There is a new client for the Folding@Home project available for OSX.

This is a SETI@home like project that does something useful in the realm of medical research.

Version 2.19 as a graphical, or console client, can be downloaded from here.

Over on the macosxhints' forum site, someone asked about getting macosxhints' headlines with PluckyX, another desktop-based website headline grabber.

I'd never heard of PluckyX, so I downloaded it tonight to have a look. It's a pretty cool little program, and adding macosxhints support is actually quite easy. Here's how...

When PluckyX starts up, click the Sources button. In the dialog box that opens, type in a name (macosxhints.com), and enter this for the URL:

http://www.macosxhints.com/backend/geeklog.rdf

This is a special file that is updated each time new stories are added to the site. Leave the 'RegEx' and 'Fields' fields empty, then select 'RSS/RDF' from the 'Sources' field. You'll get a message about how PluckyX handles these file types automatically. Hit the 'Add' button and you're done.

In the main window again, hit 'Refetch' and you should see the latest macosxhints' headlines. PluckyX is $15 shareware, but I don't know much about it. I've used it just long enough to figure out this hint.

I recently had to extract a couple of pages from a large PDF file. It turns out that this is really easy to do using Preview!

First, open up the PDF file in Preview (Acrobat might work too). Then select Print, and under Pages choose the range of pages you need to extract. Then click Preview. Those pages will open up in a new window and you can select Save As from the file menu to save the extracted portion.

[Editor's note: I'd often wondered why it might be useful to be able to select "Preview" while already running Preview ... and now I know why it might be useful!]

This is kind of an obvious one, but one of the complaints about ncftp is that on install it creates the user's .ncftp directory as root. This creates the problem of not being able to use the background processing (bgget/bgput/bgstart) commands, since the current user doesn't own the spool files.

To overcome this, you can either run ncftp as root each time, or type the following command in the terminal:

sudo chown -R .ncftp [username]

where [username] is the current user's login.

With the lack of any decent GUI FTP clients at current, I've found ncftp to be a perfectly useable and extremely powerful client with the addition of background processing.

[Editor's Note: I have had excellent results with Transmit, RBrowser and Interarchy, all GUI FTP clients.]

I noticed that Mail.app wouldn't show the number of new emails in the dock icon. This was because I have filters to move incoming mail to the appropriate mailbox and Mail.app doesn't show those new message items. Well, that's not entirely true...

Mail.app will show the number of new messages in Incoming mailboxes (denoted by an 'Incoming Drawer' icon rather than a folder icon). All 'Incoming' boxes from all accounts are 'Incoming', so they are automatically displayed in the Mail.app Dock icon. But there is a way to turn ANY mailbox into an incoming mailbox that will update Mail.app's Dock icon with new mail.

Read the rest of the article for the step-by-step instructions...

This tip expands on a note I read in the cocoa-dev mailing list.

As it ships, TextEdit can open files in nine encodings, including Unicode, UTF-8 and Shift-JIS. This is pretty handy, but there's more - it is fairly easy to change the list of supported encodings to include any of the over 100 built in to Cocoa.

Here is how you do it:

1. In the Finder, control-click on the TextEdit application and select Show Package Contents. This opens a new window with a Contents folder.
   
2. Open Contents/Resources
   
3. Make a copy of the file MoreEncodings.plist; call the copy Encodings.plist

Now if you launch TextEdit, you will have 33 encodings to choose from. These encodings are specified in Encodings.plist.

To continue with this tip, you will need the developer tools. Assuming you have them, do this:

1. Open Encodings.plist in PropertyListEditor or a text editor.
   
2. Open the file /System -> Library -> Frameworks -> CoreFoundation.framework -> Versions -> A -> Headers -> CFStringEncodingExt.h in a text editor. This file lists all the encodings supported in Cocoa. By adding entries to Encodings.plist you will get support for the corresponding encoding in TextEdit.
   
3. Note that you will have to convert the hexadecimal values in CFStringEncodingExt.h to decimal values to put in Encodings.plist. I use PCalc to do this.

[Editor's note: I have not tried this tip...]

Just to let everyone know, Disk Copy burns Toast image files. I'd assume it mounts them as well, although I can't currently test that.

[Editor's note: I thought I recalled reading somewhere that, with the OS X version of Toast, Roxio had dropped their proprietary format. Does anyone have any solid information on this?]

In order to filter my incoming email, I've set up a series of rules that correspond to appropriate mailboxes. I noticed earlier this afternoon that Mail.app was not auto-displaying my Inbox folder. Here's why:

Mail.app auto-displays the last mailbox you viewed before quitting the program. This mailbox "preference" is preserved through restarts, log outs, etc. Normally I keep Mail.app running so long as my computer is on; still, I felt this "tip" fit nicely into the FYI category.

So to make sure mail.app opens to the proper mailbox, select your main mailbox before quitting the program.

If you try to import photo files (.jpg) from the Kodak CD directly into iPhoto, you'll have a problem - You won't be able to edit your pictures!

For some reason (bug?) iPhoto doesn't realize that when files are stored on a CD, they are usually set to Read Only. And when you copy a read only file from a CD, you usually have to turn off the read only attribute to allow editing the file. Well, iPhoto forgets(?) to turn off the attribute if you import directly from the Kodak CD.

So, you have two choices. You can either turn off that attribute using the UNIX chmod command, or, as it turns out, you can do the two-step import

1. Copy the files from the CD into a temporary location (say the 'Shared' folder).
   
2. Import the photos into iPhoto from that temporary directory. Ah...success.

I think iPhoto should be modified to automatically turn off the read-only file attribute when importing from CD's.

[Editor's note: Combining the info in this tip with the recent tip about PictureCD's and ImageCapture, you shouldn't have this problem if you have ImageCapture set to load the images to disk first. I'm not sure if this applies to all images on CDs, or only those that are specifically marked as Read Only during the write process. Since CD's are inherently Read Only, this may very well apply to any image on a CD ... but I'm not going to burn one just to test the theory.]

I had some PictureCD's made at Wolf Camera after a vacation a couple of years ago that I wanted to use to create a photo album. I was prepared to navigate through the CD's contents to find that cryptic folder that housed the JPEG images. I have done this before and was not looking forward to it.

To my surprise, I noticed that Image Capture launched as soon as the CD mounted, and it pulled every photo from the PictureCD to my Pictures folder. Cool.

Since ImageCapture is the front-end to iPhoto, this means that iPhoto also supports PictureCD's.