Mac: Automatically mount shares based on location

macosxhints.com – Automatically mount shares based on location:

One thing that frequently bothered me about OS X was the lack of any way to automatically mount Windows file shares.

It annoys me too. Especially since I prefer to close my iBook when I plan to leave it for awhile.

I did create an Automator script to connect to my shares, but Automator is so slow and clunky. It’s nice to have an AppleScript alternative.

Thanks smanek.

Mac: Lifehacker’s Guide for Switching to a Mac

Hack Attack: A guide for switching to a Mac – Lifehacker:

What follows is a round-up of everything that stuck out to me when I made the move to my first Mac.

An extensive but pithy guide. Even if you are not-so-new to OSX there is probably something you can learn from this post.

Most of the comments are great too, I was floored by Matt Haughey’s comment:

When you first switch to a mac, go into System Preferences then Keyboard and Mouse prefs. On the Keyboard tab, click the Modifier Keys button.

Set the Control Key to Command, and Command Key to Control, then hit OK.

Now, your beloved and muscle memory shortcuts like control-c for copy and control-v for paste will work exactly as they did on your PC.

A year of frustration over in a moment. The Command (Apple) key is just in the wrong place, I never got used to it.

Hardware: Digital V6 KVM over IP

Digital V6 – The Engine of Innovation:

Kaveman is a revolutionary remote server management tool to remotely control servers, either over the Internet or your local network. Kaveman fully emulates a screen, keyboard and mouse, giving the user complete control over the attached computer.

I have no clue why the idiots who created this website can’t just use normal english.

This box is a single port KVM to remotely control any PC or Mac over a network using VNC. The would get a lot more hits from googlers if they’d use language like that.

There is nothing revolutionary about this device, it seems like a no-brainer to me. The focus on server management seems shortsighted. Any server should already have remote management in software. Of course KVM stuff is usually considered high end and is often ridiculously overpriced given that there are quite good, often free, software alternatives.

As a PC tech I regularly wish for a plug and play means to remotely control a PC temporarily. This would appear to be the answer. It’s a pity that it’s just too expensive.

Intel are introducing vPro which will build this type of thing into the motherboard. This would be nice, except I’m not a fan of Intel chipsets, and don’t like intel motherboards. Plus there are the security implications. Having your PC open to remote control even when it is switched off, before the OS is loaded, even being able to change BIOS settings… I don’t like it.

What would be nice is a cheap KVMoIP device that us techs could use day-to-day. Surely someone could manage that. Perhaps someone has, let me know if you find one.

Mac: Upgrading the Mac Mini – Core 2 Duo CPU

Merom Mac Mini Hack:

The purpose of this page is less about bragging (I certainly wasn’t the first to upgrade the processor in my Mac Mini) and more about describing my experience with the upgrade – both from a performance perspective and from a “lessons learned” perspective.

Ambor.com has listed some very detailed benchmarks which should be of interest to anyone considering the upgrade in terms of bang for buck. Now all we need is a Mac Mini with a slot for a graphics card.

In fact, how about a just a Mac MoBo; a bare bones ATX Mac motherboard build to Apple specifications, that we could use with our own CPU, Ram, HD etc. It could come bundle with a copy of OSX. I know this gets away from the ‘mini’ aspect, but as a cheap Mac it could offer the best of both worlds.

One can dream.

Security: The Ten Most Dangerous Things Users Do Online

Dark Reading: The Ten Most Dangerous Things Users Do Online:

most users have no idea how dangerous their online behavior is.

Indeed. But whilst this is all good advice, I can’t help but point out that whilst most of these activities pose a great threat on Windows, they pose much less of a threat on OSX or Linux. Most of these are threats because of vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer and Outlook Express.

So the top tip is to get get Firefox and Thunderbird, especially if you are a Windows user, and even if you are not.

OSX: Dual TV Tuner for Mac

123Macmini.com – News – Miglia intros TVDuo dual TV tuner:

Bundled with Elgato’s EyeTV2, TVDuo enables users to record TV, remove advertisements from recorded footage while watching live TV, access EPG data from the internet, schedule recordings, and export recorded shows to a video iPod or Mac applications such as iDVD

The TVDuo is a USB device that features 2 DVB-T TV tuners. Like many such tuners, it simply records the broadcast stream directly to disk. The advantage of this is simplicity, the disadvantage is you’ll need about 3GB for every hour of TV. It’s a good thing that harddrives are getting cheeper by the day.

OSX: Make networked scanners available to other Macs

macosxhints.com – Make networked scanners available to other Macs:

If you share a scanner using the Open Source SANE project… you can use Mattias Ellert’s TWAIN/SANE interface to make it available to your Mac applications.

Sounds like a useful thing to be able to do.

XP & OSX: Adobe Soundbooth Beta

MacMerc.com: Adobe Soundbooth Beta available for download:

According to the specifications, Soundbooth requires an Intel-based Mac with Mac OS X 10.4.3 or greater.

Adobe Soundbooth is a baby sound editor, which looks like a drastically cut down version of Audition. What interests me is that this is available on both Windows and OSX. Audition is PC only and it sticks out like a sore thumb amongst Adobe’s otherwise cross-platform lineup.

Could this be a hint that Adobe are planning to start work on a version of Audition for OSX. The fact that Soundbooth is Intel only suggests that it may in fact contain code from Audition or it’s predecessor Cool Edit. Perhaps this is Adobe’s way of cutting their teeth on a smaller audio app.

This is all just speculation, but one can always hope.

iPod: A video player? Forget it!

The iTunes+iPod software update has decided to mess with the aspect ratio of all the video files that I spent some considerable time and processor cycles re-coding. They worked fine before, filling the screen perfectly. Now I get a letterbox view with the picture all squashed up to fit and 2 black bars at the top and bottom wasting many precious pixels.

So I’m giving up on this. I always knew that the iPod would be stupid as a video player because if it’s severely limited range of supported video file formats. But I thought I could figure it out, I thought I had figured it out. I could probably buy some shareware to do it, but I just don’t think it’s a problem worth spending money on. I don’t think I should have to, just to be able to use the iPod for the purpose for which it was designed.

So, now my iPod will only being used for the purpose I originally intended, as a photo viewer and as an in-the-field memory card backup unit.

It’s better this way.

I already mentioned how fantastic the new iTunes/iPod software is for viewing photos organised in iPhoto.

Vista: Still missing OSX’s 2 best features

I’ve been running Vista for a couple of weeks now. I must say I don’t see the point. It doesn’t seem like an upgrade, rather a side-grade. Different for the sake of being different.

Vista tries to include some of the visual flare of OSX but for the most part fails to actually include anything genuinely useful. But it’s not visual niceties for the sake of aesthetics that are OSX’s biggest asset.

There are two particularly silly and amateurish shortfalls that continue in Vista from earlier Windows.

The first problem is it’s continued use of drive letters to identify disks. This idiotic carry-over from the days of DOS 1.0 creates several problems.

You can never tell what drive letter you’ll get when you plug a removable disk in into the computer. This makes it difficult to work with removable disks with some programs, and adds a layer of complexity if you want to automate tasks.

If you install a new HD, your other drives (including optical drives) can be re-assigned and some programs will have to be re-configured or may stop working.

An even more insidious problem is where windows fails to assign a unique drive letter to different devices. I have a USB card reader that I can’t use at work because windows tries to assign it a sequence of drive letters (one for each type of card slot). When some of those drive letters clash with already assigned drive letters, that card slot is unusable. There is no work around for this. It is common for windows to try to assign drive letters to USB devices which are already taken by network shares.

OSX avoids all these problems by using volume labels to identify drives. This allows me to keep my iPhoto Library on a removable HD and transfer it between my 2 Macs. My card reader only shows up when I actually have a card in the device, so there is no hunting around to find the drive letter for the card.

The second problem is the Taskbar. The Taskbar comes to us from Windows 95, and is a great way of switching between about 4 programs. Back then people were grateful to be able to run more that 2 programs without the OS crashing. Any more than 4 and the taskbar is a mess. Even with a wide-screen monitor it’s not really much better.

You can re-configure the bar to give you 2 rows. This is the first thing I do when I use a Windows PC. But it’s still a mess. Microsoft tried to fix this in XP by allowing you to ‘Group Similar Taskbar Buttons’. This is just adding frustration to injury.

Is it any wonder that so many programs offer some method of hiding their presence from the Taskbar by only showing up as a System Tray Icon next to the clock.

OSX has the Dock and it has Expose.

The Dock is great because the user knows where a certain program is. If they want to run Firefox (for example) they click on the Firefox icon. If they have minimized or hidden Firefox and want to get it back, guess where they click – the Firefox icon. If it’s running, OSX is sensible enough to bring the program to the front. If it’s not, OSX launches it. This is next-generation thinking. The user doesn’t have to worry about whether a program is running or not and act differently.

Expose is even better. A user can choose a window by looking at all windows and choosing the one they want. It’s a natural, human way to work. Vista tries to provide a thumbnail view of running programs in three different ways, none of which are as useful as Expose. They could have just ripped off Expose. They should have.