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 (116) here or visit the downloads page.

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1. How to easily open UIF disk images on the Mac and convert to .iso format

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.

With both utilities, conversion of UIF to ISO format is pretty much straight-forward.

How to use UIF 2 ISO on the Mac

The easy way

• Download UIF2ISO 4 Mac (318).
• Open the zip file and decompress UIF2ISO for Mac to your Applications folder (and then maybe even to the Utilities folder therein).

Quick Tip: Drag the Uif2iso4mac icon to your dock, once you have decided the appropriate location for this utility app.

• Drag the UIF image you want to convert onto the Uif2iso4mac icon and that’s it – conversion to the .iso format is automatic. You can then either double-click the converted iso disk image to get it mounted on the Mac or open it with Disk Utility or a 3rd party app like Roxio Toast to burn the image to a CD-R or DVD-R disk.

The geeky way

If you are one of those command line wizs, you may want to use Luigi Auriemma’s Uif2iso command-line tool.

• Download uif2iso (84)
• Follow the instructions in the Read Me file (uif2iso.txt)

Related posts:

1. How to Convert .daa Disk Images to .iso
2. Ability to write to NTFS volumes on the Mac
3. How to Transfer an iWeb website from one Mac to Another

On windows , the maximize button – where the term “maximize” is inherent from Windows operating system anyway - simply enlarges a window to almost full screen except that the window’s title bar, menu bar and the task bar remains visible and the remaining space is allocated to the window and its contents. On the Mac, however, this may not exactly be the case – especially when using Safari.

The maximize button on Safari on the Mac, when clicked, causes the browser’s window to change size usually to the web page’s defined width horizontally and the height of the window to anything from a random size to the vertical space between the menu bar and the dock, and not full-screen (unless the screen-resolution is 1024×768 or smaller). For more info about how the Mac works and how different it works than Windows PCs, you may want to refer to the Mac Basics Page.

Work-around: How to maximize Safari Window to full-screen?

Soluıtion 1 – new!

Get Glims add-on for Safari (Mac-only) which does the following:

• Adds a “Max Window Size” menu item to resize the Safari window
• Adds full-screen browsing capability
  while these are the functionalities which concern us, Glims offers the following features also:
• Adds thumbnails to Google.com search results
• Adds thumbnails to Yahoo.com search results
• Adds search engines to the default Google search tab
• Adds full-screen browsing capability
• Adds Favicons to tab labels (in order to close tabs, you click on the favicon which replaces the ‘x’ , by the way)
• Adds keyword search from address bar
• Undo “Close Tab” (cmd-z)
• Re-opens last session when Safari starts
• Auto-Closes download window
• Adds new tab position option (right/left/leftmost/rightmost)
• Adds tab closing using middle mouse button
• Focus last selected tab
• Always open links in a new tab
• Type-ahead support (auto cmd-f)
• Sets the focus on the search field when opening a new window
• Adds Amazon’s information banner on Google.com search results
• Adds Amazon’s information banner on Yahoo.com search results
• Forms autocomplete always on
• Autocomplete search phrase
• Adds bookmark separator
• Adds bookmark actions
• Dated download folders
• Localized to Japanese, French, Polish, German, Spanish, Italian, and Korean

Download : Glims for Safari add-on (883)

Soluıtion 2 - not fool-proof

J. Y. Design has a dedicated Safari resources page on his blog where you can add shortcuts to your bookmarks bar which are useful to resizing your browser (not just limited to Safari, but seems to work virtually on any browser – though the max. button on a browser like Firefox causes the window to be resized to the maximum possible dimensions). See the demo video clip below to see how to install them on your browser (as simple as drag-and-drop) and then see them in action:

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You can support Toby by visiting and subscribing to his YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/tobuscus

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What is VNC?

VNC stands for Virtual Network Computing, and it is a desktop sharing system with a graphic user interface which allows you to connect and control a remote computer over a network or the Internet. Thanks to the RFB (Remote Frame Buffer) protocol it’s using, VNC applications send the keyboard and mouse events to a remote computer on the network (or the Internet) who’s screen is being shared, and it relays back the updates.

RFB (Remote FrameBuffer) is a simple protocol and since operates at the framebuffer level, it can be used on all operating systems with a GUI including Windows, Macintosh (Mac OS X) and Linux. Although RFB started as a very simple protocol used by VNC and its derivatives, it has been improved so as to support file sharing, advanced compression and security techniques in its development cycle.

Why VNC is used and How

With VNC you can display the screen of a remote computer on your own computer in a window or in full screen mode, and using your own keyboard and mouse on this screen, you can control that remote computer as if you are sitting in front of it. All actions taken on the view of the remote desktop on your computer are performed actually on the remote computer itself.

You can connect to and take control of a Mac or a PC using VNC, whether you are connecting from a Mac or a PC. Because of the use of the RFB protocol, the client computer and the server do not necessarily be running the same operating system.

VNC Components

• The VNC Server VNC server is the host computer which would remotely be controlled by a client computer running a VNC client application to connect to it.
• VNC Client is the computer running the VNC Client app, to connect to the VNC server and take over the control.

Setting up VNC on Mac OS X

Setting up Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) as a VNC Server

Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5 come right out-of-the-box with VNC server components built-in, so all you need to do is to activate them.

1. Open System Preferences from the Apple menu
2. Go to ‘Sharing’ under Internet & Network category
3. Activate the checkbox of Screen Sharing
4. Go to Advanced Settings in Tiger, Computer Settings in Leopard, set the access privilege and the password for those who will connect to the machine remotely using VNC. (JollyFastVNC or Mac OS X Leopard’s ScreenSharing do not require this step although setting a password is highly recommended)
5. Close System Preferences and you’re done.

Setting up a VNC Client on Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger)

In order to connect to a remote computer from Mac OS X 10.4 using VNC, you need to install a VNC client on Tiger. Although there are commercial products such as RealVNC, a few freeware applications are also out there:

JollysFastVNC (free) as of this writing is said to be the fastest VNC client available for the Mac with far more features than its counterparts. (still at an alpha version though) – Download (775 KB)

Chicken of the VNC (free) is an older VNC client for the Mac and simply connects to a remote server using an IP address. – Download (1.2 MB)

RealVNC Viewer Enterprise Edition (commercial) featuring 2048-bit RSA server authentication and 128-bit AES session encyrption, RealVNC is a commercial enterprise-class VNC solution (server suite edition also available).

Setting up VNC Client on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)

The Finder way

In this method, you will be using the ScreenSharing app which comes along with Mac OS X 10.5′s core services. ScreenSharing is a VNC client built-in on Leopard.

1. Select “Connect to server…” from the Go menu in Finder
2. In the ‘server address’ field in the opening pop-up window, type “vnc://” and then the IP address of the VNC server you want to connect to (for example: vnc://192.168.1.24)
3. Click the ‘Connect’ button
4. If it works, you have the option of connecting as a registered user or asking permission from the remote computer.
   1. If you choose to connect as a registered user, you need to enter the username and the password of an account set up on the remote computer.
   2. If you choose to ask for permission to connect, an invitation request will be sent to the VNC server and someone at that computer must grant you permission in order to proceed.

The iChat way

In Leopard iChat has built-in ScreenSharing. Although using VNC with iChat is not the best method, it is one of the simplest ways.

1. Open iChat and enter your MobileMe account credentials, or alternatively you should be able to use ‘Bonjour’ if the remote computer is on the same network as yours.
2. Select your buddy from the buddy list.
3. You will see an icon in the shape of two small squares one overlapping the other with a small offset at the bottom of the iChat window. This is the ScreenSharing button.
4. Select “Share my screen with “, or “Ask to share screen… “.
5. iChat takes care of the rest. In order to end the screen sharing session, just press [Command (Apple)]+[Esc] on either computer.

Note: This method requires also someone to be present in front of the remote computer.

Suggestions and Warnings

• If you are the one who sets up the VNC server, for minimal security you should set a password for VNC connection to your computer from “computer settings” in the Sharing pane of System Preferences.
• If you have more serious concerns about security, it’s a better practice to configure VNC to accept only local connections, and then establish an SSH tunnel from the client computer. This way, all VNC packets between the client and the server will have been encrypted.
• Since VNC in itself is not quite secure because of the protocol it uses, it is highly recommended that you disable it, reverting the steps described above i.e. going through the above described steps in reverse order, when you’re done using it.

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According to Engadget(.com) GeForce GTX 285 graphics accelerator card will be available for Macs the beginning of this summer (expected to be shipping June 2009).

The GeForce GTX 285 takes DirectX 10 to gaming beyond HD with a top of 2560×1600 resolution.

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You can add the possibility to write / modify NTFS files on Mac OS X now thanks to MacFUSE from Google Code and NTFS-3G from Erik Larsson. MacFUSE allows you to extend Mac OS X’s native file handling capabilities via 3rd-party file systems. As a normal user, installing the MacFUSE software package will let you use any 3rd-party file system written on top of  MacFUSE, such as NTFS-3G from Erik Larsson which will allow you to not only read NTFS volumes, but also give you the ability to write (finally) to NTFS volumes. In order to have the functionality MacFUSE and NTFS-3G must respectively be installed on your Mac (and the system be rebooted after respective installation). MacFUSE can be downloaded from the following address: http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/ or the cross-platform utilities section of OzarWEB downloads

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After installing MacFUSE – a very straight-forward process – and restarting your machine, you need to download and install NTFS 3G for the Mac from Erik’s NTFS-3G for the Mac Blog. And then, remember to reboot one more time if you wish to avoid any unpleasant issues later on. As of this writing the stable releases were MacFUSE version 2.0.2 and NTFS-3G version 1.5130 and these versions have been uploaded to the OzarWEB Downloads Library as a mirror.

Known issues after this installation:

• Your bootcamp partition (if NTFS) will no longer appear on System Preferences > Startup Disk. Workarounds:
  • Press “alt” (option) key while rebooting your Mac and select your PC partition before startup.
  • Intel users only: Install the rEFIt boot manager for better control of the boot process.
  • Using the command line utility bless (see “man bless” for more information)
• Files with filenames created in Windows containing international characters with accents, umlauts and similar dots and lines, or filenames with korean characters might seem unreadable in the Finder. This is because Finder apparently expects all filenames to appear in unicode decomposed form, while NTFS allows both composed and decomposed form filenames. This issue is hard to solve in a pretty way, but you should still be able to access these files when using the Terminal. Copying the affected files to a HFS+ drive using the command “cp” works fine.

Uninstalling NTFS 3G for the Mac

Since Apple hasn’t come up with an easy way to remove installed packages, there is a shell script that removes all NTFS-3G files from the system. It is located on the disk image that you downloaded to install NTFS-3G, and is called “Uninstall NTFS-3G.command”, and a user should only need to double click to launch the script. The user will need to be an administrator with sudo rights, and will be required to type its password in order to authorize the script to remove NTFS-3G from the system directories.

Uninstalling MacFUSE

Run the uninstall-macfuse-core.sh script that resides in the Support subdirectory of the MacFUSE file system bundle. The bundle itself resides in /System/Library/Filesystems/ on Mac OS X 10.4.x and in /Library/Filesystems/ on Mac OS X 10.5.x. For example, to uninstall MacFUSE on Mac OS X 10.4.x, you would run the following command in the Terminal:

sudo /System/Library/Filesystems/fusefs.fs/Support/uninstall-macfuse-core.sh

To uninstall MacFUSE on Mac OS X 10.5.x and above, you would run:

sudo /Library/Filesystems/fusefs.fs/Support/uninstall-macfuse-core.sh

If the file system bundle in your MacFUSE installation doesn’t have a Support subdirectory, that means you have an incredibly ancient version of MacFUSE. In that case, look for the uninstall script within the fusefs.fs/ directory itself.

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1. 5 CHM viewers for the Mac