One thing that was a hinderance for the longest time was being unable to find a simple graphics editor to approximate Microsoft Paint (which ships with the OS). While OS X ships with basic utilities (e.g., TextEdit), it shocked me that there was this “hole” in the provided base apps. I need to emphasize, that I was not looking for a Photoshop equivalent, but merely needed something that would allow me to edit images quickly, typically before uploading them online.

Enter Paintbrush. Now I can quickly take a screenshot, use Paintbrush to circle/underline material for emphasis, resize, and save a file ready for rapid upload to my server. I can open, use, and be done with Paintbrush in the same time it takes Gimp or Photoshop to boot up.

For those that need quick edits for use in the fast-paced world of media like Twitter, you’re welcome. For future Colin who might have forgotten this software exists, shame on you.

Never fear! Two pieces of software– MacDropAny for OS X and DropboxFolderSync for Windows– can link up any directory on your computer to your Dropbox account!

The dirty little secret is that both of these programs are just graphical interfaces which perform the command line hacks discussed previously. However, they can be a much-needed asset to the the not-terminally inclined or those prone to frequent, frequent typos.

Hattip, Lifehacker.

If you don’t have Dropbox, you can sign up for free here. Dropbox is a web-based system that uses cloud computing to enable users to store and share files and folders with others across the Internet using file synchronization.

I use it for doing clever things like syncing my Keepass database, sharing presentation files after I give a seminar, and other miscellaneous tasks that require file use between my three computers and iPhone (and it allows me to access these files in a pinch through a web browser somewhere else), but other individuals also use it purely for off-site backup in the event something goes horribly, horribly wrong inside her laptop (since Dropbox syncs with the cloud it preserves a copy of your files on their servers– these files can be restored in the event of a hard drive failure).

New or existing Dropbox users can also increase their space here and here.

In Unix speak, this is quite easy– open up a terminal window and type:

ln -s /PATHTO/DIR2/ /PATHTO/DIR1/

This has finally been added in Windows Vista and Windows 7, but remains somewhat sloppy and confusing. Here is a very brief reference for those trying to do a similar thing in Windows, with emphasis on the flags.

mklink \PATHTO\DIR1\file.txt \PATHTO\DIR2\file.txt

You will be returned with:

symbolic link created for \PATHTO\DIR1\file.txt <<===>> /PATHTO\DIR2\file.txt

This is the most basic entry for creating a symlink between files. The one issues? This creates a soft link (essentially the same as creating a shortcut in Windows Explorer). If I am doing something like syncing my Keepass database, I will actually break this symlink because the software will not be forwarded to the file on a basic level– it will merely sit in the folder and go “where the hell is my database?” and either create a blank one or give some other error message.

To solve this problem we need to use the /H flag which tells Windows to create a hard link. A hard link physically points to the secondary location. You’ll want to use this option if you are trying to trick an application into looking for a different directory. For me, most of the time.

mklink /H \PATHTO\DIR1\file.txt \PATHTO\DIR2\file.txt

Now that’s how to symlink files– you need additional flags for directories. /D tells Windows that you are creating directory links, not file links. If you only use /D you will create a soft link. /J instructs the OS to create a “junction” which is (functionally) the equivalent of the hard links discussed above. In most cases I find myself using /D and /J before the link and target.

mklink /D /J \PATHTO\DIR1\ \PATHTO\DIR2\

Also remember, if you type “mklnk” at the command prompt, you will be returned with basic instructions for using the functions described above:

C:\Users\balloflightning>mklink
MKLINK [[/D] | [/H] | [/J]] Link Target

/D Creates a directory symbolic link. Default is a file
symbolic link.
/H Creates a hard link instead of a symbolic link.
/J Creates a Directory Junction.
Link specifies the new symbolic link name.
Target specifies the path (relative or absolute) that the new link
refers to.

Hopefully the above helps demystify the procedure a bit, however.

There is a solution for some users if they are willing to take a few risks and modify the stock Apple OS. You can theoretically jailbreak your iPhone (if not already) and wirelessly tether the iPhone’s 3G connection so you can use surf on the iPad through the phone.

MiWi is an app (downloaded through Cydia for a one-time $20 fee, they also offer a free 3-day trial) that can setup your iPhone as a network access point (it will create a new “wireless device” that is available when you are using an iPad, laptop, etc.). Here’s a Wired article detailing the functionality of this “hack” (ironically the first thing that popped up on Google when I was trying to get to the MiWi home site). Now when you surf on your iPad, it routes the data transfer signal through your iPhone. Speed does not appear to be significantly degraded– you can easily still get up to 1 M/s download, so even streaming music or videos shouldn’t be a problem provided you have a strong connection to a tower (and you’re not in a location where 50,000 people might be trying to access that tower!)

If you go this route you just have to be careful about data transfer. MiWi keeps track of it for you, and you have a couple of options for visualizing it. Data transfer is key because new iPhone customers are likely on a tiered data pay structure– they have monthly transfer caps of either 200 MB ($15) or 2 GB ($25). I (and I assume many early iPhone adopters) am grandfathered in with an “unlimited” AT&T plan (which will eventually turn out to be like Comcast’s version of “unlimited” but for now you can’t beat it)– these individuals should be salivating at this post by now. Regardless of plan, you can obviously run up a few hundred megabytes very, very quickly browsing, so you might want to up your iPhone data transfer cap if you are at the bottom end their plans. However, this $10 bump would still be much cheaper than buying a whole new data plan for the iPad.

No peripherals (external hard drive, USB mouse, etc.) were attached so that was immediately ruled out. To attempt to diagnose the problem, I attempted to boot into safe mode. Not happening. Tried resetting the PRAM and NVRAM. Nada. Finally, the next series of steps allowed me to salvage my hard drive and let my Macbook live to see another day (minus a $700 data recovery charge).

Boot into single-user mode (sometimes called verbose mode) (hold down Control-V as soon as the Mac chime sounds after pressing the power button). You should now be in an environment that looks like this:

At the command line type:
/sbin/fsck -fy
and press Return.

You will receive messages about the disks use and fragmentation as fsck will now go through five phases of disk utility. If you get:
disk0s3: I/O Error
then you have a problem with bad sectors on the hard drive.

Eventually, fsck will probably tell you:
***** FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED *****
Repeat the fsck process above.

Keep repeating the above process until
***** FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED *****
does not appear.
Even after this message disappears, repeat one more time. If this message doesn’t disappear, and you continue to get disk0s3: I/O Error or similar errors, it might be time to think about punting the hard drive (or visiting a data recovery specialist if you don’t have a backup).

Type reboot at the prompt.

You should be able to boot (hopefully). If you can, find an empty external hard drive. If it’s big enough (more than 2x the size of your internal drive, which most on the market nowadays should be), I highly recommend doing three things (you can partition it into 2 OS X Journaled drives for total safety, although this should work.

1.) (optional) Run Onyx maintenance scripts
2.) Clone the internal hard drive with Carbon Copy Cloner.
3.) Do a brand-new, full backup using Time Machine.

This may seem redundant (backing up your now-functioning hard drive at it’s present state twice), but there have been sporadic issues reported in the past with Time Machine backups having issues backing up drives with I/O errors. Secondly, CCC will provide you with a bootable copy of your hard drive. Why is this important? Well, if you had I/O errors during this ordeal, it’s extremely likely that your hard drive is on the way out. You may have salvaged it for now, but with 2.5″ HDD prices being under $100 these days (even their SSD cousins are coming down) you might as well drop the coin and upgrade the hard drive.

Hard drives for Macbooks are simple to replace (iFixit will walk you through the steps). You can then either restore your Macbook via Time Machine and the OS X install disk, or, more preferably, boot onto your external partition (hold down Option right after the Mac chime sounds during bootup, select external hard drive) and then clone that partition over to your newly installed hard drive using CCC (essentially the same but reverse as you did before).

Press the start button, click on Run, and type “cmd.” Press enter.

The shutdown flag allows you to shut down (or restart) either a local or remote machine. Used without parameters it merely logs the user off. However you can add…

-l : Logs off the current user, this is also the defualt. -m ComputerName takes precedence.

-s : Shuts down the local computer.

-r : Reboots after shutdown.

-a : Aborts shutdown. Ignores other parameters, except -l and ComputerName. You can only use -a during the time-out period.

-f : Forces running applications to close.

-m [\\ComputerName] : Specifies the computer that you want to shut down.

-t xx : Sets the timer for system shutdown in xx seconds. The default is 20 seconds.

-c “message“ : Specifies a message to be displayed in the Message area of the System Shutdown window. You can use a maximum of 127 characters. You must enclose the message in quotation marks.

-d [u][p]:xx:yy : Lists the reason code for the shutdown. The following table lists the different values.

For example, when you use the command window and type…

shutdown -s -f -t 3600

… it shuts down the machine (-s) while forcing applications to close (-f) in one hour (-t 3600).  Helpful for situations like the one I outlined above or when you are streaming a movie to an external monitor and don’t feel like getting out of bed after realizing “Jeez, even pirating Couples Retreat was a huge waste of time.”

I had tried to sync my GMail account once-upon-a-time, but decided it wasn’t worth the potential hassle. What hassle, I don’t remember– but in any event, I remember it was extremely easy to get it up and running using POP. However, this time around I decided IMAP was the way to go. Over the last few years I have slowly devolved into someone who uses GMail as my big e-mail cloud in the sky– that is, I want to be able to access an identical account (same inbox, sent, drafts, etc.) from anywhere (Macbook, PC, office, iPhone). IMAP should give me that ability.

Well, once I set up Mail to play nice with my Google account I noticed signficant slowdowns. I mean really, really slow. Like sending an e-mail that said “hello world!” took five minutes as the Apple pinwheel spun frantically. It seems like this a common occurrence with Mail 3.x and Leopard/Snow Leopard but there seem to be very few answers. I did end up finding one in the dusty corner of the internet.

It appears that Apple Mail has an issue with big attachments. I mean really big attachments. Like 20 MB big. Get rid of them, and it solves the problem. How do you do it? Well, there are two ways…

The easy way (tested by yours truly):

1.) Delete your IMAP account from within Mail by going to “Mail” -> “Preferences” and then clicking the little minus button below the account names. NOTE: I’m pretty sure this is foolproof with IMAP, but please, please make sure you are not deleting your e-mails from the server when you download them to your computer, because if you do that and then delete this account, well, you’ll lose your e-mails.

2.) Go into finder and delete the folder ~/Library/Mail/IMAP–/ or thereabouts.

3.) Go back into Mail, click on “Mail” -> “Preferences” and then the plus icon. Create your IMAP account as you did previously (make sure “create my account automatically” is unchecked or you will end up just creating a POP account with the default settings). This time, unclick “bring this account online” at the end of the creation process.

4.) Go back into “Mail” -> “Preferences,” click on your GMail – IMAP account, then click on the advanced tab. Uncheck “compact mailboxes automatically” and MOST IMPORTANTLY set the offline viewing preference to keep “all messages but omit attachments.”

5.) Set account to “online” and Mail will re-download all your e-mails; however e-mails and e-mails alone– no attachments. Everything should be running at Mach speed again.

Now, this way has one main drawback. You aren’t storing any attachments on your within Mail; if you want to download them, you have to do so as the e-mail comes in. This isn’t a problem for me, since I download the attachments I feel are important to whatever folder they are needed in by default and therefore don’t need another copy clogging up my inbox. However, if this is of crucial importance you can try the next step (at your own risk).

The hard way (I haven’t confirmed this works, but this would allow you to keep most attachments offline; only the ones over 20 MB are deleted– courtesy of bebopper):

1.) Quit Mail (Force quit if you have to)

2.) In Finder, click “Go” -> “Go to Folder.” Type the following folder path (replacing with your GMail User Name): ~/Library/Mail/IMAP–/.OfflineCache

3.) Look through the cached messages in this invisible folder and see if there is one or more larger than 20MB.

4.) Drag the offending large messages to the Desktop or Trash. Restart Mail, and Mail should stop hating you.

Both of these are essentially band-aids, so hopefully Apple will get its act together and figure out exactly what is going on. This seems to be a problem that has arisen in later incarnations of 10.5 and into 10.6, so it’s something that should be of pressing importance to the development team as we speak.

1.) The printer is automatically selected to “use printer offline.”
2.) Upon deselecting “use printer offline,” the print status of any documents in the queue is changed to “Error – printing” at which point anything in the queue will hang.
3.) The printer will reset itself to “use printer offline” upon power cycle or OS reboot, therefore leading to an endless cycle of 1, 2, and 3.

It turns out my issue was in the IOGEAR USB hub I use. I’m not sure if Windows 7 is having trouble dealing with the drivers (it was working in XP about a week ago) or the hub is just flat-out fried. Either way, I’ve seen a lot of threads on Google with the same problem but lack a resolution. Here’s one more thing to try, even if it’s a “well, duh.” If that doesn’t work, it can’t hurt to go with the always popular “reinstall the driver.”

Yeah. Thanks Microsoft. Here’s how to get around that.

Download oscdimg and then drop oscdimg.exe file into C:\Windows\System32.

Start -> Run -> type “cmd” to open a command window.

In the command window, type “oscdimg.exe -u2 -bC:\PATH\expandedSetup\boot\etfsboot.com -h C:\PATH\expandedSetup C:\PATH\Win7.iso” replacing C:\PATH\ with your actual path to the downloaded files.

You should now have an .iso file in that directory; burn a DVD using your favorite software (I used CDBurnerXP, but it’s old).

Restart and boot from the CD (specific to individual motherboards, my Biostar is F9, some are F8, some are the “Del” key). You should see something to the effect of “Press XX to select boot drive.” Press and select your DVD drive and follow the Windows 7 installation from there.

Thanks SIW2.