When reinstalling the original software on an older Core 2 Duo MacBook Air the other day, installing the OS itself (in this case, Mac OS X 10.6, which came on a tiny USB stick) went without a hitch. The USB stick's iLife installer, however, kept failing with an unknown error and told me to contact the software manufacturer.
Fortunately, that wasn't necessary.
A look at the installer log (hint within a hint: when in trouble, always check the log) revealed that the culprit was an expired installer certificate. When a certificate expires, OS X doesn't trust it anymore, and thus refuses to install.
All I had to do to work around that error was change the system date back to shortly after the MacBook Air shipped. After traveling back in time, Mac OS X trusted the iLife installer certificate, because it hadn't expired yet back then. So the installation went without a hitch, and after it was done, I changed the date back to the present.
(Note: Newer MacBook Air models let you restore iLife from the Mac App Store. This model, however, predates the Mac App Store, so I don't know whether that would have worked. And I didn't want to use my Apple ID for this anyway, as I'm about to give away the MacBook Air.)
My guess is that a fair number of people likely to submit hints about Mountain Lion have developer accounts and are already running the GM. If so, you can start submitting hints now; there is already a System 10.8 category. I won't run any of these until the official release date, but I'll be able to test and prepare them in advance.
I'm looking forward to tons of interesting hints with Mountain Lion. And thanks in advance for submitting them!
Many podcasts feature a lengthy intro that you have to hear every time you listen to a podcast. If you, like me, listen to fresh news podcasts every morning, you have to skip introductions manually just to get to the news section. Wouldn't it be nice if podcasts were trimmed automagically? Here's the AppleScript for that.
The script is based on Doug Adams' Reset Tracks Start script (GNU GPL). My version of his script goes through every track in a playlist and sets track start time to 90 seconds (you can adjust this number to suit your needs). "News" is the name of my playlist; change accordingly.
property my_title : "Trim all tracks in a playlist"
tell application "iTunes"
set thePlaylist to playlist "News"
with timeout of 300 seconds
repeat with i from 1 to (index of last track of thePlaylist)
my reset_this(track i of thePlaylist)
end repeat
end timeout
end tell
to reset_this(t)
tell application "iTunes"
try
set start of t to 90.0
on error m
log m
end try
end tell
end reset_this
I use crontab to run this script every morning, but you can use iCal:
Create a recurring event (every morning at 7 am, for example)
Choose Alarm and select Run Script, locate the script file you've just created
Now, every morning at 7 am the script will quetly run and "trim" all the tracks in News playlist to make your mornings a little bit more efficient.
NB: "trimming" does NOT actually trim your tracks, it merely adjusts the starting point; this is totally reversible and instantaneous. If you want to undo this, just change 90.0 to 0.0 and re-run the script.
[kirkmc adds: This is sweet. The only problem is that different podcasts have different length intros. So what I'm going to do is make a number of scripts with different offset times and run them on selected podcasts, adding the podcasts as I want to a playlist on which the script acts.
I asked Doug Adams how to change this script so it acts on a selection rather than a playlist. He said to use the following:
property my_title : "Trim all tracks in a playlist"
tell application "iTunes"
set theSelection to selection
with timeout of 300 seconds
repeat with aTrack in theSelection
my reset_this(aTrack)
end repeat
end timeout
end tell
to reset_this(t)
tell application "iTunes"
try
set start of t to 90.0
on error m
log m
end try
end tell
end reset_this
You'll notice that only o couple if lines in the first part of the script are changed.]
You can benchmark the speed of your SSD or hard disk using a few simple Terminal commands. To test write speed:
time dd if=/dev/zero bs=1024k of=tstfile count=1024
In the output, you should look for something that looks like "bytes transferred in 16.546732 secs (519131791 bytes/sec)." Copy and paste the bytes/sec speed into Google to convert to MB/s (e.g. Google search for "519131791 bytes/s in megabytes/s").
To test read speed:
dd if=tstfile bs=1024k of=/dev/null count=1024
[kirkmc adds: While we're on the subject, here's an easy way to test data throughput from one disk to another. Open Activity Monitor (in /Applications/Utilities), click on the Disk Activity tab at the bottom of the window, then look at the Data read/sec and Data written/sec numbers. Copy a large file from one disk to another to see how fast it can go. FWIW, my new Thunderbolt drive has throughput of about 100 MB/sec.
You can run the above commands while watching the information in Activity Monitor, and skip making the conversions. This shows that I have a peak read speed of 137 MB/sec, and a peak write speed of 151 MB/sec (an SSD in a Mac mini). The commands above will give you average speeds, whereas Activity Monitor shows the speed in real time, as well as peak speeds.
See the comments below for what may be a better approach.]
Mac OS X now has a very basic, built-in font sampler, at least as of 10.7.3. If you don't care about having customized sample text, Font Book can do it without any add-ons.
Select the desired fonts in Font Book, choose Print from the File menu, and choose "Font Book" in the pull-down menu for printing options near the bottom of the dialog (the one that also says Layout, Paper Handling, etc.). If you don't see this menu, click on Show Details to display it.
You'll have the ability to choose from among three reports: Catalog (upper case, lower case and numbers, optionally grouped by font family and in a size of your choosing), Repertoire (a chart of every character that each font can print, also in a size of your choosing), and Waterfall (font details and the same basic sample in increasing font sizes of your choosing; seemingly one font style per page).
[kirkmc adds: I don't know when this was added, but this is quite nice. For most people, this will be more than enough. Note that this does not work with Mountain Lion; the Print command is dimmed when you select fonts.]
In Lion, Apple did away with the button in the upper right corner of Finder windows, which allowed the sidebar to be toggled on and off. I used this frequently for ejecting disk images after I installed new software. Clicking on this button toggled the sidebar which allowed me to find the disk image and click on the eject button next do the disk image icon.
With this button now gone, I needed a faster way to eject a disk image than opening a new Finder window and ejecting. After playing around for a second I found out that by right-clicking anywhere in the mounted disk image's window, I could choose Eject . This is actually faster than the previous method I used. I'm not sure how long that has been a feature, but in is in Lion.
[kirkmc adds: I'm assuming that the poster means that he uses this for disk images that open in their own windows without a sidebar visible. I would just press Command-Option-S to show it (or hide it). But it's true that right-clicking and ejecting can be a bit quicker, if you don't have another Finder window open where you can click to eject the disk image.]
Since I was able to get a MacBook Pro retina last week (you can read my thoughts about it on my blog), I've switched my laptop, for the first time in more than four years, from a 13" to a 15". (My last two laptops were 13" MacBook Airs.)
Discussions about the correct size for a laptop display can be a hostile as those between, say, emacs and vi users. I've noticed especially that many people I know prefer the 11" MacBook Air, whereas for my aging eyes, that display is too small.
So, this seemed like a good question for a poll. Feel free to add any comments you have on the poll page, explaining why your preferred laptop size is the Right Size. Vote in the poll.
Apple recently released a Podcasts app for iOS. This application has a number of performance and interface issues, but some podcast listeners may find it superior to using the Music app (though many standalone podcast apps have far more features than Apple's app).
When you look at the Podcasts app, it seems as though you can only subscribe to podcasts that are in Apple's store. This is not true, but the way to subscribe is unintuitive.
When you're in the Podcasts app and viewing your podcasts, there's a black bar at the bottom of the window with a Search field to the right. Paste a podcast URL into this field and tap on Search. A dialog will display asking if you want to subscribe to the podcast. Tap Subscribe to add it to your podcasts.
I was never satisfied with results of "Reduce File Size" Quartz filter when trying to make some PDFs smaller before sending them by e-mail. It made them too small, and the graphics were fuzzy.
I eventually found where these filters are:
/System/Library/Filters
I was delighted to find out they're XML files easily editable with TextEdit (or any other text editor). I also found why this particular filter makes quite unusable PDFs, as these parameters were just too low:
Compression Quality 0.0
ImageSizeMax 512
So I copied this file to my Desktop, and then made two more copies of it, and called them Reduce File Size Good, Better and Best. Then I changed the parameters of each file to 0.25, 0.5 and 0.75 for Compression Quality, and used these three values for ImageSizeMax:
842 (that's A4 at 72dpi)
1684 (A4 at 144dpi)
3508 (A4 at 300dpi)
Finally, I changed the default string for the Name key at the end of each file to reflect the three settings, so they display the names I have given them in the menu.
Then I copied them to a /Library/Filters folder I created (for some reason, ~/Library/Filters doesn't work in Lion) and now when I open a picture or PDF in Preview, I have the option of four different qualities for reduced file sizes.
As an example, I have a JPEG of scanned A4 invoice at 300dpi and it's 1.6MB. When exporting to PDF in reduced size, the file is only 27 KB and it's quite unusable - very fuzzy and hard to read. The Good one is much easier to read, slightly fuzzy and still only 80 KB. Better is 420 KB and clear, and the Best is 600 KB and almost as good as the original even on a laser printer.
[kirkmc adds: Interesting hint. I see this as useful only for creating PDFs from files. If I'm scanning something, and I don't want the file to be too big, I'll either scan it at a lower resolution, or change the resolution in an image editor before making a PDF.]
When your MacBook Pro switches from integrated Intel graphics to the dedicated GPU, power consumption goes up considerably. Which API calls or program attributes trigger this switch is not totally clear, and programs that you least expect might be draining your battery.
Cody Krieger’s free gfxCardStatus will tell you when a switch occurs and lists which programs are causing this. (It also lets you manually toggle the mode.)
I found out, for instance, that EagleFiler and Twitter both triggered the GPU, significantly reducing the time I could run on battery. (EagleFiler's author is investigating this.) Neither program is particularly graphics intensive, so I'd never have suspected that leaving them up (and hidden) would be draining my battery prematurely.
[kirkmc adds: Since I now have a new MacBook Pro with Retina display (wow, that display is nice!), this hint comes at just the right time. This utility has been around a while, yet it's never shown up here as a hint. Jeff Carlson reviewed it for Macworld last year, so you can read more about it there. One thing I can say about the new MacBook Pro is that the battery life is orders of magnitude better than my late 2010 MacBook Air, and with this utility, I'll be able to use it even longer.]
