Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with osx and macintosh

Writer meets arthritis

grumblebee — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 11:18:40 -0800

Mac voice-recognition software for a writer with arthritis. My father's arthritis is making it more and more difficult for him to type. This is hard for him, because he's been a writer for decades (over 25 books and countless articles). He is considering switching to voice-recognition software.

Here are some things to note:

- He is originally from England but has lived in the US since the 1950s. He is a very clear speaker, but his accent is a mix of British (cockney originally) and American.

- He owns a Mac.

- He is not highly computer literate, but he lives in a university town and could find people to help him set things up if necessary. He probably will have trouble if the voice-recognition software itself is overly complicated to use.

I am looking for any advice and experiences with this. What is the state of the art these days? What's available for the Mac? What is the experience like for people who are heavy users?

Options for a small & cheap Mac laptop?

attercoppe — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:01:07 -0800

What are my options for a cheap, small Mac laptop? I'm on a tight budget, but would love to get a laptop. I've been looking at netbooks because I love the light weight and small size. However, I may be about to get a job at my school, which basically is an Apple campus, so now I'm considering a Mac instead. I'd still like to find something cheap, small and light, and with some serious battery life. Of course one option is to buy a used or refurbed Mac (maybe an Air?). Could I also buy a netbook and install OS X? Or install some *nix - how compatible (not look and feel but interoperability) would this be?

P.S. I could probably do some research and get some good info, but I thought I'd see what ya'll can tell me first. I've read other questions here, and they seem to be either out of date or about desktops (or both).

Latency? This. Is. Infiniteloop!

selfnoise — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 12:28:23 -0800

Help me try and fix my mother's weird internet/Mac Mini issue. So, my mother has a Mac Mini. This is one of the older PowerPC ones... no wireless. It's connected via a cat5 cable to a ZyXel wireless router, which is then connected to a DSL modem. The problem she has is a delay between requesting a webpage and having it start to load (in any web browser). Since I am a Windows user, I don't know much about Macs, so I am at a loss.

Pertinent factoids:

-When I go to dslreports.com and run a speed test, I get a latency of between 500-900ms, which seems really high.

-When I ping google.com from within OS X's network dialog, however, the latency looks normal.

-My netbook and another Windows PC can connect wirelessly without this issue. I also connected my netbook to the router using the same cat5 cable; no issue.

-I tried setting the DNS servers to opendns instead of the default; no change.

Apparently the system did not originally have this issue. Any ideas?

Looking for a printer without the problems of finicky ink.

blueberry — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 21:36:09 -0800

[MomFilter] Looking for a reasonably cheap, reliable printer (for printing text) for an iMac. Leaning towards laser as the experiences with inkjets have been that bouts of little use lead to still full, yet dry and thus worthless ink cartridges. Looking for a printer for my Mom's iMac. She is wanting to print up a bunch of stories she has written, so the printer will only be used for text.
(No need for color, an attached scanner, or anything else)

She's had two cheap inkjets in the past where they were cheap to buy, but then you got gouged on the ink cartridges. These printers would up being a bit like "disposables" or white elephants—either getting gummed up after a while, or she'd not print anything for a month or two by which time the ink would have dried up or otherwise stopped working.

Fellow MeFites, do you own or know of any reasonably cheap (both pre- and post-sale), reliable b/w laser printers that you can recommend out there? Also, am I correct in guessing that laser toner has a longer "shelf life"?

Or, if lasers are too spendy, do you own or can you otherwise recommend an über-reliable inkjet that, say, you can just buy black ink for, and you've never had gum up or dry up on you?

Thanks all!

How do I expand Now Compress archives?

NewGear — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 20:26:43 -0800

I'm trying to find a way to expand a file that's in an ancient Mac archive format (Now Compress). So I find myself needing to access some files I created back in the mid-1990s. Back then, I had everything on floppies (remember them?) which later on got archived on Jaz discs (remember those?) which were in turn copied over onto cds. There's a bunch of things in those files that I now find myself wanting to access.

Only problem is, most of the files have a ".now" extension. As I recall, that's the extension "Now Compress" used for their archived files. Fort hose that don't remember, Now Compress was part of "Now Utilities", which used to be THE utility package for the Mac back in the OS9 days. Now Compress was sort of Now's "Stuffit" program. It could compress files automatically, create archives, etc. I can barely find information on Google about the old program, let alone any suggestions of how to handle these files nowadays.

So the question is, does anybody know of a program that runs under today's OSX that can expand these files? I'm in a quandry!

Many thanks...

Baby got too much back

lukemeister — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 08:53:41 -0800

How can I consolidate all my pictures, music, pdf files, etc. from multiple drives? I have about 10 external drives containing photos and so forth. Different drives contain some duplicates, but the individual drives do not. Say I want to copy the files from DRIVE1, DRIVE2, etc. to UBERDRIVE, which has room for everything. My first thought was

cd /Volumes/DRIVE1; find . -name "*.jpg" -exec cp {} /Volumes/UBERDRIVE/Pictures/ \;

and then repeating the process for DRIVE2 and so on.

I tried this for DRIVE1, and it seems to be really slow. (It's taken 10 hours thus far to find 100,000 jpgs on a new MacBook Pro.) Also, I think my current procedure will overwrite files with the same name, even if they're different files.

Does anyone have a better approach? Thanks!

I'm running Leopard, but I also have machines running Vista, XP, and Fedora 10.

Quicksilver loses track of moved files. Why no?

middleclasstool — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 18:48:12 -0800

How can I get Quicksilver to keep track of files that have moved? I'm running QS B54 on OS X Leopard, and love the heck out of it, but I have only one problem with it (beyond some minor buggy lack of functionality since a1c0r stopped supporting it, anyway). The problem is that I'm also running Hazel, and I have a rule set up that scans for anything in my Documents folder that's been untouched for more than n weeks and moves it to a subfolder labeled "Archive." Keeps only new and relevant stuff in Documents, so it's easier to browse.

However, I've noticed that after Hazel moves a file, QS can't see it anymore. If I go browsing for a file in my archive folder and manually open it, then QS again has it indexed, but I'd rather (if this is possible) somehow configure QS so it keeps track of the file or folder even after it's been archived. Is there a way to do this?

La Cie external drive failure

gen — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 17:27:01 -0800

Mac, Leopard, La Cie external hard disk drive spins but does not mount. What's my best option for getting data off this drive? I've got an external La Cie drive that won't mount. I've tried 3 of the 4 interfaces (USB 2.0, FW400, FW800) but cannot get this disk to mount. What are my best options for getting this data before retiring this drive?

Waiting for Migration Assistant

pzarquon — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 17:28:38 -0800

I started migration assistant before I knew how long it would take. Am I screwed? So we finally got the new MacBook Pros in Honolulu, and I took my lunch break to get one. (Yes, after this question, I decided to wait and go new.) Got back to my desk, connected the MBP to my old MacBook via FireWire 400-to-800 cable, and started Migration Assistant.

Except it says it will take 6 hours, and I need to unplug in three, and there ain't no cancel button.

Yes, I know, I should've waited 'til I got home. (Could you? Don't answer that.) Yes, I know, I should've just selected my apps (which is what I most wanted migrated, I could get my giant documents and other folders later). But the button was pushed and now I'm wondering:

1. If I unplug the MacBook and MBP and run on battery, will the Migration Assistant continue? Or is it something that will only function on AC power?

2. If for whatever reason the Migration Assistant dies, does it recover gracefully?

3. How accurate is the time estimate? It actually went up from six hours to six hours and 40 minutes (making me panic even more), then seems to now be dropping faster than realtime. Though I've also read elsewhere that last one percent actually takes a big chunk of time.

I'm confident in Migration Assistant after reading positive comments here. But all the tutorial videos I've found conveniently skip the long wait part of this process!

how to post myspace comments to multiple friends on a mac?

binocularfight — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 09:57:40 -0800

is there an application that works on a mac that will allow me to post comments to multiple myspace friends at once? myspace is such a pain in my ass. i'm managing a page for this all girls bicycle gang in milwaukee, and we need to send out comment postings to our members pretty regularly. we have about 175 friends, so it takes me FOREVER. i know there are programs that work on a pc that will allow you to post comments to multiple people at a time. the problem is i have a mac (specifically, a powerbook g4 running os x 10.4.11). is there anything i can use on a mac that will allow me to post comments to all my myspace members at once? or at least a bunch of my members at once? i'm hoping i don't have to install virtual pc to do this. but if that's the only way, what kind of experience have you had with virtual pc? can i trust it?

How to unzip my iTunes Library backup?

wheat — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 10:43:12 -0800

OS X filter: How can I recursively unzip files (in directories that are not zipped)? One of my hard drives died, and took my iTunes Library with it (thanks, LaCie). Luckily, I have a backup (made with SyncBack while I was still on WinXP). I had zip-compression enabled in my backups, on a file-by-file basis. So what I'm left with is an iTunes library of uncompressed folders that contains individual mp3 files that are compressed (.zip, not .gzip). And, yeah, I know, compressing files that are already compressed is stupid, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.

I'm on OS X now, and I want to uncompress all of these and then drop them into iTunes. "gunzip -r *" doesn't work because they're in .zip (rather than .gzip). "unzip -r *" doesn't work because the directories are not also zipped.

Can anyone help me with a little shell script magic to traverse these directories and unzip everything? Or is there some other unzip utility out there that can handle this easily?

#@$%!!! Flash!!

serazin — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 21:17:21 -0800

Annoyingly specific question about a failed Flash installation on a Mac: 1. Some website told me to update flash. In retrospect, I think I already had version 9, but I went to the Adobe sight and downloaded the installer for power PC Macs anyway.
2. The installer opens fine and then gets to "Items remaining to be installed: 4" and just stops. Nothing happens from there even if left all night.
3. So I go download the UNinstaller. Downloads fine, but when I open it, my computer freezes - every time.
4. Have tried restarting computer several times.
5. Opened Terminal and put in:
cd "/Volumes/Adobe Flash Player 9/Install Flash Player 9 UB/Contents/MacOS"
It says: No such file or directory

sudo "./Install Flash Player 9 UB"
It says: command not found

6: For the hell of it, I also used Disk Utility to Repair Disk Permissions.

Computer Specs: iBook G4, Power PC, OS 10.4.8. I mostly use Firefox 2 but also have Safari and Explorer.

Flash does not work at all on my computer now, which is a problem. Any suggestions would be appreciated! I also welcome you to tell me a better forum for this question! Thank you! !!

Good emulators for OS X Intel?

NucleophilicAttack — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 18:54:20 -0800

Please recommend good entertainment console emulators for Mac OS X Intel. I used to use zsnes, nesticle, ultraHLE, Bleem, etc. a few years ago under DOS and Wintel, but I'm no longer sure what the applications of choice are under OS X Intel.

Please suggest whatever is best from the free/open, and payware sides.

Thanks!

Currnet Macintosh OS X vulnerabilities or exploits?

loquacious — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 15:36:01 -0800

What is the current state of the art in Macintosh OS X vulnerabilities, exploits and other remote security issues? I'm a recent convert to OS X, and I'm fairly familiar with Unix/Linux/BSD - however, my primary work and IT experience is with Windows.

As such, I like to stay informed of these issues - and I also like experimenting with my own machines - and I like to feel more secure about the machines I use by knowing what is and isn't possible.

What's new? What should I be aware of as an IT consultant and support tech? What can I experiment with at home?

I'm particularly interested in buffer overflow exploits, pings-o-death and other remote DoS or TCP/IP stack attacks.

Automator workflows for Excel

lackutrol — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 16:50:41 -0800

Automator as an antidote to Excel tedium. Can you help me get through repetitive tasks with favorite Automator tricks in Leopard? I would like to be able to open a new Excel workbook, create worksheets based on an existing list, and copy formatting to each sheet. Can you point out Web resources for an Automator amateur, whether general or for Excel in particular?

Entourage database corrupted

londongeezer — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 11:24:59 -0800

Corrupted Entourage database: what can I do (Mac)? OS X 10.4.5: Entourage 10 (part of Office X), 2001 (I think, at least that's the installation year). Trying to launch Entourage brings up the message "Entourage cannot access your data. To attempt to fix the problem, rebuild your database." There are two rebuilding options, Typical Rebuild and Advanced Rebuild. Choosing either of them brings up the message "An error occurred while launching. Mail error." After which the only option is OK and the program quits.

Anything I can do? I am aware of this thread (http://ask.metafilter.com/25790/Corrupted-Database - sorry, no link-formatting button), and I have mailed the originator of Entouraid, which appears no longer to be in development and not accepting payments to unlock it (although a trial version, allowing you to retrieve the first 20 emails is still available - it seems to work btw). I've run disk utility. But are there any other options?

Shrinking and JPG'ing images to a certain FILE size?

blueberry — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 04:22:39 -0800

Wondering if there's a Mac OS X program that I could drop an image file on and tell it "Make me a 'best quality' JPEG out of this that winds up being no more than 10 mb in size". I have a couple of hundred scanned family photos that I want to put up on my Flickr account. Most of the scans are anywhere from 25 to 100mb TIFFs. Many of the photos I'm uploading are things like group photos from the '20s—where you can only just make out a 10-year-old great-uncle in the back row—so I want to keep as much of the details as possible.

Up to now, I have been opening up each file separately in ImageReady 7.0, resizing it, and saving it as a "100%" quality JPG (my aim being to have the largest/highest-quality versions on Flickr, yet still be under Flickr's 10mb per image limit).

Unfortunately, this means a lot of time wasted with hit-and-miss ImageReady resizing

(resize -> wait for resize -> click optimize -> wait for JPEG optimization = result usually being either too small (say, 7 megs, so not as large a photo as I could conceivably upload) or the file size still being over 10mb).

Right now, I find I am able to do only a few in an hours worth of time (fortunately I've had a boatload of podcasts to keep me company).

While Flickr's own FlickrUploadr has the option to shrink the image size of oversized JPGs (down to widths of 2048—pretty much ensuring that the files will be way under 10mb), I don't see any third party uploaders that let you specify a target file size.

Any ideas? Is this something that could possibly be done using Automator?

Is a new iMac enough for a graphic designer?

jeff-o-matic — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 12:41:24 -0800

New iMac: Good enough for a graphic designer? Convince me it isn't. I'm an art director/graphic designer at a mid-size ad agency. We use Macs at the office, and I'd like to be able to sometimes take home work for myself so I'm not always stuck doing it at work. Right now at home, I have an old G4 Powerbook that I use for surfing the web and as a music player. Definitely too small and unworthy to use for the pro that I am now.

I'd primarily use it to do Photoshop work and Indesign layouts. The kind of Photoshop I do is mostly for comps, so no crazy huge files or detailed retouching work. Indesign would be used to do storyboards, and sometimes collateral stuff, though I'd like to be able to do more than just that. Realize that I'm not looking to set up a full-time professional graphic design office at home- I just want to be able to do work there, and also be able to put my book together to look for new work. I'd also be using it to do stuff for my wife's business... Signage and card layout, simple elements for web design (I don't know interactive). I also want something that will be powerful enough to not be outdated in a couple years.

So I'm looking at the new crop of iMacs. Considering what I was looking to (possibly, down the road) spend on a G5 tower and separate monitor, these seem like a great choice. I'd be willing to shell out for the 24" model, probably just the 2.4GHz and max out the RAM to 4GB. Throw in a wireless keyboard and the AppleCare plan, it puts me at $2948. I get a 10% deal on macs through work, so it'd be around $2600.

Yeah I'll have to shell out a load of cash for Adobe CS3, but I was going to anyway.

Plus, I can set it up in our spare bedroom and not take up much space. I can connect wirelessly to the net, another minor plus. I'd rather buy a couple portable drives to take stuff back and forth, so I don't need more storage.

What am I unsure of? For one thing, the graphics card. I don't really know much about these in general. It comes with an ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO with 256MB of GDDR3 memory. I copied and pasted that out of their website. I don't know what it means or how it would affect what I need it to do.

Also, should I max out the processor as well, or just go with the 2.4GhHz?

What else am I missing? Is there any reason this wouldn't be a smart choice for me? Will it still be good to use a few years from now? To maybe freelance from if I lost my job? To put my book together to find a new job?

I don't want to cheap out on a computer and I don't want to just get by. But like I said, I don't need to pump out massive quantities of work on it either.

Thanks for your insights and replies. If I think of other questions about this, I'll post them here.

Please help me run OS 9 on my desktop

interrobang — Tue, 22 May 2007 09:59:43 -0800

I'm feeling nostalgic after having gotten this to work, and I was wondering if it's possible to make the OS 9 "Classic Environment" run in a separate window within OSX. I have two monitors, and I think it'd be neat if on one side I could have the old-timey OS 9—its own hard drive and desktop image and everything—running in its own, separate window, without running an emulator. I'm not really sure how to google for this (and I have been trying) because everything I'm finding is about running Basilisk II and the like to emulate an older system.

I'm talking about the Classic environment that's already on my G5, running in its own window. Is this possible? Thanks!

Learning about old Thai movie theaters

blueberry — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 16:49:27 -0800

Is there some sort of Mac program that can monitor a web forum and update me when there are new posts? There's a Thai movie forum where a lot of people post images of old Thai movie theaters and posters. I'm interested in these, but don't want to have to go in and select each thread on a regular basis (I can't read Thai) to search for them. I tried using SiteSucker once or twice but each time it's run it has to visit each page on the site. Not only does that take forever, I don't want to be hitting them with unneeded sitewide traffic.

Maybe I'm thinking of something like RSS, where it has to actually be set up by the site itself, but I thought I'd ask just in case anyone had any ideas.

Thumbthing's wrong with my iMac's USB ports

baltimore — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 13:28:34 -0800

OSXFilter: Because AskMeFi is where all the coolest Mac nerds hang... On my iMac 24", USB thumb drives and memory cards are failing when copying files. The specific symptom is that the file transfer will hang, and the only way to recover is to manually remove the device from the port. This happens regardless of whether the device is plugged into the back of the iMac, or into a powered hub.

And, to make the issue extra-difficult to diagnose, it doesn't happen all the time.

Behavior replicates across two different user accounts on the machine, so it's not specific to one login.

Is there some kind of diagnostic tool to run or a driver I can replace? Apple's hardware disagnostic disc comes up problem-free.

And, yes, I've tested the USB devices on other Macs and they work fine.

Thanks in advance, hive mind.

who watches the watchees?

luriete — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 12:07:52 -0800

Can anyone recommend easy to install, cross platform monitoring software for Mac OS X - that is, something that would allow a parent, employer or teacher to, from their PC, monitor the screen of a Macintosh? Will remote desktop do this? Is it relatively easy to install?

What is the easiest way to convert e-mail to tasks or appointments in OSX?

4ster — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 10:10:25 -0800

I am considering making the switch to the Mac, and I am wondering how you all convert an e-mail to a task or appointment in OSX. In Outlook, I just drag it to the Calendar or Tasks button (or use one of the ClearContext buttons). I understand this does not work in Entourage. I don't believe I have to use Entourage, but I just thought I would begin there, since it is closest to what I already use.

Thanks for your help.

cheap Mac file sharing?

cccorlew — Sun, 10 Dec 2006 06:54:29 -0800

I'm looking for a cheap (or better yet, free) software to run a simple file server in my journalism lab. I have a G4 mac to use. I've been using AppleShare IP running OS 9, but there are issues now that all the clients are OS 10.4. (file name lengths, etc)
Apple's Personal Sharing limits me to 10 users and I have 20.
Mac server software costs a ton and does a lot more (web, mail) then I need.
Is there an in between solution?

Fix for distorting sound in OS X G4

cccorlew — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 11:41:33 -0800

The sound on my OS X G4 laptop has suddenly become very loud and distorted. Help me make it stop. It used to be that I could hardly hear sound coming out the tiny speakers Suddenly it's really loud and distorted. Turning the volume down in the system prefs makes it less loud, but not less distorted. Weird.... HELP?