Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with macOSX

Does this create a local root exploit for Mac OS X using Finder?

jeffburdges — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 07:01:58 -0800

Why does Apple's Finder bypass some group permissions? A directory /Games is owned by the Games user and Games group and has mode 750. The Admin user may not access /Games from unix programs, like say bash. But said Admin user may happily access /Games from Finder! wtf?!?

I imagine this means Finder is running as gid 0, which seems like a major security risk. I noticed that /Games isn't accessible from Finder if the group is changed to wheel, group 0, which mitigates the most obvious security risks. But a buffer overflow in Finder could surely give gid 0 access! wtf?!?

Really weird Snow Leopard font problem

ferdinandcc — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 21:51:19 -0800

I just upgraded to Snow Leopard, and since then, some of my fonts are MAJORLY screwed up in iWork '09 (Pages, Keynote and Numbers). Specifically, my entire extended family of Hoefler Text.

Here's a screenshot of what my Hoefler Text fonts look like inside Pages:
http://www.ferdinandcc.org/hoefler1.png

(The menu should read as follows: Engraved, Engraved 2, Roman, Roman Alt, Roman SC, Regular, Italic, Alt, Italic SC, Italic Swash SC, etc.)

And here's Hoefler Text in action (Hoefler Text Regular appears fine, but Italic looks screwed up):
http://www.ferdinandcc.org/hoefler2.png

The fonts worked just fine under Leopard, and also work fine in my other apps I've tested them in (TextEdit, Pagehand, Scrivener), and they also show up just fine in Font Book and Fontcase.

Here's what I've tried so far to repair the issue:

1. I reinstalled the fonts. Didn't work.
2. I used AppZapper to get rid of all traces of iWork, then reinstalled iWork off the disc. Didn't work.
3. I repaired disk permissions. Didn't work.
4. I entirely deleted ALL Hoefler Text font files out of both my user/library and my /library. This is where things got really weird. When I deleted Hoefler Text, it quit appearing in Font Book, TextEdit, etc. but in Pages, et. al it was still there!
5. I purchased FontDoctor and scanned my font folders. No problems there. However, when I copied all my Hoefler Text fonts to a folder on my desktop and then scanned that folder alone, it said the fonts were incompatible with this system (but if that's the case, then why do they work in every other application on my Mac, including Font Book?)

Note: the file type is PostScript Type 1 outline font.

These fonts are very important to me, as they're part of my organization's corporate branding guidelines and are used in all our documents and publications!

How do I select what I toggle to in OS X's pop-up windows?

helios410 — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 18:39:36 -0800

Mac OS X Filter: In Finder, when a pop-up menu shows up, say to empty the trash or cancel, I toggle through the buttons/options by pressing tab, but how do I actually select what I toggled to with a keyboard shortcut? '

Case-Insensitive LS on Mac OS X?

WCityMike — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 11:03:27 -0800

Unix mavens: is there a way for ls on a Mac OS X install to alphabetize its listing case-insensitively, while still preserving any other ls flags you may be using? If not, does another ls variant offered by anybody offer case-insensitivity, and if so, how can I supplant one with the other, without risk of any harm to anything else on my system? (If it matters, my shell of choice is tcsh.)

Display Affinity Software for MacOSX?

tomierna — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 10:50:04 -0800

Is there a piece of Mac OS X software which will let me divide a very wide screen up into several virtual displays so window/app affinity hacks like spaces will work? I recently purchased two 24" HD displays, and I'm running them both from my Mac Book Pro via a Matrox Triple Head 2 Go, Digital version (Dual-link DVI)

I love having all of this real-estate - it's truly wonderful for programming.

The problem is that the Triple Head 2 Go makes both monitors present as one huge, wide display to the OS.

This means whenever any centered alerts pop up, they are right in the middle of this giant screen, and split by the bezels.

OK, so it's not the worst thing in the world, I just need to move the window to make it legible.

But, I was wondering if there's any third-party or shareware software out there that will allow me to tune the screen location affinity of apps or windows or alerts.

The real solution to this, I know, is to have a desktop machine with multiple display cards, but that's not happening at the moment.

How do I get rid of a Mac user acct w/o losing files?

Piscean — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 16:35:54 -0800

I have a MacBook Pro running Leopard. It has two admin accounts. Some time ago I stopped using account "A" in favor of new account "B" (the reason behind the creation of account B isn't relevant to this question, however). If I delete user account "A," what precautions must I take to ensure the preservation of the files created under "user A," and what automatically happens to the ownership of those files?

I'm a Python, and I'm a Mac.

reductiondesign — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 18:41:20 -0800

Help me learn Python! On a Mac! I'd like to start getting to really know a programming language, and I've determined Python to be the best choice (it seems to be useful and able to make things and fairly intuitive—if I'm wrong, tell me!). I've got vague backgrounds in Java, a tiny bit of C, and web design.

I'd prefer to avoid the "Learn something else before Python!" speech unless you have a really good reason.

Also, I'm on a Mac. How do I write/compile/etc. in Python? Terminal? Xcode? Something else that's really cool and I'm unaware of?

Thanks so much!

Space for change

ChrisR — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 09:32:22 -0800

How can I reconcile Emacs, Firefox, and Cocoa controls' keyboard navigation, and still use Spaces' keyboard shortcuts? I'm trying to reconcile all of the assorted keyboard navigation shortcuts in a set of OSX applications in such a way as to permit me to use keyboard navigation in them consistenly, as well as supporting Spaces' keyboard shortcuts for navigating spaces. The three classes of apps I use, in order of frequency, are Emacs, Gecko (Firefox 3.5, Thunderbird 3.0 alphas), and cocoa controls. Here, right now, are the key mappings in place:

Emacs (Carbon Emacs, in particular):
shift-(left/right): move left/right a frame
shift-(up/down): move up/down a frame
ctrl-(left/right): move left/right a word
ctrl-(up/down): move up/down a paragraph
cmd-(left/right): move left/right a word
cmd-(up/down): move up/down a line, scrolling
opt-(left/right): Same as unmodified keys
opt-(up/down): Same as unmodified keys

Firefox/Thunderbird:
shift-(left/right): move left/right, extending selection
shift-(up/down): move up/down, excending selection
ctrl-(left/right): No effect
ctrl-(up/down): No effect
cmd-(left/right): move to the beginning/end of a line
cmd-(up/down): move to the beginning/end of a text widget's content
opt-(left/right): move left/right a word
opt-(up/down): No effect

TextEdit:
shift-(left/right): move left/right, extending selection
shift-(up/down): move up/down, excending selection
ctrl-(left/right): move to the beginning/end of a line
ctrl-(up/down): move to the beginning/end of a text widget's content
cmd-(left/right): move to the beginning/end of a line
cmd-(up/down): move to the beginning/end of a text widget's content
opt-(left/right): move left/right a word
opt-(up/down): move to the beginning/end of a line

Ideally, looking at the setup in emacs, I want to configure Spaces to use opt-(arrow-keys) to navigate, since that will have the least impact upon my regular workflow. To that end, I need to configure Firefox/Thunderbird/Cocoa controls to move left/right a word when ctrl-(left/right) is pressed; the paragraph support would be nice, but not necessary. Is this possible?

Is there a way to reduce the margins between pages when printing two pages per sheet in Leopard / OSX?

phyrewerx — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 17:25:07 -0800

Is there a way to reduce the margins between pages when printing two pages per sheet in Leopard / OSX? I am trying to print two A4 pages on to one sheet of paper. In the standard Mac print dialogue, there's an option to print two pages on to one sheet of paper, (or 4, or 6). When printing n pages on a sheet, the os tends insert its own padding between the pages, increasing the margins/space between the two pages on one sheet. Is there any way to reduce this margin? Maybe some plist hackery?

Faster way to upload to Amazon S3?

DakotaPaul — Wed, 20 May 2009 09:10:12 -0800

Is there another way to upload ~15GB of data to Amazon S3 besides my slow DSL line? I signed up for an Amazon S3 account for off-site backups and am using Panic's Transmit to upload ~15GB of data. My AT&T Pro DSL connection tops out at about 50KB/s during uploads (according to Transmit), so this is going to take forever. Do I have any other options?

I'm running Mac OS X 10.5.7 and am also backing up to an external drive via Time Machine.

Please help me fix my workflow

kenbennedy — Tue, 12 May 2009 12:13:50 -0800

Why can I only sometimes drag and drop images from Aperture into Photomatix? I have a Canon 40D, and shoot my images in RAW format. I have an Intel Macbook Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz, 4GB of ram, and am running OSX 10.5.5. I generally import my images to Aperture using a card reader (using the import function in Aperture, not by first putting them on my hard disk).

When Importing, I choose the folder on my HD to store the pictures using Aperture's dialogues. I like to take bracketed exposures on my camera and try to make HDR images using Photomatix (emphasis on try, there is deifinitely a learning curve). If I am browsing through Aperture, I can sometimes drag the images right from Aperture into the Photomatix workflow/dialogue boxes, but sometimes not. I believe that if the images in Aperture are in the original location they were imported to, they drag and drop just fine, and Photomatix does a very speedy job of processing them. If, however, I use Aperture to relocate the master files (i.e. on my hard disk, into another folder), then I can no longer drag and drop them from Aperture to Photomatix. Why? What did I break? How do I fix it?

I am trying to allow Aperture to do the RAW conversion, since it is faster than Photomatix. With respect to the images in question, I have not exported them or converted them first, they are still RAW images. Thank in advance for your help.

Can I play CivIV mods on the mac?

ChrisR — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 13:29:47 -0800

Do Civilization IV mods such as Fall From Heaven and Fall From Heaven 2 work in the Mac OSX version of Civ IV? If so, how do I install them?

Buffalo Terastation

theyexpectresults — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 10:17:02 -0800

What is the best way to use Japanese filenames on NAS drive in Mac OS X? I have a Buffalo Terastation NAS (model TS-1.0TGL/R5), and have some trouble with filenames which include japanese characters. When I mount the drive with SMB, any filenames with japanese characters are not displayed properly (I see those gobbledegook wingding type characters). Any attempt to copy files (with japanese characters in the name) to the drive fails. When I mount the drive with AFP, things seem to work ok but I am then stuck with the fact that AFP does not support files larger than 2GB.

Can anyone point out why I get this problem with SMB, but not AFP? I am also considering setting up the terastation as an NFS server (which takes some work I think), does anyone know if this would make a difference?

Also tried changing the "encoding" option when I mount with SMB, this seems to make no difference at all. I have no trouble using japanese filenames generally within mac os, only on this NAS drive. When I use the drive in windows, I can read and write with no problem at all.

I looked at a bunch of terastation forums, but struggled to find any help for someone needing to use both japanese and access from mac os x. I am using firmware 1.12 (Japanese), which I believe uses Samba v3. Tried a bunch of other firmware versions, none seemed to help.

Thanks for any help.

How can I transfer text and pdf files to my iPhone?

zardoz — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 17:30:38 -0800

Transferring files (namely txt and pdf files) to the iPhone 3G, how is it done? I broke it out of jail already, so what's my next step? I have an Intel iMac running Leopard and a 3G iPhone. I "jailbroke" the thing the other day with the Pwnage Tool and have a few Cydia apps running.

What I am really interested in is reading txt and pdf files on this iPhone, really the main reason I jailbroke it in the first place. There are some good ebook readers like Stanza, eReader, and Kindle on the iTunes app store, but I need help in transferring the pdf or txt file from my iMac to the iPhone and able to be read by one of those book readers.

I've seen a few methods in which you use WiFi, but alas, I don't have a WiFi connection, so that's out. I've tried out PhoneView, but it doesn't seem to be the right program for the job.

So to reiterate, how can I transfer the txt and pdf files on my computer to my iPhone and read them with an ebook reader?

Using Garmin GPS II Plus with Mac OS X

jcdill — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 14:07:18 -0800

It is possible to transfer waypoint data from an old Garmin GPS II Plus model to a MacBook Pro running Mac OS X 10.5? I was given this old GPS. I don't have the data cable. I want to be sure I can transfer data to my MacBook Pro running OS X 10.5 before I go in search of the data cable. The specs say the cable only works with a Windows PC with an open Comm Port. See: http://www.amazon.com/Garmin-Plus-MultiTrac8-Personal-Navigator/dp/B00000DM9D

But a lot of products *say* that but work just fine on a Mac - they just aren't "supported" on the Mac. If the Mac sees the Garmin as a drive device and can copy the .gpx file I'm good to go. Does anyone know if this is possible?

Also, the Garmin cable has a serial port connection - what connector/adapter will I need to connect it with a MacBook Pro?
Serial-to-USB?

How to sanely migrate email messages from Apple's Mail.app to Google Apps' GMail

Wild_Eep — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 17:34:07 -0800

How do I move around 2000 messages from Apple's Mail.app (10.4) to a Google Apps (Premier) GMail account quickly and efficiently? Maintaining the received dates and any miscellaneous attachments is a must.

I'm helping a company move their 35 employees with traditional POP download-it-to-your-hard-drive-then-delete-it-from-the-server accounts to Google Apps-based GMail accounts. They opted for the Premier ($) version of Google Apps.

I know about enabling the GMail account's IMAP service, then adding the IMAP account to Mail.app, and then dragging in your messages. When I tried that, it took hours upon hours to move very few messages, often timed-out for no good reason, and even with the activity window open, didn't give very detailed feedback about the progress of the operation. The company has a "business-class" DSL line. Speedtest.net reports that they're getting 300 kbps upstream from their office to San Francisco. (I assume Google's servers are somewhere in San Francisco.)

I'm willing to convert the mailboxes to some other format (mbox, etc.) and use a PC tool. Google themselves provide a tool to suck in messages from an existing IMAP server (which doesn't help directly), or Google Email Uploader, which only seems to work with Outlook, Outlook Express, or Thunderbird. I've also heard about IMAPSync, but I'm not certain it will do what I want.

I do have a PC available, if needed. For the Mac, I do have Emailchemy available.

Please help this n00b get his Mac OSX back!

war wrath of wraith — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 16:50:05 -0800

Help me get my OSX back! Ubuntu/Mac questions inside. Ok, so I did one of those very stupid things that is probably fairly easily fixable but is still a major pain in the butt, especially to someone who knows nothing about Mac OS.

I was playing around with the Ubuntu LiveCD and wanted to try the USB drive installation. Instead of choosing "Create a USB startup disk" option, I started an "Install", thinking that it would give me that option.

I stopped before any damage was done, but when I tried to boot back into my Mac OS there was no boot disk present. I suspect that the Ubuntu install, even though I aborted it, still repartitioned my Mac HD.

So I booted back into the Ubuntu, and started up GParted. I wanted to check with the experts here before I did anything colossally stupid.

I see:

/dev/sda1  |   fat32   | EFI | 200.00MiB | ... | boot
/dev/sda2  |   hfs+    |     |  74.21GiB | ... |
unallocated|unallocated|     | 125.53MiB | ... |

I'm guessing sda2 is my MacHD, and that I need to set the flag to 'boot'. But I don't recognize the other partitions, and when I untag the 'boot' flag from sda1, it turns into 'msftres', something I also don't recognize.

I am running Ubuntu 8.10, and my Mac OSX was 10.4 (if I remember correctly--it's the OS just before the newest one).

Can someone please help me get my Mac OSX back? While I'm not a complete tech n00b, where partitions and other OSs are concerned I feel rather helpless.

Mac backup DVD software

jcdill — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 20:28:51 -0800

I need recommendations for Mac backup / archive software to make DVDs that fill each DVD to capacity with files from a group of folders. I'm using a MacBook Pro with OS X 10.5. I've searched the archives, but I can't find any recent posts on this topic - most of the threads I read were 2-3 years old, or older.

I am a pro photographer, and I have 2 TBs of photos stored on external drives. Periodically I backup data from my laptop to the current external drive, and also make DVDs so I have 2 copies of all files, on 2 different media (DVD, hard drive) which I can store in 2 places (here, and offsite). I need a solution that will take a group of ~10-40 folders, and make DVDs filling up each DVD as it goes. I also need to know what files were on each DVD - a plain text index file that I can write to the first or last DVD in each burn set would suffice.

Bonus if the software is open source or free software. Compression is not important - RAW photo files don't compress very effectively.

I'm NOT interested in using online archive services such as .mac (MobileMe) or Amazon's S3. With 2 almost TBs of data, growing by many GBs every month, the monthly hosting fees for these services are not within my budget.

Back my Mac up online

c:\awesome — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 10:46:37 -0800

What's the best software for automated online backups for OSX? I have a Dreamhost account with unlimited storage and transfer, and I'd like to use that as a place to remotely backup the data on my Macbook Pro (mostly photos from iPhoto). MobileMe is a ripoff.

You'd think there'd be a nice piece of software that runs in the background and allows me to set a few directories to be synced, and any additions to those folders are automatically reflected online. True? Something that uses SSH or FTP, maybe?

I know about rsync but I'm stupid and I want a GUI.

What are my options?

Scrunched up Firefox bookmarks!

Fiat124 — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 08:54:57 -0800

Firefox 3.0.5 on MacOSX 10.5.5: How do I make the Bookmarks Pulldown Menu Wider? I cant read half of my bookmarks because the dropdown is too narrow. When I click Bookmarks on the title bar, the dropdown menu is VERY narrow. I can only read maybe 40 characters of titles to my bookmarks and a lot of them have LONG titles. I would like the dropdown to show 80-100 characters if possible.

I tried what was suggested here and here but it doesnt make any difference.

Here is my userChrome.css:

@namespace url("http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul"); /* set default namespace to XUL */

/* change maximum width of bookmarks menu items - default is 26em */
menu.bookmark-item,
menuitem.bookmark-item {
max-width: 99em !important;
}

Located under ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/blahblah.default/chrome

The file is also owned by me and permissions are 644.

Any ideas?

Install Mac OX X "Tiger" onto blue-and-white G3?

ancientgower — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 11:08:51 -0800

I have an old blue-and-white G3 tower that is still running OS 8.6 (!) and I'd like to install Tiger on it to use as an in-house web server. However, it doesn't have an internal DVD drive, and recent attempts to use an external DVD drive failed. Any suggestions on how I might work around this?

How to automate FTP user creation with Pure-FTPd on Mac OS X?

lion — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 07:10:44 -0800

How to automate FTP user creation with Pure-FTPd on Mac OS X (running Apache) retrieving usernames and passwords from another http (linux) server? I have made for a client a website with user registration feature, hosted on a shared linux hosting.

The client of the website has an internal always turned-on Mac with XAMPP and Pure-FTPd running on OS X, connected to Internet with a static IP.

In the website, I can create a button/link which connects with phpWebFTP (a nice web FTP client) installed in htdocs on the Mac server, which connects to the FTP server (pure-FTPd) on the same machine (localhost, i.e. the Mac server); the link/button can send the username, and phpWebFTP will ask for the password. No problem on this side.

Said that, I need this: when a user registers on the website (maybe not in the very same moment, even at regular intervals is good enough), an FTP account should be created on the Mac server, with same username/password used for registration.
So I need some sort of chron job, script, reading a file from the linux server, etc... well, I don't know!

I have found the following useful page on Pure-FTPd documentation:

README.Virtual-Users

Unfortunately, I need pretty detailed and straightforward instructions on what to do on the Mac side, because:

- I am not a Mac user (but I am comfortable with terminal, command-line utils and this sort of things)

- the internal Mac server is located in a pretty distant place from me

- I have a limited amount of time to put my hands on the server, after which I have to schedule a new trip

So, for the linux shared hosting php part no details needed; for the Mac server part, something like a tutorial would be very appreciated.
Thanks, sincerely

How to Create Non-Paginated PDFs from Current Webpage of Firefox?

WCityMike — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 11:54:24 -0800

Is there a Firefox extension, or Mac app that can work with what is currently on Firefox, which will export the current webpage as a PDF file that is not paginated and reproduces the screen appearance, such as what Saft's "Export PDF" feature offers for Safari? The Saft plugin for the Macintosh version of Apple Safari offers a feature called "Export PDF" in which the page is exported as one long PDF file. The PDF file is not like the one you might get by picking "Save as PDF..." from the PDF menu on the Print dialog; it works off the screen version of the current webpage. This webpage more accurately describes, and gives you a visual example of, the feature.

This is perfect for my archiving purposes; it retains the text as text, so that I can then highlight it or annotate it using Skim, yet leaves the result near-identical to the original. The only problem? I don't use Safari any longer. I currently use a very klutzy process of passing the URL over to Safari using Safari View and then having a macro pick the contextual menu item, do the renaming, and so on. The problem is that if the timing is imperfect due to system lag, or if a new extension has rearranged the order of items in the contextual menu, the macro misbehaves. I'd much prefer to have a Firefox-native solution, or an Apple application that will work directly with Firefox.

Saving the URL as an image, such as is currently offered by some extensions and Mac applications (such as Paparazzi), is not a useful solution to me because it does not preserve the text as text within the document.

Thanks!

Need to connect Wii and Blu-ray to wireless Mac network

DakotaPaul — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 09:38:27 -0800

I'm clueless about wireless home networks. Please help this Mac user get his Wii and Blu-ray player connected to one. I have an iMac running Mac OS X 10.5 connected to a DSL modem. In another room, I have a Wii and will soon be getting a Blu-ray player that can connect to a network. What do I need in order for everything to be able to connect to the Internet? I'm assuming a wireless router plugs into the DSL modem, but what do I plug the Wii and Blu-ray player into?

Also, I like the idea of streaming iTunes to my stereo, which sits next to the Wii and Blu-ray, via AirTunes. Can I do this and everything else I need using AirPort Express? Or AirPort Extreme? What would I need besides the base station? If I don't go the AirTunes/AirPort route, what's a good wireless router that will like my Mac?