Latest Posts in Mac 911

Bugs & Fixes: Finding 10.5.5’s bug fixes

Based on news reports, it would be difficult to overestimate how many bugs Mac OS X 10.5.5 managed to fix. Macworld reported that the update addressed “33 issues with the operating system.” Other sites suggested that 10.5.5 patched “nearly 70 bugs.”. According to Ars Technica, the update provided “tons of fixes.”

Depending on your viewpoint, it’s either impressive how much Apple fixed or how much still needed fixing, considering this is the fifth maintenance update to OS X 10.5.

You might suppose that, given all of the hyperbole, after you updated to Mac OS X 10.5.5, you would easily notice at least a few of these improvements. “Not so!” claim many, if not most, Mac OS X users. These users report seeing not even one difference between 10.5.4 and 10.5.5.

Muting the Mac's startup sound

Reader Stephen Mette faces the age-old problem of how to shut up the Mac when it first boots. He writes:

I’ve always loved the Mac’s opening chime. But I’m the early riser in my family, and the volume of my new iMac’s chime is very loud. For the sake of family harmony (excuse the pun) is there a way—a terminal command or something—that I can reduce the volume?

You can solve this problem with a little forethought. On a newish Mac just press the Mute key on the keyboard before you shut down the Mac. When you next boot the Mac, you’ll hear nothing more than the Mac’s fans and hard drive.

If you’ve neglected to take this step and face a Mac that will bong with the best of ‘em on startup you can mute it by slipping a miniplug (found on a set of iPod headphones, for example) into the sound output port.

Remapping PC keyboards

Reader Roger Vaught would like to bring a little more Mac goodness to his PC keyboard. He writes:

I got a used Microsoft Bluetooth keyboard with no manual. It works, sorta. The problem is the Apple (alt) and Control (Cntl) keys do not work like the keys on Apple’s keyboards—the Option and Command keys are reversed, for example. Any solution?

If you’re running OS X 10.4 or later, check out the Keyboard & Mouse system preference, and within it, the Keyboard tab. Click the Modifier Keys button and you’ll find that you can change modifier key assignments (such as Caps Lock, Control, Option, and Command).

If your keyboard doesn’t respond to such treatment or you’re running an older version of the Mac OS, check out my colleague Dan Frakes’ solution from back in 2005. It’s just as worthwhile now as it was then. That solution is Michael Baltaks’s free DoubleCommand, a kernel extension you can use to swap the Alt and Windows keys on a PC keyboard. This isn’t DoubleCommand’s only talent, however, as Dan says:

Bugs & Fixes: OS X 10.5.5 causes hassles for some apps

As with any OS update, Mac OS X 10.5.5, released nearly two weeks ago, is a bit of a trade-off. While the update fixes a slew of bugs, it inevitably introduces a few new ones. In some cases, the bug is more the result of a third-party application having problems with the update, rather than the update itself. Here are two examples:

Adobe printing errors

According to an Adobe TechNote, after updating to Mac OS X 10.5.5, “printing to certain printers from Illustrator, InDesign or InCopy results in pages rendering with incorrect scaling and/or rotation.” Based on reports in Adobe’s forums, the most common specific symptom appears to be that, when printing to Adobe PDF 8.0, a resulting image is half its expected size.

Adobe offers three work-arounds. The simplest is to export the file as a PDF and print it from Acrobat or Adobe Reader. Otherwise, from your original Adobe application, select Print and navigate to the Printer Features options. From here, change the printing resolution back to 600 dpi. Unfortunately, this is not a permanent fix, as the settings change is not retained as a preset. A third solution, as detailed in the TechNote, is to use the “Defined by Driver” option in Paper Size control, also accessed via the Print dialog.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.