SmileOnMyMac about PDFpen
Impressive if it works, it does a lot of what Acrobat since OS X handles the page generation and Preview does bookmarks. No thumbnails.
Tuesday, January 06, 2004
ComboDock: very cheap approach to firewire drives. $150
WiebeTECH Micro Storage Solutions - ComboDock
Stick it on an IDE drive, plug it in, have a firewire drive. Something to do with those ancient 20GB drives -- easy way to make an emergency boot disk for OS X. $150.
Stick it on an IDE drive, plug it in, have a firewire drive. Something to do with those ancient 20GB drives -- easy way to make an emergency boot disk for OS X. $150.
Metakit by Equi4 Software: Underlies Mac OS X address book
Metakit by Equi4 SoftwareFascinating application, with a veyr modest web site. They're tackling some terribly hard problems.
Macintosh iLife: iPhoto Links
Macintosh iLife: iPhoto
Nice collection of iPhoto links and digital photography resources.
Nice collection of iPhoto links and digital photography resources.
Panther and Journaling: Carbon Copy Cloner and reformatting system disk
Apple - Discussions - Panther: iPhoto freeze, black screen of death
Based on the hypothesis that the primary problem is a disk defect not detectable by Apple's disk utility, I did the following.
1. Formatted my iPod as HFS (journaled) and used CarbonCopy Cloner to clone my iBook drive to the iPod. Repaired privileges before and after.
2. Booting from the iPod I erased and formatted my iBook drive (not just the volume, the entire drive) as HFS (journaled) including OS 9 drivers.
3. Used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone iPod to iBook drive. Repaired permissions -- this time some major (.core) privileges were repaired. Ran Disk Repair again, as usual no problems.
4. Restarted from iBook and tested. Found the icon for the CD/DVD system preferences was missing though the preferences worked. Switched users and the icon was back, so I located the cache for the System Preferences in usr/Library and deleted it. This restored the icon. Unsettling!
5. Restored the iPod (reset to factory, then applied iPod updater then synched with iTunes).
A few preferences did not make the round trip -- which is again unsettling. The power preferences, for example, had to be reset.
If I were to do it again, I'd like to see if I could install a basic version of Panther to the iPod w/ CCC, but do my cloning to a sparse disk image and restore from the sparse image. Given my experience with sparse disk images on an SMB share I could actually put the sparseimage file on an SMB share and use the iPod just for booting.
I've done some preliminary testing and not experienced the problems seen earlier, but I need to use the system a lot more before I start to trust it.
At this point I still suspect the problem is switching to journaling on a file system first formatted under OS X 10.x then subject to various lockups, repairs, crashes and severe file fragmentation through 10.1 to 10.3. (However the S.M.A.R.T test shows valididated, so the disk mechanism appears intact.).
Based on the hypothesis that the primary problem is a disk defect not detectable by Apple's disk utility, I did the following.
1. Formatted my iPod as HFS (journaled) and used CarbonCopy Cloner to clone my iBook drive to the iPod. Repaired privileges before and after.
2. Booting from the iPod I erased and formatted my iBook drive (not just the volume, the entire drive) as HFS (journaled) including OS 9 drivers.
3. Used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone iPod to iBook drive. Repaired permissions -- this time some major (.core) privileges were repaired. Ran Disk Repair again, as usual no problems.
4. Restarted from iBook and tested. Found the icon for the CD/DVD system preferences was missing though the preferences worked. Switched users and the icon was back, so I located the cache for the System Preferences in usr/Library and deleted it. This restored the icon. Unsettling!
5. Restored the iPod (reset to factory, then applied iPod updater then synched with iTunes).
A few preferences did not make the round trip -- which is again unsettling. The power preferences, for example, had to be reset.
If I were to do it again, I'd like to see if I could install a basic version of Panther to the iPod w/ CCC, but do my cloning to a sparse disk image and restore from the sparse image. Given my experience with sparse disk images on an SMB share I could actually put the sparseimage file on an SMB share and use the iPod just for booting.
I've done some preliminary testing and not experienced the problems seen earlier, but I need to use the system a lot more before I start to trust it.
At this point I still suspect the problem is switching to journaling on a file system first formatted under OS X 10.x then subject to various lockups, repairs, crashes and severe file fragmentation through 10.1 to 10.3. (However the S.M.A.R.T test shows valididated, so the disk mechanism appears intact.).
Dry Creek Photo: ICC profiles to get great results at Costco and other digital print vendors
Dry Creek Photo
Great stuff, especially for Mac users. Most printers are set for standard PC gamma and other settings and print Mac images as somewhat dark. I will try this out.
We offer a database of freely available Fuji Frontier and Noritsu digital printer Icc profiles for mini labs everywhere. In the US, these include most Costco, Wal-Mart, and Ritz Camera locations, among others. If your local Frontier or Noritsu lab is not listed in our database, download and print our profiling target. We will build a basic profile for you at no charge.
You can use these profiles to get the best color fidelity from your digital prints.
Great stuff, especially for Mac users. Most printers are set for standard PC gamma and other settings and print Mac images as somewhat dark. I will try this out.
Sunday, January 04, 2004
Panther's Best: Sparse Disk Images on an SMB share
Apple - Discussions - Disk Images on an SMB share
Other than a more robust file system, the single best feature of Panther for my purposes may be the ability to host a sparseimage (sparse disk image) on an SMB share. Jaguar did not allow sparseimage nor regular HFS+ disk images to be mounted when hosted on an SMB share unless the images were quite small.
[Addendum 1/9/04: From a MacDev article - FileVault uses sparse image -- "FileVault uses a special disk image format: USDP or SPARSE. These files have a .sparceimage extension. Their specificity is that the resulting volume expands as needed to accommodate more data without requiring you to manually create a new image and copy data back and forth -- or requiring the system to do so."]
Using Disk Utility one can create a sparse image (not a read/write image) on a local drive or a share, including an SMB share. The file created has the extension "sparseimage". The size one specifies in the create image dialog is the MAXIMUM size, the actual file created is quite small -- about 4MB where the maximum size is DVD size (4.7 GB). Even over an 802.11b WLAN connection it only takes a few minutes to create and format the image.
Once the image is created and mounted one can copy files to it. I experimented with copying a 500MB iPhoto Library to the disk image. The sparseimage file grows only as needed to incorporate the added files, so the physical file grew 500MB after copying. (The Finder reports 4.2GB free, as far as the Finder knows this is a 4.7GB disk.)
The image can be quickly mounted and dismounted. Using a G3 iBook and a slow 802.11b connection the 500MB sparseimage (4.7GB capacity) mounts in seconds.
Once mounted it is accessed like an HFS+ share. Using iPhoto Library over the effective 2mbps (802.11b) connection I loaded the 500MB library into iPhoto 2.0. Access was quite fast with a delay of a few seconds when displaying a full screen image for the first time. I expect there'd be no perceptible delay on a 100mbps wired LAN.
Why is this so valuable? SMB storage is very cheap. Any ancient box running Win2K and some dirt cheap IDE controllers easily host 5 or so inexpensive 120GB drives. Unfortunately the OS X SMB client cannot take full advantage of this. Problems with character encoding and perhaps permissions mean some HFS+ data cannot be placed on an SMB share. In particular iPhoto 2.x libraries, which can require a large amount of storage, cannot be moved to an SMB share. (If you try you will get messages that some files cannot be copied.) They can, however, be quite safely copied into a disk image on an SMB share. One might consider the same approach for iTunes, though I've been hosting my iTunes files on an SMB share using the standard approach without known problems.
The main drawback is backup. If one is doing backup via the SMB host then changing a single bit in a file on the disk image will alter the disk image. Even the kind of disk based backup I use [1] will run out of space. I will probably exempt the disk image from my standard backup and just copy it weekly to my backup store, while doing monthly DVD burns of the sparseimage to provide serial backup. I will experiment with Retrospect server to see if Retrospect will do a file level backup if I simply leave the image mounted on my laptop overnight.
I await reports from other experimenters!
john
jfaughnan@spamcop.net
www.faughnan.com/ibook.html
[1] http://www.faughnan.com/backup.html
meta: jfaughnan, jgfaughnan, OS X, diskimage, disk image, sparse image, sparse disk image, SMB, windows, share, network, iPhoto, backup, server, storage management, Panther, 10.3, 10.3.2
Other than a more robust file system, the single best feature of Panther for my purposes may be the ability to host a sparseimage (sparse disk image) on an SMB share. Jaguar did not allow sparseimage nor regular HFS+ disk images to be mounted when hosted on an SMB share unless the images were quite small.
[Addendum 1/9/04: From a MacDev article - FileVault uses sparse image -- "FileVault uses a special disk image format: USDP or SPARSE. These files have a .sparceimage extension. Their specificity is that the resulting volume expands as needed to accommodate more data without requiring you to manually create a new image and copy data back and forth -- or requiring the system to do so."]
Using Disk Utility one can create a sparse image (not a read/write image) on a local drive or a share, including an SMB share. The file created has the extension "sparseimage". The size one specifies in the create image dialog is the MAXIMUM size, the actual file created is quite small -- about 4MB where the maximum size is DVD size (4.7 GB). Even over an 802.11b WLAN connection it only takes a few minutes to create and format the image.
Once the image is created and mounted one can copy files to it. I experimented with copying a 500MB iPhoto Library to the disk image. The sparseimage file grows only as needed to incorporate the added files, so the physical file grew 500MB after copying. (The Finder reports 4.2GB free, as far as the Finder knows this is a 4.7GB disk.)
The image can be quickly mounted and dismounted. Using a G3 iBook and a slow 802.11b connection the 500MB sparseimage (4.7GB capacity) mounts in seconds.
Once mounted it is accessed like an HFS+ share. Using iPhoto Library over the effective 2mbps (802.11b) connection I loaded the 500MB library into iPhoto 2.0. Access was quite fast with a delay of a few seconds when displaying a full screen image for the first time. I expect there'd be no perceptible delay on a 100mbps wired LAN.
Why is this so valuable? SMB storage is very cheap. Any ancient box running Win2K and some dirt cheap IDE controllers easily host 5 or so inexpensive 120GB drives. Unfortunately the OS X SMB client cannot take full advantage of this. Problems with character encoding and perhaps permissions mean some HFS+ data cannot be placed on an SMB share. In particular iPhoto 2.x libraries, which can require a large amount of storage, cannot be moved to an SMB share. (If you try you will get messages that some files cannot be copied.) They can, however, be quite safely copied into a disk image on an SMB share. One might consider the same approach for iTunes, though I've been hosting my iTunes files on an SMB share using the standard approach without known problems.
The main drawback is backup. If one is doing backup via the SMB host then changing a single bit in a file on the disk image will alter the disk image. Even the kind of disk based backup I use [1] will run out of space. I will probably exempt the disk image from my standard backup and just copy it weekly to my backup store, while doing monthly DVD burns of the sparseimage to provide serial backup. I will experiment with Retrospect server to see if Retrospect will do a file level backup if I simply leave the image mounted on my laptop overnight.
I await reports from other experimenters!
john
jfaughnan@spamcop.net
www.faughnan.com/ibook.html
[1] http://www.faughnan.com/backup.html
meta: jfaughnan, jgfaughnan, OS X, diskimage, disk image, sparse image, sparse disk image, SMB, windows, share, network, iPhoto, backup, server, storage management, Panther, 10.3, 10.3.2
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