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OK more Mac utilities, this time from a quick read of Mac magazine:

• iStumbler. This is like a similar utility on Windows, it tells you the strength of various Wifi and Bluetooth devices. Even has a widget for your dashboard
• USB Missile Launcher. OK, its not really a utility, its a nerf rocket launcher you can attach to your computer to fire at coworkers. Adrian will love one!
• DVI to HDMI Cable. If you've got a late model TV, then you can take the DVI output of your Mac and plug it directly into the HDMI input. This works great. Its $20.

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I need some help to navigate through a website, so how do I do it. Well, Mac's allow desktop sharing and it should be pretty easy as long as you can get through some settings. Softwareareas.com has a good guide for Max OS X 10.4 "Tiger"

For the machine that you want to share, do this:

1. System Preferences | Sharing | Apple Remote Desktop. Tick this option.
2. Click on Access Privileges
3. Tick “Observe”, “Show when being observed”, “Guests may request permission to control screen”, and “VNC viewers may control screen with password”
4. Enter the password next to the last of these options, e.g. we’ll assume it’s “easy2guess”

Now you have to forward a port with your router

This application will ask for the IP address of the view. Use whatsmyip.org that should give you the IP address of the client

This is the hard part, you have to forward TCP port 5900 to your Mac. Every router is a little different, but for Linksys and D-link, you need to know the IP address of the router and access its administrative web page. Typically http://192.168.0.1 for D-link and http://192.168.1.1 for Linksys. Hope you know the password for the router!

Install a VNC Client onto the "viewer machine"

Use Chicken of the VNC as its free and my goodness what a great name!

You need to give the viewer, the IP address from wahtsmyip.org and also the password

He should then see a replica of your screen and you can now share and debug

Windows alternatives

As an alternative, Unyte is a free skype addin that does that same thing for any Skype user with Windows. You can actually view from any platform with IE, Firefox or Safari, but the client has to be a Windows machine.

I'm going to see if this runs under Parallels

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In the Mac, I just lost 10GB worth of data doing that. With Windows, when you "replace" a folder, it actually merges the contents together. With the Mac, it overwrites anything taht was there. Taht means once you do it that data is lost, lost. It doesn't even go into the trash. You've been warned as xvsxp.com points out. Sigh!

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This is a cool tool for downloading and runs cross platform and also has a large plug in library. Some of the interesting ones are.

Zeropaid has a nice list including advanced statistics

BT and router problems? File Sharing FAQ - dslreports.com

Although its effectiveness is questionable, you could install a freeware IP blocker called PeerGuardian 2 (methlabs.org/projects) that blocks incoming traffic from IPs that are known or suspected to be part of the surveillance networks. You can use this if you’re running the original BitTorrent client. In Azureus there’s a plug-in available called SafePeer that uses a similar block list as PeerGuardian, but it only loads when Azureus does. Use the Plugins menu to open Installation Wizard and follow the prompts until you get a list of plug-ins. Check the SafePeer box and continue through the menus to install it. When you restart Azureus, SafePeer will download the current IP block list (adding about 30 seconds to the load time).

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Sometimes the Mac can be too clever for its own good. iMovie has a hidden directory structure for movies and somehow a movie I made is chewing up 50GB of disk, but you can't see it. Discussions.apple.com tells us that iMovie keeps its files in something called a pacakge. This is a collection of files that Finder and Spotlight only see as one file.

You need to download WhatSize to figure out what is actually on the disk since packages are hidden.

To then take them apart, you that need to find the movies which have the extension .iMovieProject and then you can see whats there by right clicking on the name and then choose Show Package Contents to find the Media folder with all the clips.

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I normally use DVD Decrypter and then DVD Shrink on the PC to backup the kid's DVDs which are constantly getting trashed. For Mac OS X, the solutions seem to be Mac The Ripper and then to burn the copy, you can use the included iDVD to get a dual layer onto a single layer or you can use Burn OSX

You can also check Rip Different as a good overall source of information

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Now you can read and write NTFS volumes. Mac OSx only allows reading with NTFS-3G

Here are some miore notes:

MacCast Forum [Powered by Invision Power Board]

The first step is made possible by Google. They created a program called MacFUSE which allows for (oversimplification warning) new file systems to be accessed by a user-space app rather than loading a kernel extension. What you need to do is http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/. There are many FUSE modules out there for various types of file systems, there are far too may to enumerate and I don't know how many are available on OS X.

Daniel's Useless Site

NTFS-3G is a FUSE filesystem that implements read/write NTFS volumes. NTFS-3G now works on Macs using MacFUSE. I’ve had a Fink package for NTFS-3g for a while now, but since I’ve had so many people asking about a binary version, I decided to make an Installer package.

This package doesn’t use Fink, but instead requires the MacFUSE Core package from here. Then download the NTFS-3G package and install it. This package contains ntfs-3g 1.710.

To connect to an NTFS volume:

first unmount the NTFS disk if currently mounted read-only (you can use Disk Utility to do this and also to get the partition). Then

mkdir mountpoint
ntfs-3g /dev/diskpartition mountpoint -ovolname="Volume Name"

where mountpoint is directory to mount the disk, diskpartition is the NTFS disk’s partition in /dev and Volume Name is the disk’s volume name.

To disconnect:

umount mountpoint

or eject from the Finder.

See ntfs-3g man page for more options.

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These are Microsoft formats. There are actually free playback from Quicktime on Mac OS X with Windows Media Components for QuickTime

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There are lots of myths about Mac's that come from previous versions. I've used Macs and Windows for years. From the very first floppy only Mac all the way to the Mac Book Pro. I do think that Apple is making it way harder though by not have a Windows transition guide because just about everything that you do or want is available but the terms are different, so here's a list from the most annoying to the most useful :-)

h3 File System

The file system on the Mac is nearly identical, but the conventions are different. When I first started with the Mac, I was completely confused. Here is the decoder ring

Start Menu. The list of applications on the bottom is equivalent to the first thing you see on the Start Menu in Windows. This is often called the most recently used applications.
All Programs. Macs are much simpler in their applications. Most of the time, the application is the same as the short cut. That is Macs don't have DLLs, so instead of the Start Menu/All Programs, you just browse to the equivalent of c:\Program Files which is in Macintosh talk is done by clicking on Macintosh HD and then clicking on Applications.

Also the file name conventions are different, Mac OS X uses the Unix convention of forward "/" rather than Windows backwards "\". Here are the equivalents on a standard one drive system:

| C:\ | / |
| C:\program files | /Applications |
| My Documents | ~ your user name |
Macintosh HD. This is just the c:\ drive also know as Hard Disk by default.

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With Windows I know all the maintenance things. I use O&O Defrag for making disks faster, Chkdsk for fixing errors, with the Mac, it is a different world. http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html#Anchor-57343 has a good list of things to be done.

# Repair permission is something you can do with /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility and you can also do a disk check, although this is normally not available on my MacBook Pro for some reason.
# Clean caches (a la the Windows, delete unnecessary files) can be done with freeware Cache Out X at http://www.nonamescriptware.com/forums/index.php?act=Downloads and you syould also clean out application caches as well manually at http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20060111202501460  which are at ~/Library/Caches (by the way ~ is a unix expression that OS X uses that mean "My Documents"
# Mac OS X has the equivalent of a registry called Preferences. You fix with with a freeware utility at http://homepage.mac.com/jonn8/as/
# The equivalent of Windows safe mode is called Safe Boot. You get it by holding down the shift key when you turn on your Mac. See http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106214
# For disk defragging, is should help, but there isn't anything available yet for the new Intel-based Macs

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