At Work On a Mac

I’m proud of myself today. Perseverance and research, trial and error have yielded a new way to install OS X Leopard remotely. My problem was that I own a PowerBook G4 with a broken DVD drive (long story) that I wanted to update to Leopard. To make a long story short, I used a strange combination of hardware and boot up key secrets (sooooo specific to Apple), to achieve the desired result.

I did quick research on the Internet and could not find a simple way of doing this aside from the usual forum best advice… I had tried to mount the PowerBook on my iMac Core Duo using a FireWire cable and “T” for target and then installing the system off the iMac’s drive with the PowerBook as the target installation drive.

Much to my dismay, Leopard’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Universal Binary installed an Intel personality on my perpetually “? booting ” PowerBook.

The solution was to mount a MacBook as a target Firewire drive on my PowerBook and boot the PowerBook using the”Alt”key to find a volume with an OS that would be the Leopard disk inserted in the MacBook’s DVD drive. Wow, how geeky can it get? I was running out of fingers, keyboards and wires. Are you up on your keys?

Here is a good primer for you:
On boot up  
hold the C key to start from CD 
hold the T key to put computer in FireWire Target Disk mode
hold the ⌥ key to show all startup disks 
hold the ⌥⇧⌘⌫ to start from external drive or CD

In the Finder
Pressing ⌃⌘-power will restart
Pressing ⌃⌥⌘-power will put computer to sleep
⌘-tab cycle forward through applications
⌥⌘-esc Force Quit Applications dialog
⇧⌘3 screen dump (entire screen)
⇧⌘4 screen dump (drag a rectangle)
⌘-space Spotlight

Read more for OS X keyboard shortcuts.

There is a lot more on the rixstep web site. They are programmers who chew UNIX like we chew gum. They make a couple of practical programs that they release under a suite. They are known for XFILE and CLIX that I had fun using for clearing caches. Check out Spike if you need a “real” file shredder. Outbox sounds like a very practical mailing application.

The main argument for their approach is that you should take control of your data, including hidden files. It makes sense to me. Revealing iPod_Control for example might be useful if you got your computer stolen and were left with your iPod as consolation.

Bookmark Essentials, Leopard, Productivity Apple keystroke, firewire, geeky, key combination, macbook, powerbook, rixstep, target mount

Quicksilver is the greatest keyboard or mouse extension for the Mac depending on how you look at it. It is now an open source project (as soon as they get the source code it seems) so expect more features in future releases. For now you can get it here. It really simplifies your life at the Mac as it reduces greatly mouse clicking and window pane aiming and displacing.

I find myself clicking more on a Mac than on a PC.

I know it does not make scientific sense. Look the Mac is windows driven (really no pun intended) and the PC is keyboard savvy, filled with keyboard shortcuts.

I use COMMAND+Tab to switch from an application to another (this is nice when you’re in a full screen presentation and you want to surf the web for your audience) and COMMAND+H to hide an application (and its obtrusive window pane).  I also find myself searching the awkward Spotlight with COMMAND+Space bar. I find Spotlight slow and unpleasant to use when I’m frantically awaiting results that keep updating.

I took me years to structure my folders in a workable manner. Using the project’s title works best for me. All files within are then broken into subfolders (background, images, text, presentation). Most of my search requests are for recent files, a few clicks away. You can also use the Apple and Recent elements on the Finder. And that’s about it if you don’t install Quicksilver.

The fundamental difference, in terms of semantics between Spotlight and Quicksilver is that Spotlight indexes a given file’s content (except if it is crypted) and QS only indexes file names. So you can see why one does not replace the other. You need both. Quicksilver is so rich in features that you can turn into a power user in no time. Once you have mapped your favourite keys to evoke it (I use OPTION+Space bar) it allows you to quickly find an application or a file and launch it with a simple carriage return (Enter key). It does much more but you’re going to have to dig in for the rest.

Bookmark Essentials, Productivity Blacktree, find, key combination, keyboard, keyboard shortcut, launch application, Quicksilver, search, Spotlight, start