Latest Posts in Mac 911

Creating an ISO image

Reader Forrest Bourke seems lost in the woods in regard to making disk images compatible with Windows. He writes:

How do I make an ISO image?

Create a folder of the stuff you want to put in the image. Launch Disk Utility and choose File -> New -> Disk Image From Folder. In the Select Folder to Image dialog box that appears, select your folder and click Image. In the resulting New Image From Folder dialog box choose DVD/CD Master and None from the Encryption pop-up menu. Save the image to the Desktop.

Open Terminal and type:

cd ~/Desktop
hdiutil makehybrid -iso -joliet -o Test.iso Test.cdr

(Change the name of Test.iso and Test.cdr to reflect the actual name of your image.)

Terminal will do its stuff and you'll be presented with a spanking new ISO file from your image.

Default fonts and Pages

Reader Marcin Szablewski seeks help with fonts and iWorks' Pages. It is written:

I have searched Pages to try and locate a setting such as in Microsoft Word, where I can change the default font used for all new pages created. Unfortunately I can’t locate this setting in the program. How do I go about doing this?

Much as I hate to start the week on a negative note, duty demands I do so by telling you that you can’t. There is no default font for Pages documents. And there isn’t for a good reason.

Microsoft Word, despite its aspiration to be all things to all people, isn’t a page layout program. It’s a word processor. Pages, on the other hand, falls somewhere between a word processor and a page layout application. As such, it relies on templates to do its work. Each template can have its set of default fonts, but you can’t impose a font on all of Pages’ templates.

Given that, your solution is to create templates that suit you. For example, if you routinely use the Traditional Letter and Invoice templates, open those templates, make the style changes you want—change the font and font size, for example—and then choose File -> Save as Template. Give the template a name that suits you—Marcin’s Letter Template, for example—and save it to the My Templates directory. When you next need to type a letter, use the Template Chooser to locate the template you created.

Bugs & Fixes: Dealing with CPU overloads, part two

Last week, I described a situation where the SyncServices process begins eating up so much of the Mac’s resources that the Mac’s overall performance slows to a crawl.

While working on the article, I recalled that I had previously covered a similar issue with a different process: mds, used when Spotlight indexes a drive.

Before I finally close the book on this topic, I want to return to the mds matter. In the specific case I cited, the symptoms were precipitated by an unneeded and unwanted indexing of a cloned backup of my startup drive. A quick work-around to stop the indexing is to add the backup drive to Spotlight’s Privacy list.

The problem is that the backup drive would mysteriously disappear from the Privacy list periodically (especially so after restarting the Mac). Indexing would then begin again—until I re-added the drive to the Privacy list. A reader comment pointed my way to the explanation for this annoyance.

Read more...

LAN messaging and the home office

Reader Bill Phillips would like a little more open communication around his home. He writes:

My wife and I each work at home in our separate offices. I seem to remember that back in the OS 9 days there was a way to pop up a message on another computer on your network. It would be really helpful for us to be able to do something like this so we could trade little bits of information back and forth without yelling across the house. Can you do this with OS X?

Sure. Perhaps the easiest way to do this is to use iChat’s Bonjour capabilities. On each computer launch iChat, open its Preferences window, click the Accounts tab, and enable the Use Bonjour Instant Messaging option. From the Window menu choose Bonjour List. The names of those running iChat on your local network will appear in this list. To send your wife a message, just double-click her name in this window and start typing in the resulting Chat With window.

If you want something that works a little more like it did in the old days, check out Jack Beckman’s free LANMessage. With LANMessage up and running on both Macs, you can send messages from one to other, where they appear in a translucent window. To compose a message just open LANMessage, choose Preferences from its menu, type your message in the Message field, and click Send. Alternatively, you can run the included Send LANMessage AppleScript, that pops up a message field much like the one you find in LANMessage’s Preferences.

To ensure these solutions work you might want to add iChat or LANMessage as a startup item on each computer.

Printing selected text

Reader Michael Laurence would like more flexibility in his printing. He writes:

Is there some way to select specific text for printing rather than an entire article? When I used Mac OS 9 I used a program called Net-Print for this but it is not available for OS X. I realize one can take a screen snapshot of selected text and then print it but this is a rather cumbersome way to do things.

MacEase’s Steve Becker offers a variety of solutions that expand the Mac’s printing capabilities. The one I’d suggest to you is the $15 iPrint for OS X. It’s a straightforward utility that runs in the background. Once installed, just select some text, press Control-Option-P, and the selected text in the active window prints. You’ll lose some formatting along the way, but it gets the job done.

Though both MacEase's website and the application icon look like they were designed in the late 90s, iPrint works with the latest version of Leopard.

If you’re a do-it-yourselfer, you could create an AppleScript that copies the selected text, pastes it into a TextEdit document, and then prints that document.

Bugs & Fixes: Dealing with CPU overloads, part one

Your hard drive begins to chatter at a level that could compete with roomful of agitated chimpanzees. Technically, it’s called “excessive disk activity.” At the same time, the responsiveness of your Mac drops to near zero. Activities that should take no more than a second, such as dropping down a menu, take a few minutes.

What’s happening? Most likely, some software process is hogging your Mac’s CPU with the result that your Mac has almost no energy left to do anything else. This is not a new bug. However, it continues to be one that bugs me on a regular basis, especially on my aging Power Mac G5.

If this happens to you, the simplest remedy is to restart your Mac. However, if you’d prefer to avoid the wasted time and irritation involved with a restart, there are alternatives.

For starters, launch Activity Monitor (assuming that your Mac is still capable of successfully launching an application in a reasonable time). Check out the CPU column. Most likely, one process will show an alarmingly high CPU percentage (often in excess of 70 percent). That’s your culprit.

Read more...

MacBook to projector connector

Reader Dustin Flatt is flat out of ideas about connecting his MacBook to a projector. He writes:

My roommate has a MacBook Pro and I own a MacBook. The Pro can be hooked up to our projector and we watch movies. My laptop does not have a port for the projector. I was wondering if there is something I could buy to have a port for my MacBook. If so, what is it called? How much? And where can I get it?

There is.

If you want to connect your MacBook to the projector via VGA, you need Apple’s Mini DVI to VGA Adapter. It costs $19 and you can get it at any Apple Store or the online store, using the link I just provided. If that projector has a DVI port, you can use Apple’s also-$19 Mini-DVI to DVI Adapter. A DVI connection will look better. The mini side of the cable plugs into the port sandwiched between the Ethernet and FireWire 400 ports.

Note that you’ll also need a cable that runs from the adapter to the projector. It’s possible that you’ll be able to use the one your roommate uses with his or her MacBook Pro. Or there may be one in the projector box.

Bugs & Fixes: Messy App Store update tracking

Sometimes, a situation is so fouled up that there is no polite way to describe it. Such is the situation with the tracking of iPhone App Store updates. The system is inaccurate, inconsistent, and utterly confusing. And that’s when it is working at all.

The situation is so messed up that it is difficult to present a list of symptoms. Instead, let me describe the shenanigans that occurred during my most recent attempt to update my downloaded App Store apps.

Updating the iTunes Library

It all began when I launched iTunes and glanced at the Applications item. The number 6 was showing alongside the item, indicating that 6 updates were available. Sure enough, when I clicked Applications item to view the icons for my App Store applications, the text button at the bottom of the screen agreed: “6 Updates Available.”

So far, so good.

Read more...

Avoiding lengthy iMovie letterboxing

Reader Hans Matthews’ patience with iMovie has just about evaporated. He writes:

Whenever I import movies from my Panasonic HD camcorder into iMovie HD and then try to edit a clip, iMovie tells me it needs to letterbox the clip. This process can take hours. Is there some way to avoid this long wait?

You have a couple of options. The first is to ensure that you’re importing your video correctly. Given that you’re likely using that camcorder’s HD capabilities, the video you’re importing is in a widescreen (16:9) aspect ratio. If the project you’ve created is in a standard (4:3) ratio, iMovie will letterbox it so all the video appears in the clip (with a black bar above and below the video) rather than fitting the video to the clip by cutting off its right and left edges. So, when you create a new project choose either DV Widescreen or one of the HD formats from the Video Format pop-up menu in the Create Project window.

Ah, but suppose you want your movie output in a 4:3 aspect ratio because you’ll eventually watch it on an older TV but don’t want it letterboxed. Open iMovie’s Preferences, click the Import tab, and disable the Automatic DV Pillarboxing & Letterboxing option. This will discourage iMovie from letterboxing your video. You’ll lose some of your video—those left and right edges—but iMovie shouldn’t force the tedious letterboxing process on your movie.

The day may come when you move to iMovie ’08. That version of iMovie makes the Aspect Ratio option even easier. When you choose New Project, down pops a sheet that includes a clearly marked Aspect Ratio pop-up menu with just three options: Standard (4:3), iPhone (3:2), and Widescreen (16:9). The last is the option you want.

Unlike iMovie HD, iMovie ’08 lets you change aspect ratios after you’ve started work on a project. Just choose File -> Project Properties and in the sheet that appears, change the setting in the Aspect Ratio pop-up menu.

Bugs & Fixes: iTunes’ CD mounting bug

Most often, when Apple releases an minor update to one of its applications, such as iTunes, its purpose is to provide bug fixes and/or add some essential new feature. For example, iTunes 7.7 (released in July) added the code needed to permit syncing iPhones and iPod touches running the new iPhone 2.0 software.

A few weeks later, Apple released iTunes 7.7.1. For this update, as is too often typical, all Apple would say officially is that the update contained “fixes to improve stability and performance.” Postings on the Web (as described in this TidBits article) filled in at least some of the blanks. For example, we’ve learned that the update apparently fixes a bug that prevented CDs from being ejected while iTunes was running.

What these minor updates aren’t supposed to do is introduce new bugs that did not exist in the prior versions of the software. Still, given the complexity of these applications, you shouldn’t be surprised to learn that such new bugs do occasionally manage to slip through the cracks.

On such new bug arrived in iTunes 7.7 and appears to remain in 7.7.1. The symptom (which may be intermittent) occurs when you insert a CD to import into iTunes. The disc typically mounts in the Finder, as expected. However, the disc either never shows up in iTunes or appears briefly but then vanishes after you click Yes in the “Would you like to import the CD…” dialog.

At this point, pretty much all you can do is eject the CD, by holding down the Eject key on the keyboard. But here’s the surprise: If you immediately reinsert the same disc, everything works fine. The disc shows up in iTunes and you can successfully import it. However, when you insert a new CD, the symptom returns. If you are planning on importing several CDs, you can wind up in a repeated shuffle where you have to insert-eject-insert each CD before you can import it.

According to reports (which I can confirm with my own experience), this symptom did not occur in iTunes 7.6 or earlier. At least one thread in Apple’s Discussions boards covers this bug but, unfortunately, does not offer a solution. More than likely, the solution will have to wait for the next iTunes stability-improving update.