Category Archives: Tips & Tricks

Wired or Wireless Time Machine Backup to Hard Disk Connected to Another Mac on Your Local Network

Posted on August 2, 2010 | 4 Comments

Ever since I decided to start using Time Machine it has been bugging me that I could not figure out how to back up my my iMac to an attached FireWire HDD and my PowerBook to the the same HDD over the Network. Of course I could buy TimeCapsule, but I wanted to make it work with what I had. You can find tips to active an attached HDD on an Airport Extreme or other network location (e.g., here, or here), but I was not interested in that. Also, there are some solutions out there for using Leopard Server (e.g., here, )

The solution presented below requires just one one desktop Mac with an external HDD (I use firewire, but I would expect USB to work as well), one Mac laptop, and any local wireless network (I use my ATT U-verse modem/router). I learnt that I wanted to do is possible from this Macworld article, alas, it does not give detailed instructions. read on to find out how it works.

Continue reading →

→ 4 Comments

Posted in Technology, Tips & Tricks

Prevent Time Machine Backups of iTunes Movie Rentals

Posted on August 2, 2010 | Leave a comment

Leopard’s Time Machine has an option to exclude certain folders from being backed-up. iTunes movie rentals which usually weigh in with greater than 1 GB are a prime example for what should not be backed-up. Unfortunately, movie rentals are stored in iTunes’ Movie folder–along with all your other movies that you may have purchased, or made yourself. So what to do?

Continue reading →

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Mac OS X Platform, Technology, Tips & Tricks

Setting up Octave and Gnuplot on OSX

Posted on February 18, 2010 | Leave a comment

Good instructions are here.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Mac OS X Platform, Tips & Tricks

PDF OCR Batch-processing with ScanSnap

Posted on December 27, 2009 | 7 Comments

The ScanSnap S1500M (but also the S1500 as well as the earlier models S510 and S510M) comes with ABBYY FineReader for OCR support. This is great for creating searchable PDFs. Especially handy on a Mac with Spotlight. The problem is that in the default setup, each scan is OCRed right after the scan and depending on the age your machine (my G5 is getting a little long in the tooth) in can take quite a while. When you’re in the process of scanning many hundred’s of pages of paper documents, you don’t want to have to wait for the computer to do it’s OCR recognition, you’d rather feed it all the documents and let it do OCR while you’re doing something else. Continue reading →

→ 7 Comments

Posted in Mac OS X Platform, MS-Windows Platform, Software, Tips & Tricks, Workflow

Tagged , , ,

Optimal Packing for Travel

Posted on July 2, 2009 | Leave a comment

On Imgriff.com I read about a truly interesting website, solely dedicated to the Optimality of packing lightly for travel: http://www.onebag.com Continue reading →

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Tips & Tricks, Transportation

Installing iPhone SDK 2.x on PPC

Posted on June 19, 2009 | 6 Comments

This post is really just an edited summary of instructions found elsewhere. I used instructions from two sources (here incl. comments, and here), the first of which is slightly outdated and incomplete. Here’s the full story: Continue reading →

→ 6 Comments

Posted in Mac OS X Platform, Tips & Tricks

Tagged , , , , , ,

BOM-files – What do/did Mac OS X Package Installers Install?

Posted on October 30, 2008 | Leave a comment

The answer can be found in the so-called BOM-files, which stands for Bill Of Material. More information about bom files be found in the Apple Developed Connection (ADC) bom man page, or by typing man bom in the terminal.

These files are buried inside installer packages as well as in receipts of already installed programs. To find it, right click the installer package, and select “Show Package Contents” and find the .bom file. Usually there’s more than one. Unfortunately, these are binary files, so there’s one more step to view its content. Continue reading →

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Mac OS X Platform, Tips & Tricks

Remove Short Description for Feed Items in iGoogle

Posted on October 17, 2008 | 1 Comment

When I looked at my iGoogle page today I found a short description under each item. Unfortunately that made the paper longer than one screen so I couln’t view all my items w/o scrolling — very inconvenient. Even worse, there was no immediately clear way to restore the original layout. I tried to click on the small arrow in each block to edit the settings, but to no avail.

The solution can be found when clicking on “My Account” in the top right corner. Continue reading →

→ 1 Comment

Posted in Software, Tips & Tricks

Tagged , , ,

Export Outlook Mail PST-Files to the Mac

Posted on October 10, 2008 | Leave a comment

While there are multiple software solutions that cost money, I prefer the free alternatives. In this case it comes in the form of Mozilla Thunderbird, and to be more precise, the Windows version. Thunderbird’s import function imports your current Microsoft Outlook folders including attachments and all. It also has options for Outlook Express and other mail programs, but I have not tried those. Once imported, you can retrieve the converted messages from the profile folder (Thunderbird/Data/Profile/Mail).

On the Mac, after installing the Mac version of Thunderbird and setting up your accounts, you simply copy the content of the mail folder from the Windows version to the corresponding location on your Mac (~/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/yourname/mail).

If you rather use OS X’s Mail Application, then additional steps are necessary. Mail App has an option to import from Mozilla but I was not too successful with that. Among other things, it creates those “mysterious” white folders that cannot contain messages directly, only other folders. Alternatively, this Mac OS X Hint (also check out the discussion) explores several other ways, however, I have not yet tried this myself.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Mac OS X Platform, MS-Windows Platform, Telecommunications, Tips & Tricks

Tagged , ,

Resize Sparse Disk Images

Posted on September 15, 2008 | 3 Comments

I am a big fan of encrypted sparse disk images in Mac OS X. I use them primarily to keep my financial data secure w/o the need to use FileVault. This way, only the data that needs to be encrypted is protected with quick access to everything else. Using sparse disk images saves space, b/c only as much space is reserved as is needed. The only problem I have encountered, if more space is needed than was anticipated when setting up the disk image in the first place. Fortunately there is an easy way to resize sparse disk images in Mac OS X Tiger. This Wikipedia Article explains how: Continue reading →

→ 3 Comments

Posted in Mac OS X Platform, Tips & Tricks