Core Dump

Firstly why would you do this? The simple answer is when calibrating your battery, the last thing you want to do is sit around waiting for your battery to drain normally. This procedures accelerates the process.

There are a number of ways to drain your Macs battery such as playing a game, or watching a DVD. But I have found a quicker way to do it which doesn’t require you to be at your computer.

Just open up one terminal per processor core and run this in it:

yes > /dev/null

Don’t run it without the /dev/null otherwise it will consume lots of memory and eventually lock up your system. Now if you open another Terminal an run “top”, you should see 0% idle. Let it run this way for a while and your battery will drain very quickly. Once it reaches around 5%, I would suggest stopping all the yes processes and let it drain by itself. Otherwise when you powerup your system these processes will start running again.

by Brandon Yap

The contenders

When I first started out with Macs, one of the more challenging tasks for me was to find the cream of the crop in Mac software. Sure there are lots of applications out there and most of them good, but some stand out above the others and this page aims to capture those excelling in their field.

This list includes casual to intermediate level applications which I think represents the best of the best. Professional applications are not covered here.

Image editing

Pixelmator, Acorn

Pixelmator and Acorn are part of a new breed of image editing applications capable of utilising the GPU for imaging operations enabling realtime effects and layering not seen in other less capable applications. Pixelmator and Acorn are not meant to be Photoshop replacements, they should be seen as lightweight and cost effective alternatives.

Alternatives: Graphic Converter

Image management

iPhoto

You can’t go past iPhoto for simple consumer level image management. It comes as part of the iLife suite of applications from Apple.

Personal finance

iBank

Quicken is the undisputed king of personal finance applications, trouble is it only runs on Windows. iBank from IGG Software has enough power to stand toe to toe with it and has changed the scene of personal finance in the Mac world.

Alternatives: Moneydance, Cha-Ching

Image capture

Snapz Pro X, Jing

Jing and Snapz Pro X are both very capable image capture applications. They also both target different types of users. Snapz Pro X is the more capable of the two and is aimed at the prosumer who wants a fully featured image capture applications no holds barred. Jing is more the social of the two and has features which allows you to capture and easily share images and videos freely online. At the end of the day, they are both great applications and deserve considering.

File compression

Stuffit

Stuffit has been around in the Mac world for years and years. Their sitx compression still remains one of the top in the field, not just for Macs but across the board. Definitely one if you need file compression.

Video compression

Visualhub

Visualhub will convert just about anything to anything. It is your video gateway. Got a video you want to put on your ipod? No problem. Visualhub can output to PSP, DVD,MP4, WMV, Flash just to name a few. It’s interface is relatively well laid out and simple to understand, but don’t be fooled. It has a lot of power under the hood.

DVD conversion

Handbrake, MacTheRipper

Both these applications were meant to be used in tandem. MacTheRipper will rip your DVD’s to VOBs, Handbrake will then compress them into MPEG-4. The latter comes with preset profiles for outputting to AppleTV, iPod, and PS3 compatible formats.

Scanning

VueScan

If your scanner is too old and your scanning software and drivers are out of date, VueScan can come to your rescue. It is compatible with lots of scanners and does not need TWAIN drivers already installed.

Database

Bento

Bento is a database application from the makers of Filemaker Pro. It lets you input and store large amounts of data through friendly and easy to use templates.

Movie making

iMovie

Also part of the iLife suite of applications, iMovie aims to please with it’s quick and easy no fuss drag and drop movie editing. It doesn’t get any easier than this. Seriously. You can even upload your video direct to .Mac or Youtube straight from within iMovie.

Productivity

iWork

Apple’s own iWork suite consists of a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation applications. Why not Microsoft Office you ask? Simply because iWork is more than powerful enough for the majority of Mac users, at close to a quarter of the cost.

Alternatives: NeoOffice

CD/DVD Authoring

Toast Titanium

Roxio has been making CD/DVD authoring/burning software for years and their experience shines in this area. Toast Titanium is a polished product which shows in every aspect.

RSS Reader

NetNewsWire

Both NetNewsWire and Vienna are very capable apps and match each others features. NetNewsWire’s outstanding attribute is it’s ability to update feeds very quickly.

Alternatives: Vienna

Diagramming

OmniGraffle

The Visio equivalent for Mac.

Maczot and MacUpdate daily promotions

Maczot and MacUpdate Promo both run daily promotions on Mac applications. Each day they feature some of the best applications out there massively discounted (around 40 – 50% off).

by Brandon Yap

Did you know that you could resurrect your Mac from a botched firmware update? Apple have available Firmware Restoration CD’s which will do just that.

“The Firmware Restoration CD can restore the firmware of an Intel-based Macintosh computer. Note: Restoring your firmware will reset some of your computer’s preferences to defaults. You can only use this to restore the firmware after an interrupted or unsuccessful update. If your computer is already in this state, you’ll need to download the software and create the CD on another Macintosh computer, or you can take your computer to an Apple Store or Apple Authorized Service Provider to restore your firmware. This CD can be created on either a PowerPC- or Intel-based Mac, but only works with Intel-based Macs.”

There are a number of versions of restoration CD’s, each supporting discrete models of Macs. Version support is as below:

Firmware Restoration CD 1.5

Firmware Restoration CD 1.4

Firmware Restoration CD 1.3 

by Brandon Yap

So you’ve used something like TechTools’s Surface Scan only to discover you have bad blocks on your Mac hard drive. Now what? Bad blocks are supposed to be automatically marked as bad by the drive controller and remapped from the drive’s factory pre-assigned reallocation pool, but sometimes this doesn’t work so you end up with bits on the drive which can’t be read from and written to properly. TechTools will not map out bad blocks for you, so what will? The answer is surprisingly obvious. Because bad blocks are reallocated on writes only, erasing the disk in Disk Utility using the Zero Out Data security option will write across every block on the disk, marking the bad blocks as it goes along so they won’t be used again.

Yesterday I decided to apply the 10.5.2 update via Software Update. It downloaded and installed just fine, then proceeded to reboot my machine so I walked away to do something else. When I came back about about 10 minutes later, I was greeted by a blue screen with a black cursor. So I thought i’d wait some more. 30 minutes later and still nothing more than the same blue screen. Ok no problem, this happened to me on the Tiger to Leopard upgrade I thought, i’ll just reboot and be on my merry way. It worked for the upgrade, surely it would work now. So I reboot. Apple logo, grey screen, spinning circle. It kept doing that. Something’s wrong. Ok i’ll boot into Safe mode. Same thing. Upon booting into Verbose mode, there was some error about mDNSresponder which kept looping and looping.
Crap!
I knew my data was probably intact, but something had messed up the boot process during the upgrade.
It took the Leopard DVD and an Archive and Install to recover the system, but it recovered well with no loss of data and all my user information and applications intact.
So while the upgrade didn’t go smoothly, I got there in the end. If this happens to you, it’s not the end of the world. Just reinstall.

It’s about time Apple got going on this one. Americans have for a number of years enjoyed easy ordering of photo books from within iPhoto. Just today I received a mail from Apple stating that iPhoto books are now available in Australia! *chrorus sings* *light shines down from the heavens*

Now you can finally send Aunt Flo (who doesn’t know the difference between a radio and a computer) all those pictures you’ve been meaning to for the past year in a nicely bound and glossy book.

Often i’ve wondered if there was a better way to keep track of serial numbers for the software i’ve purchased. This usually involves keeping a text file up to date with your serials, but an upcoming trend is for software vendors to distribute license files which makes the traditional method of tracking licenses difficult.

LicenseKeeper is set to change all that by becoming the central repository of all the licenses you own.

BookEnz have an innovative range of docking stations for the MacBook, MacBook Pro, and PowerBook. Since Macs lack a docking connector, BookEnz have developed docking stations with connectors that plug straight into the external slots present on the notebooks. Kinda cool.

Enough is enough. I’ve delayed upgrading this modest 80 gig hard drive that came with the Macbook for far too long. It’s time for an upgrade! So down I go to the local dodgey computer store, you know the one that looks more like a warehouse than a shop. I picked up a 160 gig drive for $125. Bargain! 5400rpm, 8Mb cache, NCQ. Certainly not the fastest but well worth the price.

Now i’ve been doing Time Machine backups since November last year, so when I got home, I fired up the computer one last time and performed a backup. After it was done, I proceeded shut down the system and removed the battery then the hard drive. Goodbye ol faithful. In went the new drive and back went the battery.

Upon firing up the machine with the external hard drive connected, I stuck in the Leopard install DVD and went through the menus to partition the drive, and then perform a system restore from backup. It asked for the source and then the destination. It then proceeded to restore my files. Everything looked good so far so I walked away and timed the process.

It took about an hour to complete and once finished, asked me to restart the system which I did.

When the system booted back up, you could imagine my astonishment to find everything exactly the way I had left it before the hard drive swap! Everything! From the placement of the icons on my desktop, to the applications I had installed. With the exception that I now had much more space

This has got to be one of the most painless hard drive upgrades I have ever done. Nice one Apple for making this such a painless process!