10 Apple Tips and Tricks

Posted by Philipp Esselbach on: 11/14/2010 07:07 PM [ Print | 0 comment(s) ]

Mac OS X Hints published the following 10 Apple tips:

- 10.6: Merging videos with cat and QuickTime X
- How to fix a Time Machine hangup
- Another way to have iTunes pause after playing
- RAID volumes not appearing in Disk Utility
- Copy images from Chrome into Apple Mail
- Format Mail.app messages with Tables or Lists
- 10.6: Re-Enable GrowlMail in Mail 4.4
- 10.6: A PDF Compression Service
- 10.6: Update renders Mac with PGP disk encryption unbootable
- Brainfusion Security System (using webcam and iPhone)

10.6: Merging videos with cat and QuickTime X

QuickTime 7 had this great feature of merging two videos together just by dragging a video file from the Finder to another QuickTime video. Unfortunately this is not possible in QuickTime X. But I still wanted to do it without installing additional software and came up with a solution that includes a small hack.

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How to fix a Time Machine hangup

Time Machine, while it does have a very usable interface, is inclined to get stuck sometimes.

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Another way to have iTunes pause after playing

This hint is a followup to this previous hint.

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RAID volumes not appearing in Disk Utility

I recently had a disk problem where RAID Utility said the disks and volumes were all fine but the volumes were simply absent in Disk Utility. I was at a total loss for what to do, since the system didn't even see any volumes to boot from unless I booted from the install disk, in which case the installer couldn't see any volumes to install on (although it would let me run Disk Utility and RAID Utility).

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Copy images from Chrome into Apple Mail

Safari allows you to Drag and Drop images from a web page straight into an Apple Mail mail message. With Chrome that does not work. It produces a placeholder icon in the email message.

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Format Mail.app messages with Tables or Lists

When I send messages to my students, I frequently need to have a table with borders, etc. included in the body of the message. Mail doesn't seem to offer the ability to create and format tables, so I use the following multistep process.

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10.6: Re-Enable GrowlMail in Mail 4.4

It seems like, with every new version of 10.6.x, GrowlMail gets disabled by Mail.app. Sure enough, this has happened again with 10.6.5 and Mail 4.4.

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10.6: A PDF Compression Service

This is a followup to this thread about using a Third party Java tool for PDF compression. I didn't get successful font rendering for the compressed PDF file using the included command options for tool.pdf.Compress, so I left the '-noembed' option out, but you can use your own command options as also described in a comment to that earlier hint by changing them in step 23 of the Workflow.

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10.6: Update renders Mac with PGP disk encryption unbootable

10.6.4 users running PGP Whole Disk Encryption may render their systems unbootable after they update to 10.6.5.

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Brainfusion Security System (using webcam and iPhone)

This article describes how I built a surveillance system, including an iPhone webapp, for my apartment using an old iBook, an external iSight, the Webcam software EvoCam and a set of scripts in AppleScript, PHP, and also some shell scripts.