling, editing video for or otherwise working on end up staying on the internal drive.

VMware Fusion 2.0 beta 2 New Virtual Machine Assistant
What can I say, I love toying around and exploring operating systems!

This is also a problem for virtual machines which I spend lots of time using and writing about. To satisfy my own addiction and fanaticism for studying operating systems, as well as for my work which involves compiling and testing applications, I have multiple VMs on this internal drive. Running these virtual machines on an external drive is completely out of the question given the performance would really, really suffer. Having 12 virtual machines which combined take up 72GiB on a 149GiB notebook drive though is also completely out of the question!

With my desktops in the past I tended to dedicate a smaller drive with the fastest RPM for the operating system and two larger, equally sized drives mirroring each other (later using RAID instead of software) for the data. On my current desktop back in Singapore which I SSH and SFTP into from here in Adelaide I have FreeBSD 7.0 AMD64 on its own dedicated, 10,000RPM SATAII drive with 32MiB of cache shared with binaries, and two 7,200 RPM drives for the home directories, port collections, documentation and served data. Ideally I’d love to have another super fast drive just for /swap too!

On this laptop I’ve got everything under the sun on one drive. Perhaps partitioning the drive and assigning the /Users directory to a secondary partition might help to compartmentalise the information and improve performance. On BSD and Linux it’s trivial to assign the /home directory to a separate volume, on Mac OS X I’m not so sure. Seems like I have some homework ahead of me!

This much taken up, on a 149GiB internal notebook drive. Bummer!
This much taken up… on a 149GiB internal notebook drive.

Of course it probably wouldn’t hurt cleaning this drive out either. I have a few Ruby scripts which I run each afternoon which cleans up my desktop and puts files in the appropriate places, but it can’t determine what is safe to delete and what isn’t. I need an electronic secretary I think. Make someone sign a NDA, then go through my drive and get rid of things. No, wait… perhaps that isn’t such a good idea.

As my fabulous father always says after ringing me from his office in Singapore which has more paper, books, phone receivers, emails and blood pressure tablets than Parliament House: "All I need is a time machine Ruben… then I’d work just fine"

By Ruben Schade | Also posted in bsd, hardware, mac os x | Comments (1)

Fun with the Mac OS X weather widget

2008.09.27 – 11.29

While rearranging my Dashboard widgets on my MacBook Pro this morning, I accidently stumbled upon a feature in the Weather widget which upon later investigation has already been well documented. At least I felt like an electronic archaeologist for a few minutes!

Regular Dashboard widget showing weather in Mawson Lakes, South Australia
Regular Dashboard widget showing weather in Mawson Lakes, South Australia

If you haven’t tried this out already though, give it a shot:

  1. Fire up your Dashboard, usually with the F12 key
  2. Drag a new Weather widget from the widget bar onto the Dashboard
  3. Hold down the Command/Apple and Alt/Option keys

You now have a widget with the weather set to "Nowhere", and by clicking the picture in the top centre you can change the weather conditions. It was cold and raining before in Rubenerd Nowhere, now it’s snowing!

Altered Dashboard widget showing rain in Nowhere

Altered Dashboard widget showing snow in Nowhere

By Ruben Schade | Also posted in how-to, mac os x | Comments (0)

BeOS, the Amiga, now the iPhone?

2008.09.26 – 11.53

It hurts the brain!
It hurts the brain!

I’ve always thought it’s a tragedy when a beautiful and elegant computer or other device is created that is such a pleasure to use and above everything else on the market, only to be snuffed out or not taken seriously when inept management and legal teams mess up their customer base and public perception by doing daft things, or conversely not doing enough. The Commodore Amiga is one example. The Swatch Smart car is another. BeOS is another. I could go on and on.

Unfortunately it seems Apple’s legal team is doing the same thing with the iPhone. Hooray.

As I’ve recently discussed on Rubenerd Show 252 and in an earlier post here, I’ve made clear how much I love my new toy and how it’s quite possibly the greatest gadget I’ve ever owned. This doesn’t mean I have not been aware of some head-smackingly stupid decisions on Apple’s part over the last few months, not least the issue with blocking some legitimate software from appearing on their Application Store. For those who don’t know what I’m taking about, here’s a summary from Gizmodo dated 12th September:

The latest casualty in Apple’s App Store blacklisting is Podcaster. A native app built according to exact SDK specifications, it goes beyond its creator’s web-bound streaming-only Podcaster.fm by letting you download and manage podcasts in a nice straightforward interface. Insidious, right? Apple thought so.

According to Podcaster’s blog, Apple explained why it booted Podcaster from the App Store: “Since Podcaster assists in the distribution of podcasts, it duplicates the functionality of the Podcast section of iTunes.”

I don’t know what person in Apple thought blocking applications that supposedly copy some functionality in their own software was a good idea from a technical or public relations standpoint, but I suspect the dope their smoking must be awfully powerful!

If this wasn’t ridiculous enough, my forehead hurt even more this morning by bashing it on the table in front of me when I read that not only are Apple blocking some applications for the dubious reason stated above, but their even forcing blocked application developers to keep their mouths shut about it! Do they honestly think this will save them from this public relations nightmare: just censor the people getting screwed over? According to Tech Radar this morning:

Apple has decided that enough is enough when it comes to people publishing the reasons they have had their applications rejected from the App Store.

Where before people wanted to highlight the reasons why their app had been rejected, Apple no longer wants to have its reputation sullied in this manner.

Every time a user now gets a rejection, the message: THE INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THIS MESSAGE IS UNDER NON-DISCLOSURE is displayed clearly in the letter.

I dislike the Google Android platform both from a technical and usability standpoint and think the devices they run on look like they came out of a 1996 computer magazine catalogue, but the one thing they have going for them is that it’s a (mostly) open platform without this nonsense. I prefer using the iPhone but I’m hoping Google can pick up their game and become a real competitor to get Apple back on track.

In the meantime Apple, please don’t repeat history as with so many of the other brilliant software and hardware devices I mentioned at the beginning by stuffing up your device with this nonsense! You’ve already shot yourselves in the foot twice already, for heavens sake, you’re running out of limbs!

Screenshot from my iPhone

By Ruben Schade | Also posted in news, phones, rant | Comments (2)

Okay okay I got an iPhone!

2008.09.25 – 11.41

Over the weekend I travelled to central South Australia to see the magnificent Flinders Ranges which will be the subject of an up and coming post. Unfortunately given the timing the trip eclipsed another event that I must admit was less awe inspiring but nonetheless pivotal and important. Why must my introductory paragraphs always be so useless?

Yes on Saturday I finally walked into a TeleChoice store and signed up for a phone and data contract with Optus for use with a 16GB iPhone 3G. And for convenience I even got the 16GB iPhone 3G itself as well to go with the 16GB iPhone 3G phone and data contract for the 16GB iPhone 3G. The 16GB iPhone 3G is the second generation Apple mobile phone device enabled for 3G networks with a capacity of 16GB that can download data at 3G speeds as well as be used as a phone, hence the name iPhone, surprising though it may seem.

iPhone goodies

I’ve had conflicting feelings about the iPhone since it’s introduction last year, and even dedicated a previous blog post to explaining why I couldn’t own one, not to mention venting my frustration over the number of iPhone posts popping up everywhere, then hypocritically discussed the iPhone being made available in Australia.

Since then the iPhone has been legitimately made available in my home market with the option of unlocking, the iPhone App store has been made available with the new 2.0 software (even if they do seem unnecessarily heavy handed in choosing which software they want to allow) and the Google Android phones, platform and interfaces have failed to impress me on many levels.

Okay okay, I just love Apple hardware design, and the software has obviously been given lots of thought and attention… I admit it, I was won over!

Below is a photo of my iPod evolution from my first 3rd generation 15GB iPod, a 5th generation 60GB video iPod, my 16GB iPhone 3G and my Palm Centro which I’ll still be using for overseas SIM cards. They all still work flawlessly, though saying such a thing I’m sure will fix that!

My iPods and such

ASIDE: As my fabulous grandfather hailing from northern New South Wales once told me: Stupidity looks bad, but hypocrisy universally looks even worse! I must look pretty bad right now!

I still haven’t taken the original plastic protector off the large screen or even the back, though I did get a basic case for it which does make it slightly thicker but I hope will keep it looking better for longer. I tend to carry lots of keys, spare change, hardware, nuclear reactors and other associated material in my pockets and I didn’t want my shiny new gadget damaged!

As for the apparently dreaded keyboard, I’m absolutely loving it. The on-screen keyboard does take some getting used to, but after a few days of hunt and pecking, I’m typing on the screen with my thumbs almost the same speed and accuracy as my Centro, my other favourite phone. An unforeseen benefit is how quiet using an on-screen keyboard is; when I was sharing a motel room in the Flinders Rangers with my dad and sister over the weekend I was able to do some light text messaging without waking anyone up.

Viewing the Adelaide Metro site on the iPhone

But wait, there’s more!

I could spend the next five hours posting more information and stats on the phone itself, but I think it’s safe to say the iPhone already has saturated media coverage! Instead, over the next few days I’ll post more personal experiences with screenshots, photos etc. The Leo Laporte machine hasn’t used the GPS features to find out how to get back to Mawson Lakes from Tea Tree Plaza I’m fairly sure.

I’ll end this "part one" post by saying that not since getting my first Palm OS based phone (the Tungsten W)) have I’ve been so happy with a portable electronic device. You could take the end of that sentence many ways, but I hope you thought of phones.

By Ruben Schade | Also posted in phones, reviews | Comments (4)

Freshly baked Camino 1.6.4 now out

2008.09.24 – 17.47

Camino icons

For the benefit of those who use the greatest web browser on the planet, Camino has been updated to version 1.6.4.

According to the latest release page, the following changes have been made since 1.6.3:

  • Upgraded to version 1.8.1.17 of the Mozilla Gecko rendering engine, which includes several critical security and stability fixes.
  • Camino again displays expiration dates for Certificate Authorities in the Certificates window.
  • Camino no longer reads OmniWeb’s "password not saved" markers in the Keychain as valid accounts.
  • Improved ad-blocking.
By Ruben Schade | Also posted in software | Comments (1)

My OS pipe dream, and HP developing a Linux distro?

2008.09.14 – 18.06

According to a CNET News report, HP is rumoured to be creating an alternative operating system to Windows, based probably on Linux. From the report:

Is the biggest PC vendor in the world looking to give customers an option besides Windows?

An article appearing in BusinessWeek this week cites anonymous sources who say Hewlett-Packard is at least looking into it. “Sources say employees in HP’s PC division are exploring the possibility of building a mass-market operating system,” the article states.

The operating system would reportedly be Linux-based, but would be tweaked to be more accessible to mainstream users.

If this rumour is true, I think it’s a fantastic move on HP’s part. Apple has shown with Mac OS X that a superior user experience can be achieved outside the realm of Windows by leveraging the power of a free and open source operating system under an aesthetic user interface, on hardware created specifically for the OS and vica versa!

What I’ve always said I’d love to see; and this development might be a step in the right direction; is a break from the monoculture of Windows replaced by a mixture of operating systems that can communicate through open standards. This is perhaps a weakness with efforts like Ubuntu, Debain and other GNU/Linux distributions; they are emulating the Windows model with all the problems associated with all the trillions of different combinations of hardware that they could potentially run on. For people like me who revel in tinkering with computers this isn’t a problem, but for people who actually have work to do on their machines and don’t have a degree in computer science it’s just a pain in the arse.

I’m imagining a time in the not too distant future when:

  • there are an interesting assortment of operating systems such as Mac OS X on Apple computers, HP Linux on HP computers, Dell Haiku on Dells, ASUS Minix on EEEs…
  • despite their different architectures they can all exchange documents with each other and read them without trouble
  • they can all run software written for others with little or no modification through compatibility layers and standardised APIs that everyone respects
  • instead of terms being dictated by one software vendor in Redmond, computer hardware companies modify the software for their customers needs
  • computers become nice to use again
  • vanilla versions of operating systems such as Debian GNU/Linux and FreeBSD continue to exist separately (as well as being the foundations of the custom OSs above) for power users and computer enthusiasts, just as sports cars exist for motoring enthusiasts!

I know it’s a pipe dream that will almost certainly never happen. A nerd can dream though right?

And as for the article specifically related to HP exploring other options besides Windows, any chance HP would create an OpenVMS laptop or consumer desktop? That would be a VERY compelling product! Pipe dream number 2!

By Ruben Schade | Also posted in bsd, hardware, linux, mac os x, news | Comments (2)

VMware Fusion 2.0 Release Candidate 1 available

2008.09.01 – 21.32

Screenshot of VMware Fusion 2.0 Release Candidate 1

For those who are also avid VMware Fusion users, you’ll be pleased to know the first Release Candidate for VMware Fusion 2.0 has been released (build number 113392).

For my own selfish needs, I only had three problems with the last beta which I’m hoping this RC has fixed:

Performace Issues with BSD hosts
Linux distributions performed just fine, but X.org in FreeBSD and Xfree86 in NetBSD on my MacBook Pro with 2GiB of RAM took far longer to load and performed worse than my 200MHz Pentium MMX box with 32 megs. This is not an exaggeration!
Folders that don’t disappear
In an attempt to backup my virtual drives as I like to do on a regular basis, I moved a folder from the virtual Windows 2000 machine to my Leopard desktop. Instead of copying over, the folder vanished from the guest, and didn’t appear on the host! One solid week of work down the toilet!
No stretched resolutions
VMware Fusion 1.x did not stretch the guest’s screen resolution when it was lower than the host’s. This meant in full screen there would generally be black bands on the sides, below and above the guest display… which was just fine for me! The Fusion 2.x betas flipped the default configuration so that it stretches the virtual screen which perhaps is useful for gamers but for reading text on an LCD it looks dreadful! As far as I can tell there’s no way to change this in the GUI, and adding lines to my preferences file turning off GuestToHost does nothing.

I might not have much time to look over these issues fully this evening or tomorrow, but I’ll certainly let you know what I find out when I can get back around to it. Stay tuned.

ASIDE: For what it’s worth, I’ve learned my lesson with virtual machine betas: they’re not worth it. Other "beta" products are actually quite usable, but not software like this. In the future I’ll be sticking with the latest stable release, in order to protect my sanity :-)

By Ruben Schade | Also posted in mac os x, virtualisation | Comments (0)
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