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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If you’re a heavy user of Apple Mail.app, you may find that over time the program takes longer and longer to open, and operates more and more sluggishly.

There’s a trick to making things faster, one that never fails to work. Open Terminal and run the following command:

sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index vacuum

This command basically cleans old and discarded crud out of the database that Mail
uses to keep track of messages. When old messages are deleted, Mail unfortunately
keeps some information about them around, and that’s what you’re nuking from orbit.
Here’s an example on my machine that shows the before and after

$ cd ~/Library/Mail
$ ls -l
-rw-r--r-- 1 maclord staff 61M Feb 15 23:14 Envelope Index
$ sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index vacuum
$ ls -l
-rw-r--r-- 1 maclord staff 33M Feb 16 18:35 Envelope Index

If you would run it often on the Terminal, make an alias for it, either in .bashrc or
.bash_aliases

alias vacuummail=‘sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index vacuum’

If you’re really feeling ambitious, you could create an Automator action that would shut
down Mail, run the command, and start Mail back up. You could even make it an iCal Alarm and set it to
run once a week, and you will guarantee that Mail runs lean and mean. Or, if you don’t
like Automator, use a tool like Lingon to run the command for you at a set time.

P.S. These methods have been tested with Mac OS X (10.6) Snow Leopard – untested with Lion (OS X 10.7)

One of my favorite things on the Mac was having a recent version of Java and a Java Development Kit (JDK) pre-installed on Mac OS X until the release of version 10.7 Lion. On Snow Leopard, the 64-bit version of Java 6 came already installed.

With MacOS X Lion, however, Java does not come out-of-the-box and you have to download and install it manually (or via the Apple Software Update) – except in rare cases where you upgraded from Snow Leopard to Lion.

The first package of Java 6 for Mac OS X Lion for download & manual installation can be found on the following link: http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1421
The download size is about 62.5 MB and gets you Java SE version 1.6.0_26 (64-bit of course). Although this one is not be the most up-to-date version, once you have it on your system, you would be prompted to upgrade automatically next time Apple Software Update is run.

As for JDK 7 for Mac, it will be available directly from Oracle, maybe even through the App Store – no official announcement on the latter, though, so far, but stay tuned for good news!

If you are a Java developer who wants to do Java development on Mac OS X 10.7, here are a few not-so-tricky steps to follow to get going:
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Advanced-level Mail.app users of Mac OS X must have noticed that as of Mac OS X Lion (Mac OS X 10.7) the feature of “bouncing messages back to sender” is gone!

There are ongoing debates whether this feature was useful (so as to help fight spam) or not – even totally unnecessary (since many spammers do not use real or valid e-mail addresses, there’s no address to bounce back the junk mail) – the latter probably being Apple’s motive to remove the feature.

For those of you, who need to restore this functionality, there’s good news for intermediate to advanced Mac OS X users who can manage to create an Automator service that will feature an AppleScript to run — at least by following a short simple series of instructions. (See also the screen recording video tutorial below)

Here are the step by step instructions to do so:

1. Launch Automator from your Applications folder
2. Create a new service.
3. At the top of the editing (workflow) pane, select “no input” pull-down menu item just following the label “Service receives”, and select “Mail.app” from the second pull-down menu. The setting should appear like “Service receives no input in Mail.app”
4. Locate “Get Selected Mail items” from the actions list on the left, and then drag it to the editing pane (that is the Workflow)
5. Locate “Run AppleScript” from the actions, and drag it to the workflow.
6. Edit the script so as to look as the following:
   on run {input, parameters}
   tell application "Mail"
      repeat with eachMessage in input
         bounce eachMessage
         delete eachMessage
      end repeat
   end tell
end run
7.  Save your Automator workflow with a name like “Bounce Mail”
8. In Mail(.app) select the message(s) you want to bounce, then under the “Mail” application menu, select “Services > Bounce Mail (or whatever you named when saving the service) menu item

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 (225) 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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