Maclord's Blog

Problem with writing to (NTFS-formatted) USB drives directly connected to your Mac? No more worries. You can solve the problem by enabling read-write (and delete) access to NTFS-formatted drives and flash memories.

It’s been 4 years since I wrote my post “Ability to write to NTFS volumes on the Mac” which presented a free solution to solve the problem to writing to PC drives (or deleting files from them) with NTFS-3G and MacFuse. However, after the release of Mac OS X Lion, and then OS X Mountain Lion shortly thereafter, the suggested free solution became obsolete as the development of the MacFuse driver has been halted, and there’s no longer any official support for newer versions of Mac OS X. A new piece of open-source software called OSXFuse driver was thought to come to the rescue, however even with OSXFuse, NTFS-3G does not function properly in Lion and Mountain Lion; you will still get mounting errors every time your computer boots. So you risk to corrupt your hard drive / SSD and end up with possible data loss.

Why can’t you write to some volumes on the Mac which you also use (read & write) on the PC?

Mac OS X uses a file system called HFS+, whereas Windows uses the FAT32 and NTFS formats (which stands for NT File System) for its drives used for storage. While Mac OS X can read files on NTFS volumes, it can’t write or copy files to them – this includes the Bootcamp partition on your Mac’s hard drive (or SSD), although it can both read & write on FAT32 disks and drives. FAT32 is heading toward its end of life cycle due to its limitations such as that you cannot format a FAT32 volume larger than 32 GB in size, and it cannot hold a single file larger than 4 GB. USB-memory drives with a storage capacity smaller than or equal to 4 GB are ideally formatted FAT32 with which you must be doing just fine on your Mac. However those that are larger have no choice but to have NTFS as their file system with which you’re gonna have this problem of writing on them on Mac OS X.

Fortunately, you can enable your Mac to write to NTFS writing on Mac OS X with relatively little trouble. Read more to find out about the low-cost solution which addresses the problem on Mac OS X Lion and Mountain Lion (aka Mac OS X 10.8).

Enter Paragon NTFS for Mac OS X

Paragon NTFS for Mac solves definitely the problem of mounting NTFS volumes as well as bringing the ability to read and write to those volumes flawlessly. A $19.95-solution from Paragon Software,  it is all you need in order to create, delete or modify any files on Windows NTFS drives (including your Bootcamp partition on your Mac if you installed Windows Vista or Windows 7 or later using the Bootcamp Utility) – and you won’t even remember there was ever a problem. Remove the barriers between NTFS and HFS with ease and confidence and no more worries about corrupting volumes and losing data.

Paragon NTFS has also been the first solution to support Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion.
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I just bought a 15″ Retina MacBook Pro and solely for the purpose of development for IBM Websphere suite of products, especially IBM BPM and ODM (aka Websphere Operational Decision Management). IBM BPM consisting of heavy-weight components based on a process server built on top of Websphere Application Server 8, requires very powerful hardware to work with efficiently. But all these products require Windows, Linux or UNIX operation systems, so I needed to setup Bootcamp on my new Mac to install and run Windows 7 for these tasks. (This is another story I will be sharing on my IT blog soon.)

Since the new Macs no longer ship with any software installation discs, everything is downloaded from the Internet inlcluding OS X software as well as Bootcamp support (Windows driver software for Mac hardware). As a loyal Mac OS X Snow Leopard user who has been resisting to upgrade to (Mountain) Lion for a long time, with my new Retina MacBook Pro, I had no choice, but to get used to working on Mountain Lion. This includes the Bootcamp utility Mountain Lion edition (as I call it) which requires to download the Bootcamp (Windows support) drivers online (and on the fly) while setting up Bootcamp on the Mac.

In my experience, downloading the Bootcamp drivers from some Apple server took more than half a day. In order to avoid such a time loss (or any possible new Apple madness) next time  I’d set up Bootcamp, I backed up the downloaded the Bootcamp drivers, and then I decided I’d share the near-1-GB folder zipped in a single file with the rest of the world for download via my web site which is hosted on reasonably fast servers with high bandwidth (courtesy of Ozar.net).

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Apple discontinued development of their Safari web browser for Windows, and the last version of Safari they have ever released for Windows is 5.1.7. While the latest version of Safari for the Mac was 6.0.3 as of this writing with a few enhancements and the removal of the built-in RSS reader, the Windows version (which was left at 5.1.7) is not likely to be maintained by Apple any more.

There’s no direct link to download Safari for Windows from Apple’s web site either, so I decided to make it easy for those who would rather download it from here.

Safari for the Windows PCs is still a cool browser with some nifty features such as HTML 5 support, fast page rendering, advanced security and privacy options, 3D top sites view showing the most frequently visited sites, history viewing with page snapshots as cover flow, the ability to search through history as well as bookmarks, a robust web page elements inspector, a sleek RSS reader where you can adjust the feed length with a slider bar, an optional developer (tools) menu, and many more.

The Problem

I’ve had a problem using Apple Magic Mouse on a 64-bit Windows 7 on my new iMac‘s Bootcamp partition. It was that I couldn’t use the Magic Mouse in Windows installed on iMac. As a matter of fact the magic mouse was not even showing up in Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > Devices and Printers in the beginning. In my case I’m using Mac OS X Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) and Windows 7 (x64) Ultimate on the Bootcamp partition.

In Windows 7, to add a Bluetooth device, you simply click Add a Device  and then Windows should automatically recognize the device and show an icon representing it in the Devices window then allowing you to select it to be installed (i.e. its drivers).

I also have an Apple Wireless Keyboard which functions just fine on Windows 7, but the Magic Mouse used not to until I figured out the following:

Somehow when the Apple Magic Mouse is paired with your Mac first, it may become impossible to make it usable with Windows 7 on the same machine when started up from the Bootcamp partition. Even if you manage to locate it in devices and select it for installation, you may see a message like “Connecting to the device…” forever, but no progress.

The Solution

If you are suffering the same problem of not being able to use your Apple Magic Mouse in Windows (Bootcamp) on your Mac follow these steps: Read the rest of this entry »

You got your new iPhone or new iPad, then a time came when you wanted to have some extra-ordinary file on your PC or your android device to be opened up on your other device and it turned out that iTunes will not sync it or you just don’t wanna bother transferring the file first to iTunes and then whatever.

Dropbox comes to the rescue. Thanks to Dropbox, once you put any file in it whether you are on your computer, or your mobile device, it will store them in the cloud and sync it to all of your devices such as your PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch even devices running on Android, Windows Phone 7, Blackberry and  Linux. What’s more, you can use Dropbox not only for personal synchronization needs, but also for sharing files with others and collaboration in real-time. Dropbox offers both free and paid services.

Why DropBox?

There are dozens of other applications either as SaaS or PaaS and all claiming to get the same job done. Among all, Dropbox was and still the best and painless (even Apple attempted to buy Dropbox before their iCloud venture – an argument for another post) I’ve ever used. It’s fast, easy-to-use, practical – the only downside of it is on mobile devices where it doesn’t push the content unlike iCloud, you need to be connected to Internet to access all your files except for the one or two which once you access it on your mobile device is/are cached for offline viewing.

Dropbox replaces

• Emailing file attachments to yourself and other people
• Using USB drives to move files between computers
• Renaming files to keep a history of previous versions
• Complicated backup software and hardware

How Dropbox works

Here’s a short video explaining how it works:

How do I get Dropbox for free?

For a starter you can sign up for a free 2 GB account (if you use my referral code, you will get an additional 250 MB)

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iPhone works with MobileMe, Microsoft Exchange, and many of the most popular email systems. MobileMe and Microsoft Exchange provide not only email, but contact and calendar information that can be synced to iPhone automatically, over the air. MobileMe can also sync your bookmarks on iPhone with Safari on a Mac, or with Safari or Microsoft Internet Explorer on a PC. You set up MobileMe, Exchange, and other email accounts directly on iPhone.

iPhone uses the Exchange ActiveSync protocol to sync email, calendars, and contacts with the following versions of Microsoft Exchange:

• Exchange Server 2003 Service Pack 2
• Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1

For many popular email accounts, iPhone automatically enters most of the settings for you.

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If you ever run into a disk image in .daa format, and you need to access its contents on Mac OS X, DAA Converter for Mac OS X is what you need.

DAA Converter for Mac OS X is a free utility for converting DAA & GBI disk images to ISO format so they can be accessed on your Mac.

DAA Converter is a native GUI application which wraps the command-line tool, DAA2ISO / GBI 2 ISO, by Luigi Auriemma.
It runs on Mac OS X 10.3 Panther or later. I have tested it on Mac OS X Leopard which works just fine on 10.5, too.

Just drag the icon of any .daa or .gib disk image onto the application’s icon, and the conversion process will instantly take place – an .iso version of the disk image will be instantly created on the same directory as the source image file.

You can download DAA Converter for Mac OS X (226) here or visit the downloads page.

Popular among Windows PC users .Uif is an alternative disk image format to others like .iso, .img and .bin-.cue couples.

You can open and convert UIF disk images on Mac OS X using one of the following disk image utilities:

1. Uif2iso which is a cross-platform command-line tool developed by Luigi Auriemma.
2. Uif2iso4mac a GUI application by Torsten Curdt . Uif2iso4mac is built upon  Luigi Auriemma’s uif2iso command line utility with a Mac graphic user interface adding basic functionalities of a real Mac app like drag-and-drop and a menu bar i.e. choosing an image using the File > Open menu.

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iPhone does not support Adobe Flash, because it does not comply with Apple’s policy about 3rd party apps may not install software on iPhone which limits all application adding/removing on the iPhone OS to be handled by the App store.

Betanews.com reports that Microsoft worked with Apple for streaming video to an iPhone from a Silverlight-based platform, on a special note by Microsoft’s User Experience Platform Manager Brian Goldfarb.

“The promise of Silverlight is that it’s a cross-device, cross-browser, cross-platform solution, and it works the same on Macs as it does on Windows,” Goldfarb said.

The argument of iPhone supporting Silverlight was born in a demonstration event where an H.264 video was played on an iPhone using Microsoft’s Silverlight video streaming wirelessly.

Although having a Microsoft stream on the iPhone at a first glance suggests that Silverlight might be an alternative to Flash on the iPhone, this seems to have nothing to do with a client-side plug-in – thanks to the <VIDEO> tag introduced in HTML 5 which is supported by Safari (including iPhone Safari) even YouTube videos can be streamed on the iPhone.

Thank you, Brian Goldfarb, for your play of words to advertise Silverlight and causing confusion, and admitting that  at Microsoft, you work with Apple.

The following article which describes how to setup Windows Live Hotmail account on your Mac’s Microsoft Entourage e-mail client app, was taken from a web page on Microsoft’s web site. The method described can also be applied to Apple‘s Mail.app to use Hotmail from within Mail on Mac OS X (tested only on Leopard at the date of this writing). Alternatively you can download and run a small utility app called Mail Setup which is claimed to run on both PPC and Intel Macs – this program can setup most e-mail accounts for you including but not limited to MSN Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, AOL / AIM Mail, Gmail, etc.

Windows Live Hotmail accounts, including free accounts, can now be set up in Entourage as POPA common type of Internet-based mail account. Examples are Windows Live Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail. After you add a POP account to Entourage, messages from the account appear in the folder list under On My Computer.

Important
All Windows Live Hotmail accounts must be set up in Entourage as POPA common type of Internet-based mail account. Examples are Windows Live Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail. After you add a POP account to Entourage, messages from the account appear in the folder list under On My Computer. To set up an account, follow all the instructions in the following sections (you cannot use the Entourage Account Setup Assistant for Hotmail setup).
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