If you’re still stuck on Lion because your Mac isn’t compatible with Mountain Lion you might want to take a look at this project where people have created an app called MLPostFactor. It allows you to install Mountain Lion on pretty much any Mac that can run Lion. It’s still beta software and you have to know what you’re doing (which goes for most things in life) but it looks good, might have to give it a try on our old white iMac.
Coming soon, looks sweet. Multiple emulators in one and a nice interface to manage the games.
For the brave or the impatient you can grab the OpenEmu source on github and compile it yourself.
With so many apps you can try and discard on your iPhone or iPad you can get a huge library of them in iTunes as iTunes doesn’t delete them and keeps updating them even, and it’s a pain in the rear to have to manually go through them all to see which ones you use and which ones you don’t.
Go to the app section in iTunes, select all, delete.
Quit iTunes and check the Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Mobile Applications folder for any remnants.
Start iTunes again and File>Devices>Transfer Purchases from (the name of your iOS device), repeat for any iOS device you have.
And of course make sure to make a backup beforehand in case anything does go wrong.
This month’s edition of hell freezing over; an official Winamp for Mac.
10 years ago, when I couldn’t stand iTunes and thought it was the biggest pile of crap compared to the Windows version of Winamp, I would have been so happy if this got released. Now, not so much. For one iTunes in its current version is a different beast, it works perfectly for me. And this Winamp version is very much beta, just a barebones player without any options, no eye candy and not exactly a pixel perfect interface. No equalizer either. It’s only 0.81, so there’s hope, but maybe it’s just too little too late.
For some reason Spamassassin in Mountain Lion Server isn’t set up for scheduled spam/ham training, even though the hooks are there for it.
So you can a) configure that correctly and schedule it yourself or b) go for Spamtrainer, which works a lot smoother, automagically finds your spam and ham boxes and has enough options to run it as you please.
I really love the -i option which asks you a bunch of questions on how and when you want to run the training and then sets the schedule up for you.
The server is dead, long live the server. Well my trusty old Mac Mini decided to retire to the great beyond and kicked the bucket after 7 years. May it rust in peace. Unfortunately this meant my websites were down, as was my mail. The latter being slightly more important at the moment as I’m still looking for a job. Back in the previous decade I decided against getting the official OsX server software because back then it cost quite a lot (for home users anyway, dirt cheap compared to windows licensing) at $500 for 10 users and $1000 for unlimited users. Fast forward to 2013 and now it’s only $20 for unlimited users for Mountain Lion Server, so I decided to give it a try on my iMac to at least get a working mail server up. Which I did. Neat, and for less money than I’d previously paid for MailServe. Spamassassin, ClamAV, RBL, the works. Still some todo’s in that area, like setting up training for Spamassassin, but nice overall.
So I figured why stop there, let’s see what this puppy can do. Activated the web server, downloaded and installed MySQL which is not included, tweaked PHP a bit (apc is missing from the standard php setup, something I love to boost performance. I had to compile that from source to add it, I should make a follow up post for that) and here we are; back online and faster than before.
I’m sure there’s still a lot b0rked around the site, but so far so good.
Emphasis on the temporary solution as I still need a dedicated server for the lot but at least it’s all running for now.
A nice roundup of the 100 best Mac apps of 2012, according to Addictive Tips. I’m not sure if they’re the best, but it certainly is a nice list of apps released over the year, with some nice finds in there.
If you bought a nice USB hard drive for your Mac but it gets disconnected every time your Mac goes to sleep, and it won’t reconnect upon wake, there’s a simple solution for that. I had the same problem with my 2TB Samsung drive and found this neat little program on the App Store called Jettison, which for €1.79 will automatically dismount any drives (and network connection, mounted disks and what not if you so desire) AND remount them again when the computer wakes up. Originally intended for people with portable Macs who quickly need to pack up and go it also works perfectly for people with stubborn USB drives. The app itself is small and unobtrusive, it just adds a little icon to your menubar (and even that can be disabled) and does its work in the background.
Jettison is available through the App Store or directly from the developer’s site.
Hmm, and a little update the next day: while Jettison is perfectly capable of remounting the drive after the Mac’s gone to sleep for a bit, it seems incapable of waking the drive up after a longer nap of a few hours. :/
I have to admit, I fail to see a use for this other than satisfying a mild curiosity, but it’s now possible to run Android apps on your Mac through BlueStacks’ App Player (they also have a version for Windows). I just gave the beta a spin and eh, it works. Kinda. It’s slow, sluggish, the controls are iffy to the point of making games not playable and the graphics are glitchy, but other than that it works. Seeing as I’m not the biggest fan of Android to begin with and haven’t touched it in years I don’t know if it’s the app’s fault or just normal Android behavior…
It’s still a beta so I hope the graphic glitches and accuracy will improve over time, but for me to try it more it needs the controls fixed a.s.a.p. as single clicks are often registered as multiple clicks, making me lose in the 2 games I tried. I don’t like losing.
Thoughts of Imbalanced Mind