Ask TUAW: reading Mac files from Windows, printing posters, VNC and more

Norman asks

I wanted to know if there's any chance ATI or Nvidia will throw us AGP bus Powermac G5 owners a bone and release new stock of Radeon X800 or fairly decent cards into the market? Currently every place has Radeon 9600 pro cards in stock but none seem to have the 9800 Pro or X800 Pro in stock. I'm just hoping something works out because it sucks to pay 200 dollars for a Radeon 9600 Pro at this point - its just not worth it. Even if I could find a 9800 pro I would spring for it(but still hoping for an X800 PRO). On the PC side - you can still find AGP cards and even though they may not be the most recent ones - they're better than what us mac owners are having to put up with. Any help TUAW? (in terms of insider news on new AGP cards or anything like that?)

I don't have any "insider news," but I seriously doubt you're going to be seeing much development for G5 AGP systems at this point. As you probably know the G5 uses "Big Endian" addressing while the Intel architecture uses "Little Endian" (click here for more background). The technical details are unimportant, but the upshot is simply this: video cards had to be designed specifically to work with the G5 Macs (e.g. NVidia's cards were redesigned as bi-endian when they re-entered the Mac market). Given the fact that all the new Macs are Intel the market incentive for developing new cards for the big-endian G5 systems has got to be really low, therefore I would be rather surprised to see new AGP cards for your Mac, particularly since AGP has itself been supplanted by PCI Express.

All of that said, I did find several online retailers listing availability for the X800 XT on August 31st, so I would check back then.

Gwion asks

How do you make a multi page poster on the Mac? I haven't found an application that lets me do it in months of searching. My printer's only capable of A4 size at the most, so I'd like to be able to print A3 size by splitting the poster over two separate pages and then joining them together afterwards.

Of course you could use a serious layout tool like Quark or InDesign to do this. However, if you want something much cheaper Poster Print would seem to do what you want (though I haven't used it myself).

Jon asks

So is it possible to buy an aluminum keyboard separately? I thought you had to buy them with an iMac.

Yes you can buy them separately. They're available for order at the Apple Store: $49.00 for the wired, and $79 for the wireless (though the wireless lists a shipping date of 4-6 weeks).

Dave asks

Help! I installed Flash 9 so that I could draw on my sister's Facebook Graffiti Wall. Now, all the flash thingies that are supposed to show up on webpages show up as Quicktime Question Marks. I can't figure out how to uninstall Flash 9 (or better yet, keep it but fix this problem)... I figured out that i'm supposed to check "enable Flash" in System Preferences under Quicktime. I did that and it worked for a while. After I restarted the computer, the box was still checked, but Flash wasn't working. Is there some more hearty setting I need to play with?

This Adobe Tech Note should help. Basically make sure the Flash media checkbox in the MIME Settings... sheet of the Advanced tab of the QuickTime Preference Pane is unchecked.

BdeRWest asks

I need a good backup app that plays nice with network-attatched drives... My backup HDD is NAS, with which my notebook communicates via Wi-Fi... Until Leopard comes out, any free (or inexpensive) suggestions?

My backup suggestion these days is pretty much always SuperDuper ($27.95). What I would do is connect to the NAS by cable for the initial copy then do scheduled progressive backups over wifi.

Jobjörn asks

I am a quite new Mac user. I don't regret this choice - I love this little machine! However, one thing is missing: the minigames. The free, open source, minigames, preferrably. For Windows, there are plenty of minigames - there's everything. For Linux, you can get more than enough of fine free open source minigames - GNOME even comes with a lovely bunch of them bundled. So what does Mac OS X come with to play during idle times? Chess. Chess? Come on. The Tetris clone Quinn has solved this problem for a month now, but even I tire of it. Help me out! I need minigames!

This seems like a strange problem to me as mini-games abound on the Mac. Have you looked through Apple's Games Downloads page and Macgamefiles.com? You might also try searching MacUpdate and VersionTracker. Finally there are more Flash games than you can shake a stick at (check out Desktop Tower Defense if you want to lose a lot of hours).

VegasFarmer asks

I just returned to the Mac world from that other place (the one where, even though it rains all the time, it still feels like you're in...) and dragged my parents, kicking and screaming, with me. Loveable, they are still technophobes and are scared to death of their computer...leaving me with two Macs to manage, thousands of miles apart. I've looked at the VNC routes and that seems too complicated for my poor, time-strapped brain. I know I could go with Apple's Remote Desktop or Timbuktu Pro or something, but those seem over the top for my simple needs (recovering errant downloads, undeleting e-mail, etc.), not to mention expensive. Are there any good, cheap solutions for my problem?

I would really encourage you to look again at VNC. OS X has a built-in VNC server you can use with the open source Chicken of the VNC client. You just have to turn it on in the Services tab of the Sharing Preference Pane. This is what I do for remote management and it's free!

If you want an easier solution, you might check out Desktop Transporter ($29.95) or SpyMe 2 ($15 for 3 machines), though I don't have personal experience with either.

Lauram asks

I'm using Windows XP on Boot Camp for one application only.... I've noticed that, while I can move documents from the Windows disk across the partition and copy them to my Mac with ease, I can't seem to copy in the other direction... How come I can only read from this disk, and is there some easy way to change that? I don't seem to be able to change the ownership and permissions setting in the usual way.

I'm not quite clear what you're wanting to do. Do you want to access files on your Mac partition from Windows or access files on your Windows partition from OS X? You should easily be able to read files from the NTFS Windows partition (but not write to it) while running OS X, so I'll assume the problem is in the other direction (accessing files on the Mac partition while running Windows). If you really need to write to the NTFS partition from OS X you can try this tip using MacFUSE.

I suspect your problem is in reading files from the Mac partition while in Windows . The reason for this is that Windows cannot read the HFS+ file system natively. You need a Windows program like HFSExploer (free) or MacDrive ($49.95) to read the HFS+ formated partition while running Windows. However, I would suggest an easier (and probably safer) solution is just to use an external HD (or flash drive) to copy files back and forth. These are generally formatted with FAT32 that both OS X and Windows can read natively.