Place your name and address on your laptop's login background screen

The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

It's easy to change your Mac's login background image, but more importantly you can add your name and address to it. A great hint!

TeXShop: LaTeX client for OS X (and that's a lot of X)

TeXShop

GPL. I'll try it. I wish someone would recreate something like WordPerfect 5.1 as an OS X Cocoa app around the LaTeX layout engine. It wouldn't be a "port", more using WP 5.1 as a functional spec. It would not support all of WP 5.1's features of course. It might, however, be the savior for those of us who loathe Microsoft Word. (Since WordPerfect used internal markup, the functionality may be more compatible than one might expect. Remember "reveal codes"?)

PS. Thanks Alexandre A. for pointing me to the great wikipedia article on LaTeX.

Pogue loves the SanDisk Ultra II Plus CF card

A Brilliant Memory Card - New York Times

My slightly older cameras take CF cards. Sandisk has figured out how to create a CF card that will interface to a USB port; an astounding feat that couldn't be done on a smaller scale memory card. Pogue thinks it's fabulous.

SanDisk says that the suggested price for its folding, Ultra II Plus card is $80 (for the 512-meg version), only $5 more than the non-folding Ultra II. Weirdly, I could find only one store online carrying the Plus card--Circuit City--and it was exactly the same price as the non-folding version ($84). (Note that these are high-speed cards. Regular 512-meg SD cards cost much less, in the $50 range.)

Apple support and especially Airport support

A Macintouch article led me to Apple's support page. Oddly enough I've never visited through this route, the hardware specific support sites are really good, particularly the AirPort site. As noted on Macintouch, on the right side is a link to the top secret AirPort management tools:

David Colville

A couple of tips about configuring AirPort with WDS bridging as you discussed.

- Internet Connect (in /Applications) will tell you the Base Station AirPort ID of the base station you are connected to - very useful for determining which base station you are connected to...

- AirPort Management Tools are a heaven send and I'm surprised Apple doesn't promote them better for these kinds of uses. You can get them at AirPort Support, there is a link in the right hand column to the "AirPort Management Tools" which will let you download them straight away. Included in this package are the Management Utility, and the Client Monitor.

The AirPort Management Utility will not only allow you to see the configurations of multiple base stations (and change them easily, en masse), it'll also query each base station for the clients that are attached to it and give service and noise graphs for those clients. Very useful for making sure your base stations are actually "seeing" each other. It will also allow you to query the base station for it's logging.

The AirPort Client Monitor can be run on a connected computer to give an idea of how good the service it is receiving is (similar to what you see in the Management Utility, but from a client perspective).

Boolean searching in OS X Mail.app

Macintouch - Mail.app (Part 17)

This is an interesting claim -- that Spotlight and Mail.app support Boolean search with the C-style logical operators of & and |. I'll test and verify as an update. Lack of Boolean operators has been a common complaint.

Boolean Searching

Kees Huyser

... According to mail->help->searching:

Use the words 'and,' 'or,' 'not,' and parentheses to refine your search:

'cat and dog' finds email containing both 'cat' and 'dog'
'cat or dog' finds email containing either 'cat' or 'dog'
'cat not dog' finds email containing 'cat' but not 'dog'
'cat and (dog or newt)' finds email containing both 'cat' and 'dog' and email containing both 'cat' and 'newt'

You can also use boolean expressions in the search box:

A & B yields A AND B
A | B yields A OR B
A ! B yields A NOT B.

This also works in Spotlight btw.

Jim Elliott

Kees Huyser's tip about Boolean searches in Mail and Spotlight adds a vast dimension of power to Tiger, with one big caveat: I can't get it to work using the words ("and", "or", even though that's indeed what the Help shows). These words seem to be treated as any other search terms. For example, if I search for "tiger and behavior" I get 12 hits, whereas "tiger behavior" gets me 14, and "tiger or behavior" nets 9. Clearly it's not a Boolean search.

If, however, I use the C-style logical operator symbols ("&", "|") it works beautifully! "tiger & behavior" gets 14 results, the same as "tiger behavior", while "tiger | behavior" yields 2062 hits. (I also tried the words individually and did the arithmetic to verify that Boolean logic added up.)

This is awesome! I had believed that there was no way to tap this power of the Spotlight API from the normal user interface. I am thrilled to find I was wrong. Now I just hope that Apple fixes their help text so that other power users, who haven't been following MacInTouch, can learn how to find exactly what they're looking for.

Update 8/12

Jim Elliott

I left out one crucial detail in my excitement yesterday, and I hope this will help explain why other users were reporting that Boolean searches were not working for them:

You can only perform advanced searches like this when you have chosen "Entire Message" (rather than "From", "To" or "Subject") as the search context. Otherwise it seems to do some sort of stemming "or" search regardless of the punctuation you include. I should also note that this mode, too, contradicts Apple's own help which claims things work in a completely different way. The documenters seem to have been utterly baffled about how Search is supposed to work in this version of Mail, and are compounding our confusion and frustration.

Ron Kaplan

This is related to the extremely useful Boolean search discussion of the last few days. It is now clear that a Boolean formula can be used to search one field of a Mail search, and that the result can be saved as a smart mailbox.

But it seems that it is not possible to use Boolean combinations of criteria across different fields to filter what shows up in that mailbox. You get only top-level "all" (= AND) or "any" (= OR). So suppose you want to have the conditions [Message is in Inbox] AND ([From contains John] OR [Any recipient contains John])

Is there anyway to get nested conditions?


Stephen Hart

Is it possible that some users are getting confused with the quotation marks writers use to indicate what to type? The following two entries yield different results for me in both the Finder and Mail (presumably both using the Spotlight search engine): bird and song "bird" and "song"

The former returns many more hits than the latter, which returns just what I'd expect on my hard drive.

Scanner support remains problematic in Tiger: Epson support

Mac OS X 10.4.2 (Part 29)

Epson Scanner Software Causes Hardware Problems

Smokey Ardisson

Steven K. Roberts wrote in Wednesday's Mac OS X 10.4.2 report that the software for his Epson 4180 was causing massive CPU use, temperature spikes, etc., even when not in use. I'm afraid I can't be very helpful, only to add that it's not specifically 10.4.2 related. I have the same model and experience the same problems under 10.3.9 (and earlier 10.3.x revisions) whenever the EPSON Scan software is open ...

Vincent Cayenne

... Apple's Image Capture will probably drive your scanner with no configuration necessary. When I upgraded to Tiger on my various machines, Epson Scan stopped working. After unsuccessful efforts to get it reinstalled and working, I discovered that Image Capture will drive all the Epson Perfection scanners that I've tried (1650, 1670, 3170, etc.). It may work for you.


Dixie

I have an EPSON Perfection 2450 scanner, which has ONLY been using the VueScan universal driver and never causes any hardware/software problems, when using the preferred Firewire connection. VueScan is constantly being updated (free) by the author Mr. Hamrick, works with EVERY scanner, and is well worth $49.95. Most drivers that are supplied with ANY brand of scanner are nightmares to install/use and are hardly (if ever) updated to eliminate bugs or improve performance.

A rather sophisticated approach to extending wireless networks

Macintouch: Wireless Networking (Part 30)

A very clever approach to extending wireless coverage in the absence of any standard for the extension (I think WDS may be a standard, but it is not well supported):

Wireless Range Extender For Travelers

Gary Ralston

I travel frequently, and often need to extend a wireless signal by 50 - 75 feet. Commonly, I can pick up a signal by a window from the next building, but lose the signal deeper inside the structure, where I wish to work. Wireless Range Extenders are the black sheep of wireless. The various WI-FI standards do not specify how a wireless signal should be captured and repeated, so each manufacturer rolls their own, resulting in incompatibility between brands.

Yesterday, I found a deal on D-Link's TINY and versatile DWL-G730AP Wireless Pocket Router/AP™. As of August 10, 2005 Office Depot in Chicago was selling them at $30 EACH after rebates.

This little device is smaller than a PCMCIA card - about the size of two graham crackers, stacked - and SMART! An external switch changes the mode between client, access point OR router. It draws power from A/C OR USB, and is fully configurable using D-Link's standard web interface. To boot, it supports WPA PSK.

I bought two, switched one into client mode and the other in router mode, taught the client which SSID and channel I wanted to bag,plugged them together, and for $60 USD, had a universal range extender.

To change the default settings, Mac users DO need to know how to create a manual IP on either Ethernet (to customize client or AP mode) or Airport (to tinker with the router). In the Network System Preference, create a location for configuring my various d-link contraptions. Set the IP to 192.168.0.100, subnet mask 255.255.255.0 and gateway 192.168.0.30. Use a browser to connect to 192.168.0.30. The username is Admin, and the default password is blank.

Two devices so the proprietary link is hidden.