Now there’s a machine that would make a pretty hackintosh. It simply has to be done, does it not?

Image courtesy of umpcportal.com

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• cmd+shift+3 to dump the whole screen
• cmd+shift+4 to select an area of the screen (then press space for a whole window).

However, there are times when the above won’t do. Typically, it’s when you’re already pressing keys to get the image you need — the key chord cmd+shift+4 isn’t going to work if you’re already holding down alt for example.

That’s where grab comes in — it’s what Mac users used before cmd+shift+3/4 came along, it’s still there, and it can dump the screen after a ten second delay.

So, start up grab. I use Spotlight to do that, so I type cmd+space grab:

Then, to do the delayed screen dump, select Timed Screen from grab‘s Capture menu:

You then have ten seconds to set up the screen as needed, and grab does the rest.

Then select File->Save As… to save the resulting tiff file, and you’re done.

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That was case for me — as adding hyperlinks in wordpress caused the browser tab to hang (documented by Geek Guides here). However, if you’re thinking about returning to Safari 3.2.1 because you can’t input hyperlinks in wordpress‘ visual editor then think again — you may not need to — as there is now a work-around.

You still need to downgrade?

What doesn’t work

What doesn’t work is downloading Safari 3 and installing that — the installer complains that you already have a newer version on the hard drive and so won’t continue.

What works

Is to re-run the Safari 4beta installer (fetch it from apple.com if you don’t still have it) and run the uninstall from there.

One reboot later and you’re back running Safari 3.2.1.

Safari image by timmargh.

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First, the hard way

When you wish to open a file using a particular application, it’s simple. Just right-click on the file (ctrl+click) and select Open With.

However, if you’d like that file to always open with the selected application then things are less elegant: right click, Open With, Other…, select the application and tick Always Open With. Fiddly.

The easy way

Fortunately there is an easier way.

Right click on the file as before, but this time depress the alt key. Hey-presto, the Open With option changes into Always Open With.

How’s that for handy?

Changing the default application for all files of a kind

The above method sets the default application for this file only. If you’d like to change the default application for all files of a type (a kind in Mac OS speak) then here’s how to do it.

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Coming to Mac OS X from Windows (XP and Vista), I missed being able to lock my session using a simple key-chord. I work in a shared office so it’s sensible to lock the session every time I walk away — something I do regularly.

In Windows, you simply press Windows-L and that’s it — time to go. Mac OS X Leopard doesn’t provide anything as succinct as standard, but there are ways.

Firstly, there are a couple of solutions that are accepted as standard ways of doing this — but unfortunately both have problems. I’ll cover these methods first in case they work for you, and then I’ll cover a solution that really is as quick and easy to use as the Windows’ lock screen key chord.

Partial solution number one: use a hot corner

A hot corner allows you to drop into the screen saver by moving the cursor to a chosen corner of the screen. To do this, first go to System Preferences->Desktop & Screen Saver and click on Hot Corners… Then select Start Screen Saver for one of the corners:

Now, when you place the cursor in that corner (I chose the bottom-left), the screen saver will start.

Of course, this doesn’t help unless your system is configured to require a password when woken from the screen saver. You can set that in System Preferences->Security:

And that’s it. Now, before you walk away from your Mac, just drop the cursor into the bottom-left corner of the screen.

However, there is a problem with this method — at least for me — as I don’t want the system to prompt for a password on wakeup. I end up typing my password far too often — every time I’ve left the machine alone long enough for the screen saver to start.

What I want is the Mac to remain unlocked until I explicitly lock it. So, on to solution two…

Partial solution number two: select a pull-down from the menu bar

Here’s another way of locking the machine, and this one doesn’t require that you tick Require password to wake up this computer from sleep or screen saver.

The trick is to enable fast user switching in System Preferences->Accounts->Login Options:

which will then place your user name in the menu bar at the top of the screen.

When you want to lock the session, just click on your user name:and select Login Window… and you’re done. (You can also achieve a similar result by ticking Show Status in Menu Bar in Keychain‘s preferences if you prefer.)

What’s my beef with this solution? The problem is that it’s still rather slow and fiddly — and it’s something I do regularly, so I want to just press and go, just as I did with Windows.

A full solution

To implement a full Windows-L style solution we need Dockables to provide us with an application that locks the Mac OS session, and Quicksilver to launch that application.

First, download and install Dockables from cocoaapp.com. This gives you a bunch of useful applications in a sub-folder of your Applications folder:

and the one we’re interested in is Lock Screen.

Next, download and install Blacktree’s Quicksilver and run it to configure a new Lock Screen key-chord. Quicksilver will present you with its main window — just quit that and instead move to Quicksilver’s menu bar at the top of the screen and select Triggers… from the drop-down menu.

In the Triggers window that appears, click on the + at the bottom and select HotKey.

A new window will appear. Click on the first field and start to type lock screen. Quicksilver will rapidly find the Lock Screen dockable you installed earlier. Click Save.

Nearly there

You now have a new command, but with no trigger. So click on the None in your new command,

click in the input field labelled Hot Key: and press the key combination you wish to use to lock your session from now on. (I chose alt+cmd+L because the obvious choice – cmd+L — is already used by Thunderbird — my email client.)

I suggest you don’t use the ctrl key as part of your hot key-chord. If you do then quicksilver presents this dialog every time you type the chord:

Now, having typed a key-chord (which doesn’t include ctrl), exit the Triggers window and you have yourself a new Lock Screen hot key-chord: alt+cmd+L in the example above.

And finally, tweak some settings

You need quicksilver to run at all times, so bring up Quicksilver’s preferences (available from the Quicksilver menu in the menu bar at the top of the screen):

and tick Start at login. You may also want to tidy up the dock a little — as quicksilver is running all the time I’d rather it didn’t appear in the dock and instead appeared in the menu bar:

so I untick Show icon in dock (and I also tick the option check for updates):

And that’s everything sorted. Any time you need your display locked, just type alt+cmd+L…

and walk away…

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If, like me, you have a Huey Pro and you’re using it under Mac OS X leopard then you may have hit this problem: once you’ve restarted your machine, the screen no longer adjusts its brightness automatically. If you start up and then quit the Huey Pro software then all’s well again until next time you log out or reboot.

It’s strange that (certainly in version 1.5.0) Pantone haven’t fixed this (surely the Mac is a major market for them?), but until they do, here’s a work-around.

The fix

The problem arises because Pantone Huey Pro‘s helper application isn’t started automatically. The fix is to manually add it to the list of applications that start when you log in.

You can’t simply select the helper application as it’s buried within the Huey Pro package, so you need to do the following:

Go to System Preferences->Accounts and select Login Items, then click on + to add an application.

Now, leave that window for now and use a separate Finder window to go to Applications and scroll down to Huey Pro. Then right click (ctrl+click) and select Show Package Contents:

Now browse to Contents->Resources->Support and select hueyAmbient. Don’t double-click it as that will simply start it up. Insteady, drag hueyAmbient to the Add Login Item window you opened earlier and that will select the hueyAmbient helper.

Now click on Add, and you’re done.

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A source of frustration

Not dangerous, but irritating until you figure it out: when an application is not the foreground app (i.e. mouse and keyboard input isn’t going there at the moment and the application’s menu bar is not at the top of the screen), then clicking on the application’s window will make it the foreground app, but the mouse click is not forwarded to the application.

So for example: with Windows, clicking on a link in web browser will follow that link, regardless of whether the application is the foreground app. With Mac OS X, if some other application is currently the foreground app then your first click will just select the web browser as the new foreground app — it will take a further mouse click to actually follow the link. So with Mac OS X you often have to click twice.

More dangerous

Dragging a folder to somewhere that already contains a folder of the same name results in very different behaviour. If you’re used to Windows then you may lose data.

Say I have a new Franz Ferdinand CD ripped and ready for my music collection. The music is in a folder named after the album, which is itself in a folder named after the artist.

With Windows, I can drag the new ‘Franz Ferdinand” folder from my ripping area to my music area and it will say

I say yes and it’s job done. The new Franz Ferdinand folder’s contents will be merged with the existing Franz Ferdinand folder’s contents in my music collection.

With Mac OS X, the OS says

Note the difference: ”Franz Ferdinand” is being replaced. So if I click on replace then all my previous albums by that artist are gone — not at all what I intended!

Another subtlety

There are others, I’m sure, but another dangerous difference in file manipulation when you’re used to the way Windows does it is this:

Drag a folder from one file-store window to another and then change your mind and hit delete (cmd+backspace in Mac OS X).

Under Windows, the destination window is now in the foreground, so you end up deleting the destination copy.

Under Mac OS X, the destination folder is highlighted (hint: it’s highlighted in grey not blue — that’s the subliminal cue), but it’s still the source finder window that’s the foreground app, so you end up deleting the source rather than the destination copy.

As with much of the Mac OS X vs Windows behaviour, the Mac OS way is usually better thought out, but that doesn’t stop it from being dangerously different if you’re used to the way Windows does things. Here’s hoping that this article will save some people some grief.

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The answer seems to be undocumented, but you can in fact type more than one host name or IP address into the Set date & time automatically field in the Date & Time settings — separated by spaces.

I have mine set like above, so it picks up my ISP (Zen)’s NTP server when I’m at home, the local NTP server if there is one (they’re usually called ntp0, ntp1 etc. or maybe just ntp), or pool.ntp.org if all else fails.

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The fix is t go into the virtual machine’s settings, select Network and then change the setting from Share the Mac’s network connection to Connect directly to the physical network (bridged).

This results in your virtual machine DHCPing etc. in the same way as the Mac, rather than straining your VM’s networking through NAT running on the Mac.

If your network provides DHCP then changing the above setting may result in better, more robust networking.

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I have an Epson R1800 (the A3 variant of the R800) plugged into a PC running Windows and shared on the home network.

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