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Mac OS X Hints

Use a mouse and keyboard…and a trackpad

When Apple released its new accessories, I thought it might be time to revisit my input setup. For a few years, I've been using the original Magic Trackpad and the Logitech Wireless Solar Keyboard.

While this setup has worked well for me, I missed the precision of a mouse (so much so that I kept a corded one nearby, and plugged it in when I needed to do such work). So I thought I'd check out Apple's new gear, with the thought of either upgrading to the new Magic Trackpad, or perhaps moving to the new Magic Mouse as my pointing device, and maybe replacing the Logitech with the new Apple keyboard.

Unfortunately, the local Apple Store only had the mouse in stock, not the keyboard or trackpad. Unable to compare the pointing devices, I just bought the mouse. After setting it up, I loved the added precision it provided over the trackpad. But if I was going to be using a mouse regularly, I wanted to narrow the reach from keyboard to mouse, so I pulled out my old Apple wireless keyboard, which is about six inches narrower than the Logitech.

This setup seemed really good, except that I'd be giving up a lot of features by removing the trackpad: I use it with BetterTouchTool and our own Butler (as well as Keymo and Moom) to execute all sorts of gesture-related actions.

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Use Intel’s Power Gadget to keep an eye on your CPU

If you're the type who likes to keep an eye on your system, you may be familiar with tools such as Activity Montior's CPU meters, or iStat Menus, which displays a ton of system info via its menubar icon. Neither of these tools, however, really show you what the CPU itself is up to—and that's where an Intel-provided tool enters the scene.

The Intel® Power Gadget shows you exactly what your CPU is up to: how much power it's using, what speed it's running at, and its temperature. As seen in the image at right (click for larger), it graphs these three values over time.

The data you're seeing there is from my 4GHz Retina iMac, and the screenshot was grabbed while it wasn't doing much in particular. What really stands out to me is how often my 4GHz CPU is running at something closer to 3GHz; if the CPU isn't being called on for its full power, I'm assuming it slows itself down to reduce power usage.

But as soon as you do something that demands the CPU's full power, the napping stops. Here's a brief movie I created showing the CPU tracking when I started ripping a Blu-Ray:

The machine is basically idle at first, then I start the rip after 15 seconds or so. As soon as the hard work starts, the power and temperature charts shoot upwards, and over time, the CPU speed pegs right around 4GHz; the naps are gone.

I'm not sure how much real-world use this tool has, but from a geeky perspective, it's pretty cool being able to see exactly what your CPU is up to at any point in time. (You can even send the data to a log file, in case you really want to study power, speed, and temperature over an extended time period.)



How to search the archived Mac OS X Hints site

Late last year, just after its 14th birthday, Mac OS X Hints was officially put into a coma. The site exists online, but it's no longer accepting hints, and exists in a static state.

While it's great that this information is still online—as there are tons of still-useful tidbits there—it's apparently not searchable. When you enter something in the search box and press Enter, nothing happens…well, not nothing: The page reloads with an empty search box. Without search, the huge database isn't quite so useful.

The good news is that Google and Bing have indexed the static site, so you can use their search engines instead of the site's search engine. Even better is that you can build complex queries that aren't possible when searching directly on the site.

To search the hints site from Bing or Google, just include site:hints.macworld.com in the search string. A few quick examples:

While this isn't quite as handy as searching directly on the Hints site, it works well. (To make it easier, I've created a Butler search engine entry that searches hints via Bing.)



Fix Messages’ image pasting by killing its engine

Kirk McElhearn explains how Messages in Yosemite has trouble sending pasted images. These problems typically only occur between people who use AIM accounts in Messages; sending pasted messages when using iMessages' accounts seems to work fine. (I use an AIM account to keep iMessage traffic off my main Mac, and for its great screen sharing.)

Kirk's article details the fix, which is to kill the imagent process, which is what controls Messages. He uses Activity Monitor to do so, which works fine. But I have to kill the stupid imagent many times a day, so I wrote the World's Easiest AppleScript™ to do the work for me.

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Span one large image across multiple printed pages

I was looking for a way to print a large image across multiple pages, so I could make my own do-it-yourself poster-size printout. By way of background, I wanted to print a huge virtual fire, to cover a piece of insulation we put in front of a drafty fireplace in the winter. (We don't like to burn wood, so the fireplace goes unused, but staring at a piece of shiny foam insulation all winter isn't all that interesting.)

Conceptually, this seemed pretty easy: find a huge image, open it in some app that handles images, and print. What I found is that doesn't work, at least not in the apps I had at hand (Acorn and Preview). After some web searching, I stumbled across an odd but effective solution: use Excel.

Open a new blank Excel workbook, then select Insert > Photo > Picture From File, and select your massive image. Now when you hit Print, you'll see the output spans multiple pages. I used Page Setup to select a borderless US Letter size, and printed out 16 pages of a roaring fire.

After some cut-and-tape operation, the drafty fireplace's insulation became more visually appealing:

Note that this was a "proof of concept" operation, so I printed in draft mode (hence the vertical striping on the printout) and wasn't overly careful about lining up the pages. I had originally planned to print the final version on glossy photo paper, but instead opted to buy a 36x48 poster-size printout from an online vendor. (I haven't yet received the print, but when I do, I'll post about its quality. Until then, though, I don't want to link to the vendor, as I don't yet know what I've bought.)

I knew Excel could do a lot, but I never thought to try it for printing huge images across multiple pages.



Encrypt files then backup to a cloud service via script

Most cloud services tell you that their data stores are safe, that your data is encrypted in transit and on their drives, that employees don't have access, etc. For the vast majority of the stuff I store in the cloud, this is more than good enough for me—the data isn't overly sensitive, and if someone were to hack their way in, all they'd get are a bunch of work and personal writing files and some family photos.

For other files—primarily financial and family related—those assurances just aren't enough for me. But I still want the flexibility and security that comes from having a copy of these files in the cloud. So what's a paranoid user to do to take advantage of the cloud, with added security, but with a minimum of hassle?

The solution I came up with involves using local encrypted disk images and a shell script. Using this script (and some means of scheduling it), you can automatically encrypt and back up whatever files you like to a cloud service.

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RIP Mac OS X Hints, Nov 4 2000 – Nov 4 2014

Note: The following is my unofficial eulogy for Mac OS X Hints; IDG has not announced any plans regarding the site, though I would hope they'll leave it online, even if no new hints appear in the future. The site is now officially in read-only mode; there will be no new hints. So it's officially comatose, at least.

Dearly beloved…

On this, the occasion of its 14th birthday, we're gathered here to mark the passing of Mac OS X Hints.

While it can be hard to tell exactly when a web site has died, the signs are fairly obvious. It's been over 45 days since the last new hint appeared on the site. There is no way for new users to sign up for an account. There's been one new comment posted in the last two days. A sidebar box proudly proclaims Latest Mountain Lion Hints. The site design, logo, and icons were last updated when I worked for Macworld, over four years ago. To paraphrase a Star Trek character, "it's dead, Jim."

To be fair, it's a bit more Monty Python "I'm not dead!" than officially dead, but really, the site is a dead man walking. Now that I'm done with movie analogies, let me explain why the passing of Mac OS X Hints isn't a bad thing. (Note that Mac OS X Hints' passing is in no way a reflection of its management by Macworld. In fact, the opposite is true: I believe the site would have ceased to exist years ago without their involvement.)

The simple truth is that the need for OS X hints has tapered off to near zero over the last 14 years. And that's a good thing.

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Mac OS X Hints turns 14

Fourteen years ago today, I launched Mac OS X Hints, with this simple post. The Mac OS X 10.0 Public Beta was only a couple months old, and many Mac users (myself included) were feeling lost in the land of Unix and Terminal. (Despite anything Apple said at the time, Terminal was very much a required aspect of using Mac OS X in those early days!)

Related post: RIP Mac OS X Hints, Nov 4 2000 - Nov 4 2014

At the time of launch, I knew nothing about content management systems or PHP; I knew enough HTML to be dangerous, and very little about anything else—including design, as you can see from the image at right.

That image, courtesy of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, was taken one month after launch. Could it be any brighter and uglier? Probably not. While I did many things wrong during that launch, I did get a few things right…

  • The site was all about the community; it was my intent from day one that it would be a users helping users site, not a "me telling the world what to do" site.
  • The content management system I chose, Geeklog, has proven to be very long lived—fourteen years on, and it's still what powers the site. In all that time, we had (I believe) exactly one hacking incident. Not bad.
  • The site had a laser focus on hints; I'd do a pick of the week, but outside of that, it was all about the hints.

So despite my poor design and lack of PHP skills, the site flourished. So much so that Macworld purchased the site and hired me in June of 2005. I spent nearly five years with Macworld, before leaving in 2010 to join Many Tricks.

In looking back, never in my wildest dreams did I imagine the site would flourish to the point where it would actually change my career. But it did, and for that, I'm eternally thankful to everyone who helped make macosxhints.com what it was. So happy birthday, Mac OS X Hints!



Yosemite: An alternative zoom-to-fit action

As you're probably aware, Apple changed the functionality of a green button click in Yosemite: it not longer "zooms to fit" (which could have different behaviors per app), but instead it enters Full Screen mode (if the app has one; otherwise, it does zoom to fit). If you want zoom-to-click, you can option-click the green button; there's no apparent way to toggle these two functionalities.

But today, I discovered a second zoom-to-fit shortcut: double-click the window's title bar. This is easier to do, as you don't have to hit the small green button target; just get the mouse anywhere in the title bar, and double-click.

Note that this won't work if you have "Double-click a window's title bar to minimize" enabled in the Dock System Preferences panel.



Yosemite: Tweaking Safari’s URL bar settings

Safari in Yosemite is a familiar yet new beast. Among the interface changes, I really didn't like the way the URL bar behaved. In particular, these things bugged me:

  1. Not being able to see the full URL.
  2. The width of the URL entry box.
  3. The drop-down that appears when you click in the URL bar (when you have a page loaded).

Thankfully, the fixes for these three issues are easy, if not completely obvious.

Full URL not visible in URL bar

By default, Safari truncates URL to just the base "dot" address, regardless of where you are on a site. So if you're reading my hint about using a dark Dock, Safari's URL bar will display this:

https://robservatory.com

But you're really on this page:

https://robservatory.com/yosemite-dark-dock-and-app-switcher-with-light-menu-bar/

If you prefer knowing where you are in the site hierarchy at all times, the fix is simple. Open Safari's Preferences, go to Advanced, and add a checkmark next to "Show full website address."

The URL box will now show the full URL of the page you're viewing. Of course, that will lead to a second problem—the URL box isn't large enough to display much of the extended URL. Thankfully, that too is an easy fix.

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