Ultimate Apple

One of the interesting features in OS X’s standard calculator application is the Paper Tape. Easily brought up by typing Command-T or selecting Window from the menu bar and then choosing “Show Paper Tape,” I have found that it makes Calculator about twice as useful for me than before.

What paper tape does is quite simple, but useful. It is a window separate from the regular calculator which essentially keeps a record of everything you’ve entered in the calculator, allowing you to have a display similar to that on most Texas Instruments graphing calculators that high school and college students worldwide should be familiar with. I have found that the Paper Tape makes me much more inclined to use Calculator when I need to quickly add a lot of numbers together, since I no longer need to worry about having missed one term.

I think that the Paper Tape may have been added in Leopard, can anyone running Tiger or any older versions of OS X confirm this?

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Audacity is a well known, simple, open source Sound Editor available on multiple platforms. However on the Mac it is a little bit tricky to install for the unintelligible, but it is quite simple.

1. Download it (I recommend the Beta)
2. Open it up and drag it to your /Applications folder

Of course it is installed right now, but to do anything with mp3s you’re going to need LAME (mp3 encoder), and we’re going to use MacPorts:

1. Run: sudo port install lame
2. Now Audacity has little trouble finding the library files so you need to run: sudo ln -s /opt/local/lib/libmp3lame.dylib /usr/lib/libmp3lame.dylib

And that’s it, now you open, edit and export into mp3s.

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Diehard Unix gurus are going to be shocked to see Excel and the Unix shell mentioned in the same hint. Yet this can prove a very powerful combination for the average user. Unix gurus should read on, too. Say you want to remove a bunch of files from different locations in your file system, for instance, temporary files. The Unix way of doing things would be:

find -name "*~" -exec rm {} ;

We are doing nothing special here: find by name and then remove. Yet this bit of shell may be above the skill or the courage of many Mac users. In real life, you may want to do more complex searches (by modification date, in multiple locations, file type, …), or do more complex operations (copy, rename, …). You will quickly find yourself in need of a full-blown shell script which loops over the results from mdfind. Well, there is an easier solution involving HoudahSpot and your favorite spreadsheet (Numbers, Excel,…

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I recently bought my parents a Mac mini, their first Mac. They like it, but unfortunately, only have access to the Internet over dial-up. They will often find that a message gets stuck in the outbox, and rather than wait for it to (eventually) send, they would rather just remove it. You can click on the message and hit the Delete button, but the message count for the outbox doesn’t change. If you quit and restart Mail, the messages are still there. What does work is to remove the messages via the shell:

rm -f ~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes/Outbox.mbox/Messages/*.emlx

I wrote a simple AppleScript program that they can use to accomplish this, after first quitting Mail. It isn’t perfect — when Mail starts again, the Outbox count initially shows a count, but Mail must figure out that the messages no longer exist, because it soon resets the message count in the Outbox. Not perfect, but effective.

[robg adds: Note that the above command delete…

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A security fix in Leopard and 10.4.10 prevents the app iSightCapture from working unless it is run by the console user. Here is a workaround to get things going again. Create a simple AppleScript with the following command as the entire file:

do shell script "/your/path/isightcapture imagename"

Replace /your/path/isightcapture with the full path to the iSightCapture program, and replace imagename with the name you’d like to use for captured images. Save the script as an application, and call that program when you want to capture the iSight’s output.This forum thread over on the macosx.com forums contains more details, including info on how to set up a cron task to automate screen grabs, as well as a way to stop your little program’s icon from showing up in the Dock.

This works as advertised, except I used…

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Those who manage large installed bases of Macs need to maintain one or more local administrative accounts on the machines, for remote administration, maintenance or troubleshooting. But, it can be undesirable to list an obvious administrator account in the Loginwindow; that same account hangs in the Fast User Switching menu, and in the Accounts Preference Pane. What to do?

Much experimentation, and some lucky finds on the Internet, have turned up the configuration to hide a user account on 10.5, and in later versions of 10.4.

In early versions of Tiger, it was easy to hide an administrator account. As per this hint, adding the array HiddenUsersList to com.apple.loginwindow with the account or accounts to be hidden was enough. But, with Leopard, this is no longer sufficient. Accounts can be hidden well enough using a HiddenUsersList entry, but the login window and…

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A little-known fact about Time Machine is that it depends on the MAC address of a computer to tell one system from another. This means that if you have your Mac repaired with a new logic board, or replace your system with a new one, you can’t resume backups where you left off. If you know of the problem, though, it’s not very hard to fix. You need to re-pair the backup to the new logic board’s MAC address. Further complicating matters is the ACL which prevents you from changing the system ID information.

First, turn off Time Machine temporarily. Next, determine your new MAC address. Open System Profiler, and select Network followed by Ethernet. You should see a MAC Address field with a number of the format 00:1a:2b:3c:4f:56. Copy it or write it down somewhere.

I will assume that your backup disk is named Time Machine and your computer is named MyMa...