Posts Tagged ‘Mac’

On the safe side of upgrading to OS X 10.5.2

Wednesday, February 13th, 2008

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that there was a process transferring a lot of data at a sustained rate. A glance at Activity Monitor showed that it was the Apple software updater.

A few seconds later, it told me a new update for Leopard was available. I went for it.

Having read reports in the past of isolated problems with upgrades in the 10.4 series, I anxiously waited: Soon, I'll invest in a matching external drive, but at the moment, I keep backups of important files and projects but not my entire machine.

Thankfully, the upgrade process was smooth and went rather quickly. The more-opaque menus are a nice touch right away. I'm sure I'll discover more as time passes.

Two ways to install Mercurial on Mac OSX Leopard

Thursday, January 31st, 2008

I'm back on the OSX platform, using Leopard, even. After a four-month absence, all of the keyboard shortcuts are coming back to me quickly. (The most disruptive I think is the distinction between switching between apps and switching between different windows of the same app.) I'm still within the first 24 hours of installing software and making it "home".

One of the pieces of software I needed to install was Mercurial. I quickly found out that, like many tools ported from elsewhere in the Linux/BSD/etc world, there is more than one way to install the same thing. :)

Install using a native installer

This is the easiest method, because, if you're using Leopard, it's one download and one package installation away.

http://mercurial.berkwood.com/ is a great resource. Scroll down past the Windows section and you will find instructions for Tiger users who haven't yet installed Python 2.5.1. Following that, you will find prepackaged installers for Mercurial, including recent fixes beyond the 0.9.5 release version.

Download the ZIP file you want, open it to extract it (Safari does that part for you), then open the installer (you can right-click in Safari then choose Open). Follow all the usual steps.

Now you can open Terminal and run hg --version to make sure it's installed. Running which hg should return /usr/local/bin/hg for this type of installation.

Install using MacPorts

This method is a little more involved, because you need to first download and install MacPorts, which involves making sure you have the latest Xcode installed. You may have already installed such things if you are a "power user".

Once you have MacPorts set up, run sudo port -v install mercurial from within a Terminal window. It takes several minutes for it to download and install all of the prerequisites that it needs.

When it's done, as noted above, you can use hg --version to make sure it's installed. Running which hg should return /opt/local/bin/hg.

Mac OS X promotes heart disease and cancer

Wednesday, September 12th, 2007

Mac OSX 10.5 "Leopard" still wants us to die of heart disease and cancer

OK, I understand that this is just a modern version of the icon that has been in use for the Stickies application for a while now.

But shouldn't Apple care more about our health, and perhaps change "Eggs" and "Milk" to "Fruit" and "Veggies"? That would be a much more modern subliminal message to send using an application icon, instead of the 1950's -era "eggs are part of a hearty breakfast" and "milk is nutritious" malarkey that is sadly perpetuated to this day.

I'd dig it.

If I were a better artist, I'd create an alternate icon to replace it. For now, I'm just going to keep my icons small, so I don't see what they say. :-)

Auto-adjusting LCD panels with analog connectors in OSX

Wednesday, December 6th, 2006

Usually, LCD panels do a decent job with auto-adjustment when they are connected to an analog video source. Imperfections in the process, though, result in ugly fonts and painful eyes over a period of time.

A good rule of thumb though is that the "busier" the contents of your screen is, the better the display will be able to auto-adjust. It can gain more information from fast-changing input than it can with, say, a huge blob of white text.

If you run Mac OSX and have X11 installed, you can however unleash the best tool I've ever found for running auto-adjust against. You can also do this under Linux (and perhaps most BSDs).

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ScreenRecycler and hextile

Wednesday, November 29th, 2006

When I upgraded ScreenRecycler to version 0.62 (from 0.56 or 0.58 if I recall correctly), I had noticed that there was a newer way of updating the VNC client when lots of changes or movement on the remote display occurred.

Updates would be displayed first as a blob of unreadable pixellation, then would progressively update to match the precise pixels that need to be displayed.

This is bearable, and I can understand why it was done, but I kind of preferred the old method where things would update slightly slower, but where the pixels shown were the final pixels that needed to be there. "Oh well" I thought, and moved on...

...until I kept running into stability issues with it, where the VNC client would lock up, or certain things (or the entire remote display) would stay pixellated.

It turns out that this is probably due to the addition of Hextile encoding in ScreenRecycler, and the subsequent use of that as a default mode, as noted in its release notes.

Turning off hextile encoding in the ScreenRecycler preferences seems to have fixed this instability. I get my preferred way of screen updating back, too :-)

I'm sure the ScreenRecycler author is fixing these issues, and I'll be sure to send a report about this, but I thought other ScreenRecycler users out there might appreciate the tip if they run into the same problem.

screenrecycler rocks

Wednesday, November 29th, 2006

When I started using a Mac, I missed the dual-head video card that was in the Linux box I used to use as my workstation. The DVI connector on the G4 tower was one of the old-school ones that apparently only works with Apple Cinema displays, and the Mini that I use now only has one video output.

So, for a time, I worked with one 1280x1024 display. The Mac experience made up for it, but I sure missed having another head to move stuff to when I'm in DeepHackMode.

Then, along came ScreenRecycler.

In short, it totally rocks! I've set up dual-monitor action at both of my offices.

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