10.4: Watch videos on data DVDs from Front Row

I don't know about anyone else, but I have a lot of shows and movies in .avi format, and I like to keep them in my Movies folder for FrontRow access. When my hard drive fills up, however, I usually burn these to data DVDs, so as to fit as much as possible onto one disc.The problem is that Front Row will not recognize the .avi files burned to the data DVD if you select DVD from the menu, because it isn't a formatted DVD. So, as a workaround, I dragged the DVD icon from the desktop into my Movies folder. This created an alias that could be accessed from the videos menu in Front Row. And better yet, the alias stays as a placeholder even when the disc is ejected, so the next time you insert it, you are ready to go!

published on Tuesday, the 15. August 2006, macosxhints

Create an alias to a top-level Samba folder

At our office, we have a mixed work environment of Windows and OS X machine. On Windows, you can mount network drives to common directories. For instance P: will take you to //network/pc05/projectsFolder. You can create an alias on OS X to a directory inside a mounted drive, such as this one... //network/pc05/projectsFolder/​project1 ...but I haven't been able to create an alias to the shared folder itself (//network/pc05/projectsFolder​). I have tried to go to the /Volumes directory after mounting the folder and creating an alias from the mounted directory, but this doesn't always work, I don't know why, but sometimes I lose write priveliges if using that alias. I just found out that if you create an alias to a directory, as in the project1 folder above, you can then use the Get Info (Command-I) command on the alias (with the network drive mounted). Click the Select new original button, and it w...

published on Friday, the 11. August 2006, macosxhints

10.4: Automate mounting shares from Finder's Sidebar

Mac OS X is great in how it allows you to skin a cat in a multiple of ways. Something that frustrated me, though, is the Finder's Sidebar window. You can drag almost anything into it, and those items act like aliases. But what about mounted server shares? Nope. It will not let you drag a share into the Sidebar. So we are forced to use the 'Connect to Server' window. With Automator we can get around these annoyances. Here's how to use Automator to work around this issue. Note that for a truly automated solution, you should first mount the share and store the credentials in Keychain. Once that's done (the share must be mounted, in any event), follow these steps: Launch Automator, which will create a new workflow. From the Finder Library, drag the Get Specified Servers Action into the workflow. Click the [+] and enter the address of your server. Something like ...

published on Friday, the 4. August 2006, macosxhints

10.4: Automate mounting shares from Finder's Sidebar

Mac OS X is great in how it allows you to skin a cat in a multiple of ways. Something that frustrated me, though, is the Finder's Sidebar window. You can drag almost anything into it, and those items act like aliases. But what about mounted server shares? Nope. It will not let you drag a share into the Sidebar. So we are forced to use the 'Connect to Server' window. With Automator we can get around these annoyances. Here's how to use Automator to work around this issue. Note that for a truly automated solution, you should first mount the share and store the credentials in Keychain. Once that's done (the share must be mounted, in any event), follow these steps: Launch Automator, which will create a new workflow. From the Finder Library, drag the Get Specified Servers Action into the workflow. Click the [+] and enter the address of your server. Something like ...

published on Friday, the 4. August 2006, macosxhints

Enable the Filters menu in GIMP 2

If the Filters menu in The GIMP 2 (I have version 2.2.12 from DarwinPorts) is empty, it could be due to the locale environment variables. It wouldn't work with my en_US.UTF-8 locale, but if I unset the locale entirely, it worked. As you would normally want to have a locale set, you should disable it for GIMP only, e.g. by typing: (unset LC_ALL; gimp) ... or create an alias for it. [robg adds: I haven't tested this one...]

published on Wednesday, the 2. August 2006, macosxhints

Free up drive space without losing content

Hard drive space is still a premium on laptops, and media files can eat a lot of that space. Here's a little trick to minimize the space taken up by applications that are not used frequently. It's a simple idea -- put the individual applications on individual compressed disk images using Disk Utility. Then create a folder for the disk image, and put an alias (pointing to the application on the image) in the folder with it. Store this folder in your Applications folder. Some people may prefer to put all of their less frequently used applications on one compressed disk image. I prefer keeping just one application per disk image, since it takes less time to verify and mount the image. The compressed disk images take up far less space than the full application. In many cases, the disk image is at least 60% smaller than the full application. When you need the application, just open the alias. The disk image is automatically mounted, and the application opens. It takes ...

published on Monday, the 5. June 2006, macosxhints

10.4: Alias individual Yojimbo items

I use Bare Bones' Yojimbo as an information repository, as well as to store my next actions and other notes that I consult regularly. But rather than switching to Yojimbo each time I want to view one of these items, I found an easy way to access them by creating an alias of the metadata file for the individual items. Do a Spotlight search for the item you want to use, then select it and press Command-Return (from the Spotlight results drop-down, not the standalone Results window). This displays the metadata item (the file that Yojimbo creates for Spotlight searches) in the Finder. Make an alias of this file, then rename it; you won't want to keep the funny name it uses. In my case, I stuck it on the desktop, but you can put it anyplace. When you double-click the alias, the item opens in Yojimbo in its own window. With this in mind, you can create aliases for other metadata files for any application that works this way. You'll find these in ~/Library -> Caches -> Metadata, then...

published on Monday, the 22. May 2006, macosxhints

10.4: A c-shell alias for searching via Spotlight

This hint is motivated by this earlier hint, and other stuff I've read elsewhere. I created a csh alias to search via Spotlight. Results are returned in chronological order and logically grouped. Here is a detailed descripti...

published on Thursday, the 30. March 2006, macosxhints