Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with osx and macosx

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?

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?

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?

Picture a Venn diagram with 3 circles: LaTeX, Emacs, Mac. I'd like to live in the intersection.

gleuschk — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 11:08:47 -0800

Mac users who write LaTeX documents in Emacs (with or without AucTeX), please tell me about your workflow. My wife and I both recently switched (back) to Macs from Windows machines. We're mathematicians, and we both live -- or used to live -- pretty much completely inside an Emacs buffer, writing LaTeX. We've had a terrible time approximating our Windows setups on the new Macs. What Emacs version do you people use? (I've tried Aquamacs and Carbon Emacs.) What PDF previewer? (Skim, Preview, something else?) Most importantly: how is everything tied together, in your .emacs or elsewhere?

Finally, please help me understand what the point of AucTeX is. Both the emacs versions I've tried come with it pre-installed. So far, all I can see is that it adds unnecesary keystrokes when I want to typeset something, and destroys all my useful muscle-memory. Do you use it? Does it make your life better/easier?

Why can't I disable root login on this Mac?

neuron — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 19:26:13 -0800

Mac OS 10.5: why can't I disable root login? Wife's Macbook: yesterday I did a restore from a manual backup using this method. This required me to enable and login as root (using this method), which I had never done before.

Now, I can't disable root. When I run Directory Utility, it offers me Enable Root User in the appropriate menu, but not Disable Root User, despite the fact that root login is enabled. (This is after unlocking and logging in as [wife's name] per the instructions.) I've tried it many times yesterday and today, and have restarted the machine several times. Root login is still enabled, which I know because I can still log in as root.

I'm not at all afraid to do this in Terminal if you tell me how.

Man Attempting to Move Leopard

indiewizard — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 07:41:38 -0800

Great MeFites, I come bearing but a humble request. I bought a MacBook Pro about six months before Leopard was released. When it finally came out, I installed it on a partition on an external drive, which I would boot from (because OS X is awesome like that, amirite?) so I could test out all my apps. Now I'm ready to commit to Leopard full-time - what's the best way to go about transplanting my Leopard partition? In my head, I would copy everything precious to the external drive, and then go into Disk Utility and select "Restore" (I'm not in front of my Mac right now, so I don't know the exact option, but it's a tab that comes up in the main pane when you select the root drive in the left-hand pane), where I would select Leopard as the source, and my internal drive as the destination. However, the internal drive is just slightly bigger than the Leopard partition - would this present a problem?

Also, what are my other options? Specifially, Carbon Copy Cloner comes to mind - is this what I need?

Also also, I would like to merge my Adium chat logs - any programs available? If this isn't possible, I'll settle for simply copying them to my Documents folder, and using Spotlight.

A thousand thank-yous in advance.

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!

Help Me Morbidly Count Down the Remaining Days of My Life!

WCityMike — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 15:16:04 -0800

I would basically like to rip off, wholesale, some command-line script which will provide me a countdown -- only in days. No years, months, minutes, or seconds. Unfortunately, adapting an existing script is beyond my ken. This idea of Kevin Kelly's inspired me to perhaps try something similar to motivate me towards working more diligently towards long-term personal goals, but I'm not an iGoogle user. I'd like to instead set it up as the result of a shell script which I can then pipe through GeekTool onto my Mac OS X desktop.

The only problem is that there is a lot of Googlenoise out there clogging up the results, and I can't seem to find the kind of script I'm looking for. I did find a countdown script that would tell it to me in years, months, days, horus minutes, and seconds -- but I really would prefer a days-only readout, similar to that depicted on the page. And I see various Javascript to include on webpages -- but I'm looking for something to be done locally, and I can't use the Javascript and then pipe it through lynx or links, since when I bring up such a page using either, the Javascript result doesn't seem to show. (I doubt lynx or links has Javascript support, do they?)

Anyway, can anyone point me towards a shell script that will take the present date, subtract it from a future date, and tell me the number of days between then and now?

I should add that I'm an idiot savante when it comes to shell scripting and Perl ... more of a splicer than anything resembling a programmer. I can sometimes look at code and grok a little of what it's saying, but telling me to embed the Doohickie:Flippa library into the Perl output by piping it through the black hole matrix into my Bananaphone is going to make me look at you blankly.

Thanks!

.chm to .pdf conversion in Mac OS X?

Señor Pantalones — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 14:11:51 -0800

.chm to PDF conversion, Mac OS X. There seems to be no easy way to do it. Does anyone have an effective and trustworthy workflow they can recommend? (more inside) After recently switching to Papers for my eBook/journal librarian, I need to get rid of all these pesky .chm files. So far I've tried...

- Tubby (chm expander) to Acrobat Professional. Works, but you need to manually nest chapters and subchapters, and it throws some ugly markup artifacts into the document.

- Tubby to HTMLDoc (cli binary). Does a nice job converting to PDF, better than Acrobat, but spits it all out as one big unordered file, which needs far more reorganization.

- Chamonix -> Print. Only prints single pages as pdf, not entire document.

- chm2pdf (python). Looks promising but even after compiling for OS X it keeps failing...maybe I am doing something wrong.

Any tips would be appreciated, and if you haven't checked out Papers yet, you'll love it...

My ears! My ears!

Blazecock Pileon — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 14:20:59 -0800

Some sound design questions to follow up on this golden moldy oldie... Red Book standard CDs seem to offer an output range of 20 to 20000 Hz.

• Can I publish a CD which can output mono frequencies between 20 kHz to 48 kHz through common CD players?
• Would I have to use SACD? In general, what would I use (hw/sw) to author an SACD?
• Are standard consumer speakers incapable of playing back > 20 kHz, or is it just that speakers aren't tested any higher for obvious reasons? (If I distributed a CD/SACD with said high frequencies, would consistent playback be impossible?)
• If no, would audiophiles have speakers capable of said playback range?
• If I used Max/MSP to generate pure tones, is my only frequency output limitation the audio adapter?
• If I recorded those (inaudible) pure tones to a sound file, what file formats could I use for storage?
• Are there caveats about the cycle~ MSP object with respect to generating tones > 20 kHz?
• If I wrote a Max/MSP Runtime program to generate tones, what sound adapter/speaker combination could I use for testing which would work with both Windows XP and Mac OS X, which would reliably output 20 - 48000 Hz?

Sorry if some or all of these are dumb questions. Thanks for your help!

What's wrong with the colour picker?

Mikey-San — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 15:57:58 -0800

When I use the magnifying glass in the Mac OS X colour picker, I get a colour value darker than what I clicked on. Why? Info: Mac OS X 10.4.x, any application that uses the Mac OS X picker (for example, Photoshop with "Apple" set for the picker or Pixen)

OS X Mail - autonomous processing of email?

jaimev — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 20:04:52 -0800

Can Mac OS X Mail be configured to autonomously process email, and based on specific From: and Subject: lines, save the attachment(s) of that email into a specific folder? I'm a dinosaur and prefer to ssh into my Unix based ISP to read my mail. So never having used OS X Mail before, I have no idea if it can do this. I want to be able to send email to a seldom used POP account and have Mail running on my Mac at home automatically check that account and save an attachment based on From/Subject lines. Possible?

two places at the same time

rbs — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 07:01:47 -0800

Is it possible to selectively mirror windows to a second screen (projector) on Mac OS X? When I do presentations I don't like to use a mirrored desktop because I have notes and things to myself on my screen. Many presentation apps (e.g., Keynote) are smart about projecting and will show different stuff on the second screen. I'd like to be able to selectively mirror particular windows onto the second screen. Like, if I'm showing off a database app, I'd like that mirrored, but not other things. Is this possible? Thanks.

DVD Ripping and burning: I'm ready to rip my hair out!

barnone — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 00:01:15 -0800

Burning DVDs: I want to get clips from (commercial and locked) DVDs and into a new DVD for class, with a menu system. I've seen this explanation, but I have a Mac (OS X, I could be convinced to upgrade to 10.4 if necessary). What's the easiest and/or best way to do this? I have a PowerBook G4, external FireWire hard-drive, a stack of DVDs and I've tried a whole bunch of different programs, found here. I want the easiest solution available. If it's free or cheapish (under $100), that's even better. I'd rather not rip the entire DVD to my hard-drive every time I do this - each week of class could include up to 8 clips from different films. The menu page doesn't have to look fancy - it just has to be able to separate each clip (like a chapter).

PLEASE treat me like a total moron here: even though I'm pretty well versed in some computer stuff, this is totally foreign to me right now and I have no idea what VOB, AVI, MPEG2 or any of the other derivations should be doing for me. Will Cinematize do this? MacTheRipper, then something else? iDVD? What is each step? Many thanks in advance: I've already spent hours and hours with someone else trying to figure this out, and I'm at my wit's end.

What filesystem can be easily shared between Linux and Macs?

odinsdream — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 13:59:03 -0800

Sharing hard-drives between Linux and Mac OSX (tiger). Which filesystem? I'd like to share a hard drive between my Linux system and my PowerBook. I'd prefer to format the disk as ext2/3 or reiserfs, something that Linux systems are familiar with, but it's necessary that the PowerBook be able to read it when connected to a firewire enclosure.

I tried formatting the disk in Mac OSX as "Unix Filesystem" using disk utility, but I can't see any partitions when I hook it up to the Linux system. Likewise, I can't see anything on the ext2/3 drives when hooked to the Mac.

Are there any ext2/3 drivers for Mac OSX Tiger? If not, what are my options on the Linux side for reading something that a Mac spits out?

OS X MP3 player with good "shuffle" ability?

odinsdream — Sat, 06 Aug 2005 16:55:02 -0800

Looking for: OS X MP3 player with good ability to scroll through long files easily and accurately. I'd really like an easy way to go through MP3 files that last about an hour or two (downloaded radio shows, commentaries, etc.) with a nice long shuffle bar. iTunes has a scrollbar where one pixel this way or that way shifts me about a minute or two in the audio. VLC doesn't seem to be any better. Audion is only slightly better. If the scrollbars were just longer!

So, what I'm looking for, is a free mp3 player that lets me say "Whoa, what was that?" and shift back 10-15 seconds, or scroll through a show to find a particular phrase or segment.

Any ideas?

Mac Screen Readability

b1tr0t — Wed, 26 Jan 2005 12:41:56 -0800

MacFilter: How do you make the screen fonts bigger in OS X? I've just upgraded my grandmother from a virus-infested WinME box to a 17" iMac G5. Unfortunately, the text is much too small for her to read clearly, and she wants her WinMe box back. I've changed the resolution down to 1024x768. Other than seriously degrading the image quality, it doesn't make the fonts much larger.

I'm comfortable working with the command line and editing plists, so don't hold anything back.

Recomendations for a small, cheap, home media center

jonson — Thu, 20 Jan 2005 10:02:40 -0800

Macmini alternatives. I was considering purchasing a Mac Mini to make it a relatively inexpensive home media center, but after upgrading the hard drive to 80GB, adding Bluetooth for a wireless keyboard & mouse, buying the wireless keyboard & mouse, adding 802.11g for home networking, etc the $499 price tag was closer to $850 or more. Can anyone recommend a Windows box manufacturer who makes small form factor PCs for this kind of application?

Downloaded WMV files have video but no audio in Windows Media Player for OS X

Cryptical Envelopment — Sat, 11 Dec 2004 16:29:20 -0800

Problems with Windows Media and OS X. (more inside) When I download WMV files and view them using Windows Media Player 9 for OS X I can almost always see the picture but almost never hear the audio. Sometimes MPlayer works but I frequently get error messages and only hear the audio. The same thing happens with VLC and with both MPlayer and VLC I often get nothing.

Embedded WMVs are largely hit and miss: I either get both the audio and video or nothing, not even an error message, with the most recent versions of Safari and Firefox. Am I missing something here or is this just part of a Mac user's lot in life?

Images quit refreshing using iSight / iBook / EvoCam.

terrapin — Tue, 07 Dec 2004 09:52:46 -0800

An iSight / iBook / EvoCam question concerning non-refreshing images and possibly firewire power inside ... I run a silly little webcam from my home that is set up as such: iSight connected via Firewire to a G4 iBook using EvoCam v3.4 to serve up the images. EvoCam is set up to take a picture every 20 seconds and FTP it to my remote web server. This works for a few hours, but at some point the camera stops sending new pictures, and EvoCam simply adds a new date stamp to the image it had last and continues to upload it.

I have the iBook set up to power off the screen after a while to avoid burning in a ghost image on the iBook's screen. I have turned off all other power management. Since the screen turns off after a minute without apparently affecting the uploading of images, I don't think this is the issue. The images upload correctly for up to 4 hours or so before I notice the issue creeping up.

EvoCam claims this issue is with Apple and that Apple is aware of it. While waiting for Apple to fix this, EvoCam suggests using v3.4 of their software which has a work-around that apparently refreshes the image periodically to avoid the freeze up. But this doesn't seem to be working, for me, at least.

I think my issue may be an issue with the Firewire port and/or iSight. I think it may be that at some point, the iBook stops powering the port or something.

Anyway, I am relatively new to Apple (switched in 2003) and all of the stuff above is simply thinking out-loud. I have checked a variety of sources I have found via Google, and have perused (and posted) to EvoCam's support forums. All with no luck. I'd like to get this thing working in time to humour the family with a Tree Cam this holiday season. If anyone can help I'd appreciate it.

Problem syncing Treo 600 with Mac

sharksandwich — Wed, 01 Dec 2004 09:53:16 -0800

I have a Treo 600. I was using Mac OSX Palm HotSync to sync the phone, and started to have some problems here and there. Went ahead and set up Apple's Isync to handle the task, and now my Palm "To Do" list does not sync in the process. Anyone know what gives or how to get my "To Do" to sync via Isync?

Playing Windows Media video under OSX

inksyndicate — Tue, 30 Nov 2004 12:51:18 -0800

Best way to play the latest Windows Media movies under OS X? I've tried the latest version of MPlayer, but it only plays the sound, not the video, of WMV movies.

I don't even know if playing Daily Show WMVs embedded into comedycentral.com is in the cards...but I'd just like to be able to play downloaded Windows Media movies reliably, at least, since it seems to be such a hot format.

Can it be done without some fancy open source re-compile of my Mplayer?

Death of an iBook

matteo — Mon, 01 Nov 2004 08:31:55 -0800

Death of an iBook. A couple hours ago, in the exact instant that I pushed the button to turn off my iBook G4, the iBook made a weird sound, its power was cut out immediately and abruptly went dead in a split-second (instead of the usual, slower process). It doesn't restart. It doesn't. Batteries are OK, by the way. Two questions: how bad is it, is it just electrical or the hard disk has been damaged as well? Also, I have put a lot of expensive software (Photoshop CS, Toast Titanium, Office, etc) in it. I still have the cd's and serial numbers, will I be able to reinstall them when the iBook's been fixed? It is still under guarantee, it's 7 months old. (more inside) Today it's a national holiday here, so Apple Support offices are closed. I plan to call tomorrow, immediately. Anybody has ever had similar notebook trouble?

My wireless Mac and wired PC transfer to each other at 2.5 MB/s. Can I speed this up any?

ascullion — Thu, 21 Oct 2004 07:48:36 -0800

I've got a network in my home - one PC, connected by wire to the router, and one Apple, connected by an Airport card (which I believe is 802.11G). The fastest speed I can get transferring files from one to the other is 2.5MB/s, which seems slow. Am I right, or is this standard?