Mac Geeks

In this short screencast I will show you how to change the keyboard shortcuts of any application. You can not only change but also add keyboard shortcuts for any menu item of any application. And all without bying any fancy helper application.

Modify Keyboard Shortcuts on MacOS X from Falko Zurell on Vimeo.

A friend told me today that Apples new operating system Snow Leopard (MacOS X 10.6) is not running a 64bit kernel as Apples massive marketing campaign might suggest.

In fact most of the desktop Macs are running the 32bit kernel by default. Only the Apple Xserve with proper CPUs will run the 64bit kernel by default.

The cause of that seems to be the fact that a lot of the drivers were not finished as 64bit version when Snow Leopard was ready. So Apple decided to deliver both kernels and boot the 32bit by default on the desktops.

However you can explicitly choose the 64bit kernel during boot by pressing the keys “6″ and “4″. You can tell that you’re running the 64bit kernel by entering the following command in your Terminal:

uname -a


It should look like this:

Darwin voyager.alice-dsl.de 10.0.0 Darwin Kernel Version 10.0.0: Fri Jul 31 22:46:25 PDT 2009; root:xnu-1456.1.25~1/RELEASE_X86_64 x86_64


The important part is the “x86_64″. It would be “i386″ if it’s the 32bit kernel.

Everyone hates the time tracking for projects. But everyone also knows that it’s essential for good accounting an planning. The reasons for the dislike is mostly the ugly tools for this tasks. Most tools are good examples for complete lack of user friendlyness

But thanks to brave Julia Soergel & Sebastian Munz there is an alternative. The wrote there diploma thesis on mite – a web based time keeping tool – and released or continued it as a service on the web.

They used all the recent Web 2.0 techniques to create lean, smart and powerfull web application. But they didn’t stop there. They also implemented some additional tools like the Jabber bot and Twitter bot to interact with your mite account.

This makes time keeping really easy and almost a pleasure. So there are no more excuses.

Im Screencast neulich wollte mir partout nicht einfallen, wie man sich die Tastaturbelegung bzgl. Sonderzeichen anzeigen lassen kann. Ich war mir aber sicher, daß das irgendwie geht. Jetzt habe ich durch Zufall in einem Screencast bei Bitnap.tv gesehen wie’s geht. Da der Screencast dort in englisch ist, hab ich das hier nochmal in deutsch aufgenommen.

Imagine you have to switch the mainboard of your Apple computer. More specific: the network card or even more specific the MAC address of your network card. Then your exisiting TimeMachine backup will no longer be recognized as valid. This is because of the fact that the Backup folder on the TimeMachine Volume is tagged with the MAC address of your computer. That should prevent you from accidently using TimeMachine backups from different computers. But will also bring you trouble if your MAC address changes for some reason (as in case of mainboard switch during maintenance).

Unfortunately there is no obvious way to tell TimeMachine to use an pre exisiting Backup. TimeMachine would simply start a new backup if you try to continously use the old Volume. The old Backup folder may be even moved to the Trash on that Volume. Obviously this is not what you want.

But when you try to move the original Backup out of Trash, you’ll notice that even the super user “root” doesn’t have the privileges to do that.

But don’t worry. You’re not all lost. What is causing you the trouble is the fact that the MAC address is somewhere tagged on the Backup folder and that Apple additionally uses ACLs (Access Control Lists) on the backup volume. These are basically some additional security settings which should prevent unauthorized or unwanted changes.

So the easiest way to get the Backup working again is to disable the ACLs on the volume, change the MAC address tag of the Backup folder and the re-enable the ACLs on the volume.

This can be done in the Terminal.app as superuser:

cd /Volumes/TimeMachineBackup
fsaclctl -p /Volumes/TimeMachineBackup -d
xattr -w com.apple.backupd.BackupMachineAddress 00:16:cb:90:62:0d `hostname`
fsaclctl -p /Volumes/TimeMachineBackup -e

After that your original Backup should be recognized by TimeMachine.

This tutorial was found here: CyberHQ NL

In den letzten Screencasts ging es hier ja um Grundlegende Sachen beim MacOS X bzw. den Mac Rechnern. In den Pingbacks zum letzten Beitrag habe ich ein sehr interessantes Blog gefunden, welches einige Beiträge für Mac Beginner hat. Hier sind viele Grundlagen schön erklärt:

check out: http://macfidelity.de/macbeginner/

Dort ergab sich in den Kommentaren zu einem Beitrag eine Diskussion bzgl. der Bündelung von Screencasting Aktivitäten. Evtl. ergibt sich hier eine neue Anlaufstelle für Video-Tutorials rund um unser Lieblingsgerät

What does that mean? 90% Application? In my eyes the Pixelmator image editing program brings 90% of the features I’d expect from a powerfull image editor. In this review I’ll show you why.

Pixelmator is only anvailable for Mac. This means it’s not a port of a program written for a different platform. It’s written and designed for MacOS X. It makes use of the build in CoreImage features. This means most of the image processing is off loaded to the processor of the graphic card (GPU). This GPU is highly specialized on image manipulation and much faster than the central processor. Your benefit from this is a very snappy user interface of Pixelmator even when editing big files. I tried this with some 20 MByte RAW Images from my Canon EOS 400D. All the tools worked perfect smooth which I can’t tell from Photoshop CS or The Gimp on these files. All the effects have a live previeview – thanks to CoreImage.

In the toolset of Pixelmator you’ll find everything you’re familiar with from usual image editing tools. There are hue & saturation, graduation curve, color balance and tone mapping etc. to mention only a few.
The whole user interface is nicely designed and all mac like. You will be suprised by the details of some tool pallettes and dialogues for instance the gradient settings color chooser or the lights on the ruler which follow the cursor.

Pixelmator Gradient and hoover ruler from Falko Zurell on Vimeo.

The highlights which separate Pixelmator from the others are: CoreImage usage, make new layer from iSight cam, built in Photobrowser for iPhoto library or hard disk, QuickLook plugin (now QuickLook can display all the files Pixelmator can), Automator actions and native graphic tablet support.

But where there is light, there is shadow too. But only a little. I miss some minor features like keyboard shortcuts for most functions, drag & drop layer duplication, layer effects and more evolved text editing tool.

But hey – Pixelmator (59$) costs only about 5% of the price Adobe Photoshop CS4 does. And it’s much faster in most of the things.

The guys at Pixelmator were very kind to provide me a coupon code for their Online-Shop. So if you buy Pixelmator then use this Coupon-Code “MACGEEKS” and save 10$.

[Update 13.06.09:] I forgot to mention that there are a lot of very good tutorials and screencasts on the Pixelmator website. And you can extend Pixelmator with plugins. Either by CoreImage plugins or QuartzComposer extensions.

There is a new star in internet music television called putpat.tv. This is the new service of the guys from Televised Revolution who created MotorTV. But putpat.tv is more than just a music video station. It’s spiced up with interactivity and prefedined channels.

During first login you select you personal music taste by giving some examples of artists or genres you like. Putpat.tv will create a channel with a music mix based on this data and add some other artists you may like.
It’s based on Flash and will start using your whole browser window to playback. This is very clean and simple.

With the “veequalizer” you can modify the mix of your music channel. Simply enter artists and/or genres and adjust the slider.

If you’re tired of your channel you can choose between a dozen of predefined channels with all varieties of music mixes. The channels are displayed in a nice cover flow like view.

All together putpat.tv is a stylish and dead simple way to play your favourite music videos from the web. You quickly get what you want when you’re using these kind of services – good music. I was suprised that I found a lot of music videos from my favourite artists I didn’t knew before. All this slightly reminds me of the good old times when the early MTV (from UK with legendary Ray Cokes, Steve Blame etc….) was constanly playing in the background in my room. I would like to have a separate PC to display putpat.tv in the office

putpat.tv Screencast from Falko Zurell on Vimeo.

Yesterday Apple released the MacOS X Update to Leopard 10.5.6. You can read about the changes at the Apple Support Website.

One change I noticed was the newly introduced “Trackpad” preference icon in the global preferences.

I think this is mostly usefull for the brand new unibody MacBooks and MacBook Pros with the glass trackpad. I can not see any settings on my old MBP that where newly introduced.

You may wonder about all the other Preferences in the custom section above. These are (from left to right):

• Backblaze Online Backup Client
• Logitech Control Center
• Flip4Mac WMV Plugin for Quicktime
• Growl
• iStat Menus
• MySQL
• Perian (additional Codecs for Quicktime)
• Secrets (gives access to hidden System/Application Preferences)
• SmartSleep
• Wacom Bamboo Preferences
• TextExpander

This is another short screencast about one of my favourite Mac programs called PictureSync.

PictureSync is a tool to upload photos to one or more websites for picture sharing. It comes with a bunch of predefined sites like Flickr and Ipernity to upload your photos too. A special feature called “Rules” will help you to automate certain task on your pictures like tagging.

PictureSync ScreenCast from Falko Zurell on Vimeo.

PictureSync is free for the use with one account and a full license is available for $10