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Macintosh news and views

Tuesday, April 4, 2000

A utility I find very, very useful is Net-Print. It adds an icon to the menu bar, and allows you to print the selected part of a document or web page, or collect a number of pieces together to be saved or printed. You can configure which applications it appears in - I use it just for Netscape. It's so unintrusive I forget it's there until I need it, and then it's quick and easy. And yes, I paid for it.

posted by Graeme Williams 4:06:52 AM

Friday, March 31, 2000

Well I was asked by someone at work to check out accounting software. Frankly, after writing accounting software for four years of my life I found the prospect less than thrilling. But I did find a neat review site! MacReviewZone has the ranking and link to the full text of reviews from a number of good Mac mags including MacAddict and Macworld.

posted by Tony Williams 10:58:49 PM

Tuesday, March 21, 2000

I found another good magazine site for those of us that just can't stand idly by and not tinker. MacTech magazine has a lot of good news and info for programmer's and technical folks as well as excellent archives of articles, utilities.

posted by Tony Williams 3:55:13 PM

Friday, March 17, 2000

I spent some time yesterday upgrading and reconfiguring ProFTPd on the LinuxPPC box.

I had to do it so our Xerox DC265 had somewhere to ftp the files it scans. What a neat beast, it's a multi-function office copier according to Xerox but it has some excellent features that make it a little more than that. First off it copies at 65 pages a minute. You can print to it (via AppleTalk or a host of other net protocols), including a feature where you can just send it the PDF file via the built in web server. The built in web server allows you to reconfigure it from the desktop. It scans real well, too. I've set up ours so it then ftps the files onto my LinuxPPC box. Then set up my friend netatalk to share out the ftp folder tree via AppleTalk. The 265s doco mutters about fax facilities so I guess that's the next thing I get to play with.

posted by Tony Williams 10:31:01 AM

Another gem I've forgotten to mention so far is MPW or the Macintosh Programmer's Workshop. We used to pay a large chunk of real money to Apple for this beast but they've now made it available free. Don't be put off by the name, it's really just a very powerful command line interface to your Mac, along with a bunch of tools useful for programming including an assembler, C and C++ compiler, and a source code control system.

posted by Tony Williams 11:00:39 AM

Friday, March 10, 2000

Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow. Breathe deeply, Tony. Just breathe. Sorry, the excitement got too much for me. I discovered Mac On Linux which allows you to boot MacOS while under PPC Linux. Now if it works fine with my favourite games (no sound yet [rats]) and network applications then life will be almost perfect.

posted by Tony Williams 9:31:38 AM

Tuesday, March 7, 2000

I found a very good page for navigating the huge system that is the Apple web sites. Apple - Find - Area has a list of all the different web servers Apple has, including pointers to your national one if outside the US.

Combined with Apple - Find - Sitemap you can quickly find the information you want from their system.

posted by Tony Williams 11:05:02 AM

Monday, March 6, 2000

I'm amazed that I've gone this far into the log and not mentioned URL Manager Pro. I can only surmise that URL Manager Pro is like breathing, I don't think about it. It certainly is an excellent tool for managing URL's, I even use it for large scale changes to my bookmarks file as it will read your bookmarks file in allow you to check it for duplicates, organise it, sort the entries and then export it back out. It will also export any part of the URL collection to HTML and suck all URLs off a page on your web browser. Another tool I appreciated so much I paid for it.

posted by Tony Williams 10:12:59 AM

Tuesday, February 29, 2000

Someone just reminded me that the later versions of Ghostscript can convert a PostScript file into a PDF file with no fuss. This comes in very handy for sending people files they can print if you are using a rare application to produce your files.

The link above will give you links to both Linux versions and Mac versions. If your are going to run it on a Linux box then make sure you have the latest version of Enscript which turns ASCII into PostScript with a nice bunch of bells and whistles.

posted by Tony Williams 8:24:32 PM

Friday, February 25, 2000

For Australian readers of this log I've found a good mirror site at The AusMac Archive. This site has what seems to be a mirror of the info-mac archive as well as mirrors of some useful web sites that I've already mentioned such as St Clair and Stairways. Much faster than using the trans Pacific cable to get your files and view the sites.

posted by Tony Williams 11:59:26 AM

Wednesday, February 23, 2000

I needed a good way for my Mac users to load new files onto the intranet web server so I got Netatalk working which turns a Linux box into an Appleshare server. It also allows you to print from the Linux box to an AppleTalk printer. It comes standard with PPC Linux so I really just had to get the configuration right. To keep them away from the entire web server I established a share directory and placed links to only the directories they need to access in it. Netatalk also handled the security well as it translates Linux groups to Appleshare groups.

There is a very good guide at the Linux Netalk-HOWTO on getting the sharing working.

A guide at Werner Eugster's Home Page was helpful with the printing side. The GhostScript/Netatalk HOWTO was also helpful. They both also have details on getting the Linux box to provide print spooling for Macs but I ran out of time before I had that working. Another day.

posted by Tony Williams 9:26:46 AM

Tuesday, February 22, 2000

InformINIT is a very handy compendium of information on Control Panels, Extensions and all the other things that seem to clutter up the System Folder. Well worth the small fee. They also host the Mac Pruning Pages which give you most of the same information, though not in as handy a form and not as up to date.

Still doesn't fix my wierd problem of Macs that constantly hang at start with the hard disk icon highlighted. Aaaaaahhhhhh I fix the little blighters by trashing the desktop printers and Finder Preference file and two days later the same user reports the same problem. Once again I say Aaaaaahhhhhh

I also wonder what happens to my network in the afternoons. About 3 o'clock it starts to slow down and by 4 it is grinding to a halt. What are all those users doing out there? Must investigate some cheap network tools.

posted by Tony Williams 3:50:01 PM

Monday, February 21, 2000

With the current plethora of sites offering e-cards I've found one I could seriously fall in love with. Mac Cards offers some funny and serious cards all themed around my favourite computer. A good site.

If you enjoy custom icons for your folders, files and disks then you should visit The IconFactory. They have a large range of freeware icons, links to other icon sites and a bunch of excellent shareware icon utilities to make changing your icons a breeze. They even have Charlie Brown and Looney Tunes icon sets, not to mention some my daughter would enjoy. (Though I have yet to find a Winnie The Pooh icon set for her. Mail me at tonyw@six.com.au if you know of one.)

posted by Tony Williams 9:31:07 AM

Sunday, February 20, 2000

Wow, a whole new look and a move to include files (not that youreally care) so that we can change the look easily. I've also recruited a couple of others to aid the web log, my brother Graeme and a friend, Geoffrey, so a big welcome to them.

Blogger makes adding others to the team easy. I'm more impressed by this software the more I use it.

posted by Tony Williams 7:11:10 PM

Friday, February 18, 2000

There must be a dozen Mac magazine sites out there, most offering a newsletter, some articles, some downloads and a search engine. Some are a cut above the rest in the quality of their site and the quality of their newsletter. My favourite has seriously deteriorated over the past two onths and the search was on. So now I've tried MacAddict and I'm impressed. I like their site and the newsletter is not just a compendium of news releases, you can even choose to get it weekly or daily.

posted by Tony Williams 2:49:15 PM

I've been getting MacAddict since about issue one. If you subscribe, you get a CD every month with a selection of games, applications, utilities and demos. I depend on it for software updates, including Apple's updates to the system and utilities. Every CD contains an index to all previous CDs, so it's pretty easy to find the software you need. The only gripe and a half I have is that the software on the CD is increasingly PowerPC only, a slight inconvenience to those of us with a fine collection of vintage 68K Macs, and the descriptions on the CD don't always point that out.

posted by Graeme Williams 11:01:43 PM