How to use calibre with a network drive? With NFS!

calibre is not exactly the program that will win a beauty contest, but functionally it is ok.

OS X: How to start the NFS daemon?

I recently reactivated my backup Mac Mini as a server; for convenience, I installed the OS X Server package.

OS X: How to change an alias icon?

I recently did some backup/restores and I noticed that the restored aliases, although fully functional, did not preserve the original icons.

OS X: How to change the main screen?

In multi-screen setups, for example a laptop with an external monitor, OS X prefers the laptop screen, which makes things a bit weird when using mainly the big screen, especially when having to confirm message boxes in the other screen.

OS X: How to get the books out of iBooks

One of the first questions I had when evaluating iBooks, was “How do I get my PDFs back from iBooks, if needed?”. The answer is pretty simple, and very Apple like: “You just drag them from iBooks to your folder of choice”.

OS X: How to disable Acrobat as the Safari PDF viewer

Soon after switching to Mac I discovered that one of the myths that I lived with for many years, i.e. that Adobe Acrobat Reader is mandatory in order to view PDF documents, is no longer true.

OS X: How to install EAGLE as a non-administrator user

There are few EDA programs that run on Mac OS X. One of them is CadSoft EAGLE PCB & Schematic software (v5), but unfortunately the integration with Mac OS X is minimal.

OS X: Startup key combinations

There are moments when even Mac OS X has problems and needs to be started in special configurations.

OS X: How to run a program with a specific PATH?

One of challenges many developers face is to be able to maintain different (old) products, built with various versions of the development tools, some quite obsolete.

The right answer to this challenge is to have different virtual machines with the complete environment. Unfortunately, due to crazy licensing issues, currently running Mac OS X as a virtual guest on a Mac OS X host is not allowed (according to some rumours, Lion will change this).

The next choice is to keep multiple versions of the development tools installed in different folders, but in this case extra care should be taken to avoid messing the PATH.

OS X: How to see hidden files in Open and Save dialogs?

Most of the time, hiding the system or configuration files is ok, it reduces the clutter and also the risk of inadvertently removing/changing them.

However, there are moments when we need to change, for example, the PATH, or some shell aliases, or some startup configurations. In other words, we need to edit such hidden files.

OS X: How to install minicom?

Minicom is a menu driven communications program. It emulates ANSI and VT102 terminals. The current version is 2.4, from 2009-12-20.

OS X: How to backup the Mac OS X Install DVD?

I recently decided to make some Mac OS X installation tests, and, to avoid destroying the original Apple Install DVDs, I thought it would be great to first make some backups of the disks.

And so I discovered the intricacies of the Apple hybrid disks…

OS X: How to get nice screen shots?

It’s this outstanding attention to details one of the reasons I like the Apple products.

I was using the Mac OS X Grab application for long time already, but it was just recently that I discovered the special keyboard shortcuts, more precisely the differences between using them and directly using the Grab application.

OS X: How to write to a NTFS disk?

NTFS support is available in Mac OS X for some versions already, but only reading from NTFS is currently (v10.6.4) possible.

Like it or not, there are moments when we need to share files with other non Apple computers (Windows, Linux). I dedicated a slim USB powered disk for this and I thought that formatting it as FAT32 is the best option in terms of portability. As long as you have only small files, FAT32 is fine, but if you need to transfer files larger than 2 GB (like .iso images, movies), FAT32 is no longer appropriate, and a solution based on NTFS needs to be considered.

OS X: How to backup (rip) a movie DVD?

First of all, this post is not about making illegal DVD copies. My goal is to transfer my DVD library from optical disks to a hard disk (ok, a large one), the same as I did with my music CD library, entirely transferred to iTunes. Well, not exactly the same, since the DVDs are significantly more complex than audio CDs.

The classical audio CDs structure is very simple, just a list of tracks, without any additional information, so ripping it did not loose any content.

On the other side, DVDs usually have a very complex structure, with multiple audio tracks, multiple subtitles, menus, special features, photos, etc.

The common approach when ripping DVDs is to preserve only the main video and audio streams and repack everything using a very high compression algorithm to produce a DivX or MKV stream. For my taste, this approach is not acceptable, due both to quality issues and missing content.

A true backup should preserve the full content and the quality; the only solution I know is to use a disk image format, like ISO.