Friday, 30 October 2009

Bulk change Type and Creator codes

I having a sort out, and that means getting rid of some old kit. One item in particular, a PowerMac 7300, which run 0S 9.2.2.

It was hanging around because of some old Artmatic vesion 1.2 files. The first problem was that the Type and Creator codes had gotten lost at some point. The second problem was that I had 181 of them to fix. The third problem was that the current version of Artmatic doesn't open these old files.

First I asked the UI folks if they had a version of Artmatic that can open 1.2 files and save them as the current format. They do, Artmatic 2.5.

Next I needed to bulk change all the type and reator codes, so that Artmatic would recongise them. I found Typeator from. First I used Artmatic 2.5 to save a reference file, and then you can drag and drop files onto Typeator. It pops a dialog box saying choose "a master file" and then it changes all the files. Magic!

I used Jing and did a screencast file to show you.

Next stage, how to convert those old files

Tuesday, 27 October 2009

Pandora on Android

If you like your Internet radio, then you'll probably like Pandora, now available for the Android.

The download is hard to find, but I got it here: pandora.android.s3.amazonaws.com/pandora.apk.

You'll need to "Apps Installer" (get it from the Market), or use a file manager to install it.

Of course you IP needs to be a US IP because Pandora have licencing agreements they have to meet, so if you don't have a US IP then it won't connect.

Saturday, 24 October 2009

Manually deleting Chrome .crx Extensions

If you've downloaded a .CRX and installed it, and then thought, that was a bad idea, you'll notice that neither Chrome nor Chromium have an extensions manager. So you'll need to delete them manually.

The extensions are held in the folder

~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/Extensions.

Tuesday, 20 October 2009

Turn off multi-touch OSX MacBookPro

The new MacBookPro (recent MacBooks as well ?) laptops come with multi-touch, but for some apps like Safari and Preview it drives me MAD! I accidentally zoom.

I've found a way to turn it off!

You need to download an application called 'multiclutch'. Install (it runs as a PrefPane) and then add keyboard short cuts for chosen applications:

By choosing a key combination that is not in use, multiclutch will get the gesture before the OS, and so will stop working for the gestures you want.

In this example setup for Safari and Preview, restart them, and job done!

And, this doesn't break other multi-touch gesture like rotation:


Ahhhhh bliss!

Friday, 16 October 2009

Netbook Summary - screen size and chipset

My Advent /Wind runs OSX great, but the screen is just that bit small... it could do with another inch and some more pixels. Came across this page which the author has summarised a good few netbooks.




Tuesday, 13 October 2009

Chrome and Chromium on OSX - where to download

Its not clear to what what the mission differences are, but as you know there are two Chrome / Chromium browsers, ummm... Chrome and Chromium.

Its hard to find the Chromium download page, since if you go to www.chromium.org you get redirected to code.google.com/chromium/ and at first glance there is no 'download' button.


Its nearly as hard to find Chrome for OSX. After some Googling I found this page http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/eula_dev.html?dl=mac so click 'accept' and download.

Phew!

Sunday, 11 October 2009

Re-running first run Chrome on OSX

If you want to have Chrome on OSX re-do its first time run, maybe to re-initialise everything, this is how

  1. Quit Chrome
  2. Quit Firefox
  3. Delete the ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/First Run* file.
  4. Restart Chrome.

If Firefox is running when you do this, it'll crash.

It doesn't import Firefox passwords.

Wednesday, 7 October 2009

Pretending to be be an iPhone on OSX

Its well known that you can spoof or if you prefer, to willfully change, your browser's User Agent to pretend to be a different browser. All those internet banking web sites like you to use IE7 but you prefer Opera 10, or Firefox or Safari? Simple change your User Agent and you've got a fighting chance.

Here's how to pretend to be an iPhone. Why would I do this? Well its rather fast when the web site doesn't send all the undisplayable stuff down to you.




Also you can test the new html 5 gmail interface.


In Firefox you can download a plugin and after a restart iPhone is one of the defaults.




In Camino you can download the User Agent plugin which you have to manually place in

~/library/application support/camino/preferencepanes

Restart Camino and you get an extra tab in the preferences window


Add the following text and you are good to go. For some reason I was not able to 'add to presets'.

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543 Safari/419.3

Monday, 5 October 2009

Proxy .pac file with Camino

If you use Camino, and apart from it still using QuickDraw its really OK, and you're on a corporate network, you might to use a .pac file to get to a proxy server.

It requires the manual creation of a text file, and adding the correct parameters:

Open TextEdit or TextWrangler or your choice of text editor, and save a file called 'user.js' in the location

~/library/Application Support/Camino

you can copy and paste the contents:


user_pref("network.proxy.type", 2);
user_pref("network.proxy.autoconfig_url", "http://foo.com/bar.pac");
user_pref("camino.use_system_proxy_settings", false);

(Replace http://foo.com/bar.pac with the URL supplied by your system administrator.)


Restart Camino and off you go