Mac
Access your Mac drive under virtual Windows
If you have been using the Parallels Desktop virtualization software to run Windows XP on your Intel Mac you may have noticed that their hacky “PSF Network” solution to accessing your Mac drive under Windows blows. Don’t get me wrong – I’m very impresses with the rest of the package, and you can’t beat the price. But it just flat at doesn’t work.
Turns out that’s ok, cause there is an easy work around. Just use the Mac’s built in support for Windows file sharing (via samba) to access your drive. Under Mac OSX just enable “Windows File Sharing” from your Sharing preferences pane. Then, under Windows I mount my home directory by accessing \iMac\duane, enable reconnect at login, and ta-dah.
Yes it seems a little odd to share files between two operating systems running simultaneously on the same computer, but hey – it works great.
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Selecting an Apple Boot Camp disk format
I recently installed Boot Camp on my new Intel iMac, and it works fabulously. The big dilemma that I (and others it seem) have is how to best allocate the drive space between the Mac and Windows partitions. So many variables to deal with. I want to have enough disk space in Windows to get my work done, but I’m also stingy and don’t want to give away too much of my Mac drive’s space since it is my primary operating system. In this post I’ll try to explain what I learned and what I came up with.
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Sharing a Printer between Mac and Windows with Bonjour
While in theory, if I have enabled printer sharing on my Mac, the printer should be available to Windows machines on my local network. In practice however, I’ve never been able to get this to work. I can get Windows to think its submitting jobs, but they never make it into the queue. I’m not sure if the problem is on the Mac side or the Windows side, but I’m putting my money on Windows being at the heart of the problem.
In any case, I finally found an ideal solution with Apple’s Bonjour technology (formerly Rendevous). Bonjour lets you create an instant network of computers and devices just by getting them connected to each other. The computers and devices take over from there, automatically broadcasting and discovering what services each is offering for the use of others. This is the same magic that makes iTunes auto-discover other iTunes clients on the network. With Bonjour services installed on your Windows machine, you can magically discover your shared Apple printers on the network. It’s a brain dead setup/install process:
- From your Mac’s Sharing preferences pane, make sure that Printer Sharing is enabled.
- On your Windows machine, download and install Bonjour for Windows
- After installing, click on the “Printer Setup Wizard” shortcut installed by Bonjour on the Windows desktop
- Select your printer from the list of network devices found by Bonjour
- Select “Generic PostScript Printer” (the default) as the printer type
I’m not too clear on why you need to use generic postscript driver rather than the native driver, but you do. I tried using the native driver for my Canon i960 but it failed to print. I’ve seen several other folks reporting this as well. It’s even selected by the Wizard by default. In any case, it works well with full color support and so forth.
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MacOS X Sleep Problems with USB Hubs
Why can’t I find a USB hub that will let my computer sleep properly? I recently bought a USB 2.0 hub when I upgraded to the Intel iMac. The hub works great, but it keeps the computer from sleeping while idle. I had the same problem on my G4. It took me about a half dozen hubs (USB 1.1) to find one that worked properly.
That old hub works fine on the iMac,but it is of course USB 1.1. That’d be fine except I have an external drive connected which is pretty much worthless at USB 1.1 speeds. Swapping in the new hub is the problem. D-Link claims that it fully supports the Mac, but I guess their flexible on this point. To me, its a show stopper.
I do NOTWANT to leave my Mac on all the time. I WANT it to behave! Anyone have any brand/model of USB hub that they have had success with? The D-LINK DUB-H7 hub I’m using is powered, and seems to be pretty high quality. It’s got 6 of the 7 ports used (scanner, printer, UPS, keyboard/mouse, card reader, drive), but nothing else magical.
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Using ACLs to Share iPhoto and iTunes Libraries
In this article over at Trent Davie’s ad Hominem blog he discusses an elegant solution to the whole notion of sharing an iPhoto library amongst several users on the same Mac.
My wife and I have this problem. We certainly don’t have our own sets of photos, but we do manage our own accounts. The old way was to wrap iPhoto in a bourne shell script that set the umask before each execution, maintaining group permissions. This works fine, but has the significant downside of having to be rebuilt every time a new iPhoto update comes down.
I’ll be trying out this solution to see if it works better for us. It also mentions in the comment trail that a similar approach could solve the problem for iTunes. What I really want though is for each account to share the same music library (the songs themselves), but maintain different ratings and playlists for each account. I’ve seen nothing that will do that for me yet however.
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Target Mode: Turn your Mac into a FireWire Drive
This is one of those cool Mac tricks that you tend to not hear about until you actually need it, and then its a lifesaver. I learned about “target mode”, a feature of all but the oldest Macs that turns your computer into the world’s most expensive external FireWire drive.
I needed this the other day when moving files between my old PowerMac and new Intel iMac. FireWire is 4X faster than ethernet, but you lose a bit if you have to copy from computer A to an external drive, then connect the drive to computer B and copy it back. Enter “target mode”. How to use target mode:
- Shutdown the computer that you want to copy to (the target)
- Connect the source computer to the target computer via FireWire cable
- While holding down “t” on the keyboard (t for target of course) power on the target computer
After a few moments, the FireWire logo will dance around the screen and you should see the target computer appear on the source computer’s desktop. It will look like any other external FireWire drive. Drag and drop! When you are done, “eject” the target computer, then power it down.
Elegant, simple, but amazingly useful. How very Apple.
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Solution: Intel Mac Wireless Networking Issues
I’ve heard several reports about poor downloads performance on the Intel Mac over wireless LAN. The symptoms are unusually slow download speeds, intermittent connectivity problems, and general flaky performance.
Turns out that it is a conflict between the Bluetooth and Wireless card in some configurations. I finally dug up the solution in this thread from an Apple support site. The gist of the problem and fix is here:
The engineering departments says that there is interference between channel 6 on wireless routers with Bluetooth. They told me to change to any other channel and the problem should be solved. I just changed my D-Link 624 to channel 11 returned to our wireless keyboard and wireless mouse and we now have screaming fast download speeds that match our 15 inch PB.
Surprise, this is the default channel on the popular Linksys wireless router. To fix it, visit your admin server panel (normally at http://192.168.1.1) and select a different channel:
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Mac Performance Comparison at Geek Patrol
The folks over at Geek Patrol gives us rundown of relative performance amongst a variety of processors, the most wide reaching I’ve seen. To quote from their conclusions:
The PowerPC G4 has served us well, its time has past. It still performs reasonably well as a lower-end CPU, but when compared to the PowerPC G5 and the Intel Core Duo it’s sorely lacking; it was blown away by both processors in almost every test (save for the Blowfish tests). With the Intel Core Duo in both the iMac and the PowerBook1 hopefully we’ll see the Intel Core Solo replace the PowerPC G4 in the Mac Mini and the iBook.
Other comparsions:
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