Filed under: Features, Troubleshooting, Ask TUAW
Ask TUAW: Reducing distractions, sharing drives, Activity Monitor, winmail.dat and more
In this episode of Ask TUAW we'll be looking at questions about sharing drives from a Mac mini to a portable Mac over the network, watching iPod video in a car, distraction-reducing software, Activity Monitor, dealing with "winmail.dat" attachments from Windows users and more.As always your suggestions are most welcome, and questions for next week should be left in the comments. When asking a question please include which machine you're running and which version of OS X, as certain answers will vary between different Macs and Tiger vs. Leopard, etc. (we'll assume you're running Leopard if you don't specify). And now, on to the questions!
Josh asks
Is there a way to darken the desktop behind a window without making the wallpaper black? I basically would like to be able to press a hotkey and have the background darken as it does in Expose when you only have one window open in that space. I would just use this but I can't interact with the window when you do that.
A couple of readers had good suggestions: Steve pointed to Isolator and Tomahawk suggested Think. In addition to these, there are various applications that can hide the desktop. I personally use Backdrop but we've covered others like Desktopple Pro ($17). The advantage of using one of these is that you can simply hide everything on your desktop with a solid color without altering your wallpaper settings. Personally, I would find that less distracting than just dimming, but there are solutions out there either way you want to go.
petey asks
I just got a new car and have been debating on whether to put in a Mac Mini or iPod, both of which have a max capacity of 160GB. I plan on getting an in-dash touch screen display and I know that some of them allow you to plug in an iPod and control the menus through the display. But do you know of any display that will show video from the iPod? My hunch is that it would be possible with the 5th gen iPod (which is 80GB max) but not the new iPod classic. Any thoughts?
Being a fan of carputers I'd recommend going with the Mini for the additional functionality (GPS mapping, etc.) That said, you should be able to display video from the iPod (including the iPod classic) to any screen that has composite input using the Apple Composite AV Cable ($49). Unfortunately, Apple has introduced new restrictions with the most recent iPods requiring you to use their first-party cable. A variety of car compatible displays have composite inputs. Erica even posted a guide on this a while back.
sDawkins78 asks
Is there a Mac equivalent to the Windows Task Manager? I keep this thing up and running in the system tray all the time, and it's one of the last concerns I had before I made the big jump.
The most direct equivalent is the Activity Monitor which you can find in /Applications/Utilities. It will display all your processes as well as stats on memory usage, CPU load, etc. I believe that Activity Monitor is basically a pretty GUI front-end to the Unix ps command. So if you have some terminal chops you can open a terminal window and view and interact with your processes directly using ps. If you want a more comprehensive (and pretty) system monitor, check out Iconfactory's $13 utility iPulse.
Ellie asks
I have a mac mini and a macbook pro which are networked using a wireless router (Linksys 54g). Wireless printing from the MBP works just fine, but I have 3 USB hard drives connected to the mac mini. I was wondering if there is a way that I could mount these hard drives wirelessly on my macbook pro. I can stream some of the music and movies through itunes, but there are many other files on these hard drives that I would like to use.
Absolutely. All you need to do is turn on File Sharing in the Sharing Preference Pane and then add the drives to your "Shared Folders" list. You should then be able to browse to the Mac mini from the MBP using the Finders "Connect to server..." command (⌘+K).
Rainer asks
I have a Mac Mini at home working as a HTPC and a file server for my LAN. I just picked up a new Macbook Air and would like for it to "see" the iTunes folder from the Mini as if it were a folder on the Air's hard drive. In other words, I want my (60GB+) iTunes library folder on my Air without it actually taking up all the space. And I want to access it from anywhere. I think I'm on the right path looking into VPN, but I'm not finding anyway to "automount" folders from my Mini. I don't want to just stream music, I want to be able to sync my iPod from either machine.
On a local network the answer here is basically the same as the previous question; mount the mini's drive on the MacBook Air and point to it in the iTunes preferences. However, you should keep in mind that running an iTunes library on an external drive poses certain problems. Have a look on our guide about it. Now, this may not practical across the internet; the bandwidth is a limiting factor. iPod syncing remotely is probably not going to happen, but you might try using Simplify Media to play the music from your source machine. To automount the mini's drive, just add it to the login items as described in this post.
ehm_jay29 asks
I'm really glad that SuperDuper has been updated for leopard, and am even more excited that the clones can be stored alongside my time machine backups... having said that: how the heck do I do it? there is no mention of how to do so on their site, nor in the documentation.
This is a built-in feature of Smart Update in SuperDuper! As explained here if you use the Smart Update option it will just ignore Time Machine backups on that volume.
Jim asks
In what may be an entirely stupid question, what is a sparse image file and why is it taking up 2/3's of my hard disk? I do not use Time Machine (I know, I know), but I discovered this file when I used WhatSize to what I might be able to offload to free up some space.Do I need to keep this file? I'm running 10.5.2 and am using FileVault.
The sparse image is the FileVault. If you delete it you'll lose everything in your FileVault-encrypted home directory. So, basically, don't touch it!
Drew asks
So I use mail.app in leopard 10.5.2. A person I receive emails from weekly was just upgraded to the latest version of outlook on the web (not sure of the official title). In each of these emails i receive several attachments. All of the attachments came through great, even after upgrading to leopard. However, all of a sudden instead of seeing 6 attachments I see winmail.dat which i understand is the Outlook file format. I thought the issue was w/ her outlook, but gmail is able to read her emails fine. Any suggestions? Could 10.5.2 have broken mail.app?
I have no idea why this problem only manifested itself with 10.5.2, but I think I have a solution for you. TNEF's Enough (donationware) should allow you to extract the attachments. According to the FAQ, it seems that this problem is caused by her address book listing you "as a person who can receive 'Rich Text'." So, if you communicate with her that often you might be able just to ask her to open her address book entry for you in Outlook and turn that option off. I don't know exactly how to do that since I never touch Outlook, but this MS KB article suggests setting the recipient to "Receive plain text only."
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
jtpoulin said 8:16AM on 3-02-2008
I recently had problems with my MacBook, so I did a restore from a Time Machine backup, now all of my non-MP3 files will not play in iTunes, or anywhere else. So .M4A, .WAV, .MP4 will not work. However, when I quickview these files from my Time Machine backups, the songs will play. It would take quite a while to restore all of these files one-by-one, so either there a way to either fix the problem, of have Time Machine just go back and restore a bunch of files at once?
Reply
Dylan Lukes said 9:21AM on 3-02-2008
Well, thats because iTunes does not support those files, Quicktime does. As far as I can tell, QuickView uses quicktime. I suggest you convert them. Personally, for videos, I use VideoHub (its been reviewed here), and with some tweaking, you can use it to convert to avi.
Chris Newton said 9:42AM on 3-02-2008
Itunes does support those files. I have thousands of them. As for how to fix the problem... so songs in your iTunes library that worked before don't now? Or when you add songs to your iTunes library they won't play? It could be that iTunes just lost track of the files, but it seems odd that it would only be the non-mp3 files since they're all stored in the same file/folder structure.
Ben K. said 9:43AM on 3-02-2008
Well, actually iTunes should play those files... iTunes uses all the QuickTime extensions. There's no reason for it not to. Very strange.
jtpoulin said 10:12AM on 3-02-2008
The files are still saved in the right folder, iTunes still knows where they are. I have tried converting AAC, but that won't work, I get error (-50).
And the files had previously played, new files that I add work fine, just old ones aren't working now.
Goran said 10:51AM on 3-02-2008
What's the exact error message displayed when your files won't play? You might have a problem with authorization: certain music files will only play on one machine (and one iPod synced to it), or something similar. Sometimes, after reinstalling the whole system, your computer might be considered as a different machine and thus unauthorized to play protected media files. That still wouldn't explain the .WAV files, though.
I'm not clear about your question about Time Machine: you ask if you should use it, but earlier on you say you already have. Maybe you should compare your procedure with the one on this Apple Support page:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.5/en/15638.html
jtpoulin said 11:17AM on 3-02-2008
Error occurred while converting the file "xxxx." An unknown error occurred (-50). And the files should be authorized, because they weren't purchased from ITMS. I have managed to mess around with the .WAV files and make them work, I am not sure what that was. But I have tried messing with the other file types to no avail. It just seems weird that I can play these files from Time Machine, but not from my main HDD.
Dan said 1:32PM on 3-02-2008
Turn off Spotlight by dragging your HDD to the privacy field. Repair your permissions. Reset your NVRAM when you reboot. Reenable Spotlight and let it index the drive.
jtpoulin said 2:35PM on 3-02-2008
Dan, I tried that, and it didn't work.
seeegs said 11:47AM on 3-03-2008
the error -50 in iTunes I think is a sign you need to rebuild your iTunes library. I have done this before. I think it involves closing iTunes, dragging the .XML file from your iTunes folder in the Finder to the Desktop, then reopening iTunes. Don't do this though until you search the Apple Discussion Boards for the specific support article. I'm on my phone right now & can't search for it sorry. :-)
jtpoulin said 1:54PM on 3-03-2008
I rebuilt the iTunes Library and as some of you had expected, it said about 400 songs (all MP4 and M4P) did not exist. Oddly enough, I didn't get the exclamation point in iTunes. I managed to restore iTunes to a point about a month ago. It is just very strange that only certain file types were corrupted. Either way I managed to get all of my albums but 2 back from the dead.
Lui said 8:34AM on 3-02-2008
hey TUAW people,
I have yet another itunes related question, is there a way to put just my videos in a seperate library on a different harddrive and have them play from a harddrive (hooked up through time capsule) to another macbook? also does anyone know of program/applescript that will automate finding my movies converting them to something itunes can read and sync ands puting them on my hardrive as i finish downloading?
i asked two questions awhile back with no answers (some things just can't be done) one is getting recent and offline buddies off ichat. i am glad to report that with a combonation of chax and ichat pro theme this can be done. also my quicksilver plugin to sync an ipod or iphone with a hotkey is almost done!!
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Rick B. said 10:15AM on 3-02-2008
You can relocate your Movies folder from the iTunes Music folder via Terminal with a symbolic link. Type "man ln" in Terminal for the full instructions - the command should look something like this:
ln -s [path to remote folder where you relocated your movies (ie, /Volumes/TimeCapsule/Movies/)] [normal path to the iTunes Movies folder (usually ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Movies)]
You'll have to delete (or at least rename) the existing Movies folder in iTunes Music so that the folder doesn't exist when you create the link, so test the copy to make sure everything came across properly before deleting the original.
Rick B. said 1:21PM on 3-02-2008
Just re-read your question, and it appears that you want to access these from two machines. If you want to do this via iTunes, it will get complicated. You just want to be able to access the files, the above should work.
Lauram said 9:01AM on 3-02-2008
In Safari, is there some way, when saving a web page to disk as Page Source, to automatically retain the url of the page? I have folders full of pages I've saved "for future reference" but I sometimes need to locate a "live" version of the page again. Saving the page as a Web Archive doesn't really work for me, since I often have to work in places without Internet access, and at any rate, Web pages have a tendency to disappear or otherwise become unavailable.
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Kuy said 2:51PM on 3-02-2008
No. Save the web pages as a web archive instead, and you will not only gain the original URL, but you'll get all resources the HTML depends on. The URL is stored in the web archive (a plist at heart) in the Root.WebMainResource.WebResourceURL key. There are probably more obvious ways of getting to it.
-Kuy
Ben said 9:03AM on 3-02-2008
I thought the Terminal equivalent of Activity Monitor was top. But then I've never read the manual for ps nor tried to interact much with top.
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George said 9:17AM on 3-02-2008
Is there a way to fake your operating system identifiers, information, etc. online? For example, Netflix's online viewing capabilities are only open to Windows users at the time, but could I make my computer pretend to be running Windows XP without actually running Windows XP? I don't even know if I would be able to play the videos once I get through, but it would be nice to have the ability to fake my OS for other things too.
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Ben K. said 9:47AM on 3-02-2008
Unfortunately, Netflix's software requires that you're running Windows AND have the latest version of Windows Media (or at least the latest Windows Media DRM hooks). There's no way around it on the Mac besides doing virtualization or Boot Camp.
Although, rumour has it that Netflix is working with Microsoft to provide its Watch Now service with Silverlight, which IS Mac compatible.
As for your original question, I know you can spoof your user agent with Safari's debug menu, but as for your OS... I don't really know. There may be a Firefox extension that'll let you do that, maybe.
Kuy said 3:19PM on 3-02-2008
While it is possible to fake your User Agent string (which contains your browser and platform info), you're probably better off voting with your feet/dollars by switching to Blockbuster or another provider. Microsoft has been paying lots of money to 'partners' to use Silverlight, which has no technical or economic merits of its own. Don't count on long-term committed Mac support from Microsoft for this product, because it is at odds with their main revenue stream. This is why an OS vendor can never beat Flash. And for an example of what happens to microsoft's 'partners', simply read http://roughlydrafted.com .
Maybe this is a good chance to put iTunes rentals to the test?
-Kuy