Anil Sharma

Just upgraded to Mac OS X Lion (10.7) on the Macbook and iMac. As in most Mac updates, faced no issue at all. I’ve been playing around with Mac OS X Lion for some time and it’s really cool. Here are a few quick notings:

1. On the Macbook with a Intel Core 2 Duo 2.13 and 3 GB DDR2 RAM (Mid 2009),  Lion is as fast or probably faster than Snow Leopard.

2. Some of the Key new features of Lion over Snow Leopard are :

• Mission Control – I would rate this as the most useful new feature. I’ve never managed to use Spaces effective, with Mision Control, I can use multiple desktop screens much more effectively.
• LaunchPad – This too is useful, for the first time, I can see the whole host of Applications that are there on the Mac and think of using them. I also don’t have to clutter the Dock now, I’ve kept only very useful icons there and use the LaunchPad whenever I need any other application.
• Conversation View in Mail and Multiple Flags – It’s made the whole Apple Mail experience different and my life simpler. Don’t have to keep searching for old mails now
• Full Screen Apps and cleaner windows – Both cool features to increase valueable screen real estate. The vanishing scroll bars are really cool, they appear as soon as the mouse is on the window. Full screen applications are totally cool to use.

3.  Another thing I’ve noticed is that in Lion, the /User/Library folder is hidden. While this is ok for most users, I need that folder once in a while. A quick way to access it is to do a Option + Click on ‘Go’ in the Finder. This shows Library as an option in the pulldown menu.

4. Overall, the new OS feels fast and effective.  I would recommend all Mac users to upgrade.

It’s cold in New Delhi, especially at night. Without central heating, sitting on a chair and working on a desktop at night is agonizing so for the past few days, I’ve been working in bed using the MacBook pro at night. This has created a new problem. The brightness of the 13″ LED, which attracted me to the MacBook Pro, is now a distraction for my sweet wife who prefers to sleep while I work. In fact, the bright glow is enough to light up the entire room. I could even see our dog making faces at me, he couldn’t sleep so I kept bribing him biscuits to keep quiet.

Some Google searches later, I ended up with the simplest of solutions. Just press Command + Option + Control + 8 on your mac and you’re done. The screen inverts colors to a negative format, so the white and light gray background of most windows become black and light gray.

The control of contrast in this negative display format is within System Preferences -> Universal Access -> Seeing -> Display. I’ve really never had to change any settings there.  Pressing the combination of four keys works both ways to revert back to original display.

It takes some time getting used to this new screen format but it’s definitely soothing and less disturbing. I’ve lately been using this negative format during daytime.

Now if I could figure out a way of getting a biscuit back from the dog…

My friend didn’t know the admin password of his Apple iMac so I figured I would reset it. While it’s easy to reset the lost or forgotten password, I realized there aren’t too many step-by-step guides so I decide to create one.

I’m assuming you have either an iMac, Macbook or Macbook pro. I’m also assuming you have Mac OS X installed. All these machines come with a boot DVD, if you don’t have your own, you could borrow one from anyone else who has one. Your DVD look like one of these:

Mac OS X Restore DVD's

The good part – and I’ve tested this – you can use any iMac’s DVD on a Macbook / Macbook Pro or vice versa. As long as the DVD is of a software version almost matching the one installed on the computer, it should work.

Insert the DVD into the computer and shut it down. Press the “C” key on the keyboard and while keeping it pressed, start the computer. After some time, when you hear the DVD being used, you can release the key. The DVD will start the computer with a screen asking you to select a language where I choose English.

Depending on the DVD you have used, you can get two choices.

a. If you’ve used the correct DVD for the computer (that means a Macbook Pro DVD on a Macbook Pro), your next screen will show a screen to Install Mac OS X. You don’t want to re-install Mac OS X, you just want to reset the password so do not press continue on this screen. On the top menu bar which appears, go to Utilities and select “Reset Password” as shown here:

Reset Password from Utilities menu

You will get a screen that shows the main hard drive. Clicking the hard drive icon will show all the user accounts on the computer. You can now select the admin account and enter a new password for it as shown here:

Any user's password can be reset

You can reset the password of other accounts if required. Once you’re done, go to the Reset Password option in the menu bar, exit and again from the menu bar, shut down the computer. When you start again, let the computer boot to the hard drive and you can enter the new password to login.

b. If you’ve using an incorrect DVD, for e.g., if you need to reset the password of a Macbook Pro but the only DVD you can lay your hands on is of an iMac, you can still reset the admin password. There’s only one change in the process described above. Instead of the “Install Mac OS X” screen, you get the screen showing “Mac OS X can’t be installed on this computer” as shown below:

If the DVD doesn't match computer specs

Since the Utilities menu is also grayed out at this screen level, you need to click on the “Restore from Backup” button. The next screen shows “Restore Your System” as shown below, do not press on the continue button on it.

Do not restore the system

The Utilities menu is now active and you can Reset Password as explained above.

Utilities menu now allows password reset

I apologize for the poor quality of these images; I clicked them using a cellphone and that’s the best I could get. I’m trying to figure out if there’s a way of taking screenshots at this level but I haven’t found one yet.

For the past few weeks, I’ve had to take a lot of screenshots on my Mac.  The MacOS comes with a default application called “Grab” that allows you to take screenshots. What’s annoying is that screenshot’s taken by Grab are automatically stored in .tiff format and there’s no way to store those images as .jpg or .png – formats that are more suited for web.

Some search on the net and I found some cool ways to take screen shots – which I’m documenting here just in case I forget them.

The most commonly use key combination for me is Command + Crtl + Shift + 4. This combination turns the mouse pointed into a cross which shows screen pixel count as we move it around.  With a mouse drag, I can select the area that I want to capture on the screen – while I drag, the cross shows pixel count of selected area. When I release the mouse, a shot is captured and stored in the clipboard. Now I just paste it where ever I require the shot – in Mail, Keynote etc. If I want to edit the screenshot, I open the default Preview application and press Command + N (or goto the File menu and select “New from Clipboard”). In Preview, I can edit the image, annotate on it and store it in various formats including PDF.

If I just want to select an area of the screen and store it as a .png file on the desktop, I can do that with Command + Shift + 4.

Sometimes, in both the above scenarios of selecting a screen area and either copying to clipboard or saving as a file, I don’t want to select an area but I want a clean image of a window, a toolbar or an icon only. These icon’s or windows have curved edges so selecting and clicking them isn’t a solution. In such cases, after selecting the key combinations mentioned above and when the cross appears, I press the space bar. This turns the cross into a camera. Now I can highlight and window etc. and get a clean image of that only.

If I need the entire screen captured and stored on the desktop as a .png, I choose Command + Shift + 3 and if I need the entire screen in the Clipboard instead of being saved as a file, its Command + Ctrl + Shift + 3.

Since the upgrade from Aperture 2 to 3, I was struggling with a slow and often hanging system. The moment Aperture was turned on, it was as if the entire system would go into a momentarily lapse and then sort of freeze.

I tried many things. The first was – as recommended by most website – to turn off the faces feature by removing the check from Aperture -> Preferences -> General – Enable Faces . While that stopped it from searching through my entire photo collection for faces, it still didn’t resolve the issue of overall system slowness.

More searches lead me to various other discussions and after trying several things, this is what has finally made Aperture work happily on my Macbook Pro :

I deleted all the files in :

Hard Drive/Library/Caches
Hard Drive/System/Library/Caches
Hard Drive/Users/(Your user)/Library/Caches

The  I also deleted  this file:
Hard Drive/Users/(Your user)/Library/Preferences/com.apple.aperture.plist

After this, I emptied Trash. Some files would not empty from trash because they were in use. I continued deleting till all other files were deleted. Then, in the Finder menu, I used  the Secure Empty Trash option to delete the pending files from Trash.

When I restarted Aperture, all my settings were set to default.  I created a new Library and re-imported all my pictures. Thats it, Aperture has been behaving since then !