Ask TUAW: Safari certificates, OCR, PC to Mac mini, and more

This time in Ask TUAW we've got questions about Safari certificates, using a PC hard drive with a Mac, OCR software, connecting to other computers on a home network, and more.

As always, your suggestions are welcome. 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 Mac OS X (we'll assume you're running Leopard on an Intel Mac if you don't specify). And now, on to the questions!

Mr. Beast

I am considering switching to a MacMini from a PC. I have an external Firewire HD with all of my music. Can I just plug the HD into the new MacMini or do I need to some fancy formatting, etc? If it is the latter, is it is easy to "convert"?

As one of our other readers noted, it depends on how the external drive is formatted. If the drive is FAT32, you can plug it into your Mac mini without any problems. If the drive is NTFS you will be able to read the drive, but not write to it. So you could copy all the music to the Mac's internal drive, but you wouldn't be able to write to the drive.

There are a few tools that will allow you to write to the NTFS drive -- a commercial package, Paragon NTFS and a free tool called NTFS-3G among them. However, if you're really going to switch over (which you absolutely should!) then I think the best thing to do would be to copy the music over to the Mac, reformat the drive as HFS+ (with the Mac's built-in Disk Utility) and the copy the music back to the drive (assuming you want to keep all your music on an external drive).

Kevin asks

I need to use a https site to manage my webhosting account, however each time I access that page I have to specifically tell Safari to trust the certificate. Is there any way to force it on a certain domain?

Yes you can change the way OS X / Safari trusts certificates. When the certificate box comes up you'll see a checkbox which will allow you to select an "always trust... when connecting to...". When you do so you'll be asked for your Administrator's password and it should then automatically trust that certificate.

If that doesn't work initially, you may already have an entry in your Keychain. If so, start Keychain Access in /Applications/Utilities and delete the relevant entry. The next time you visit that website it should automatically bring up the certificate box.

John asks

Does anyone know of a mac utility (or pc... if necessary) that can restore an image (or an actual dvd) to a non-hfs partition or a usb stick? I'm trying to get boot camp working, but my superdrive is fried and windows won't boot from my external firewire dvd drive. I have an external usb hd, though, and a usb stick thingy, so i figured i could just make an image of my xp install disk (is this legal? it's my own copy that i bought), and restore that to the usb stick or to a partition on my drive. trouble is, superduper, carbon copy cloner, and disk utility are all unable to do this (at least i can't figure out how.. after 5 frustrating hours of trying, and googling!). I've also tried a few different programs on an xp virtual machine - alcohol 120, daemon tools, and a few others - but i can't figure out how to do it. all the articles i've read describe long complicated procedures with command line tools - all way above my pay grade! i figure there MUST be a simple way to do this, no? I did the equivalent with my leopard install disk, to a bootable partition on my external, and it was ridiculously easy. i know it's windows, but it can't be THAT much more complicated to do something this simple, can it???

I think you're going to have to do this on Windows. From what I understand you want to install Windows XP from an external USB flash drive. Fortunately, I found couple of tutorials for installing XP onto various netbooks lacking an optical drive. Check out this tutorial for the eeePC. Here's another tutorial focused on the HP Mini-Note which has basically the same steps. The basic procedure should cross-apply to any computer and will give you a good idea of how to proceed.

macuser asks

Can someone tell me an application that can pull text from pictures and make a text document. I know Microsoft OneNote had this feature, but I was wondering if there was a free program somewhere. I have a typed document printed and I did not want to retype the whole thing just to make a few changes, so I was wondering if I could scan it and use a program such as this.

What you're asking for is OCR (optical character recognition) software. On the Mac there are a few options Readiris Pro ($129.99), OmniPage X ($499.99), and DEVONThink Pro Office ($149.95) among them -- Adobe's Acrobat Pro also has built-in OCR capability for PDF files. Unfortunately, as you can see each of these is rather expensive. If you only have a single document that you want OCR'ed you might try an online service OCR service. I haven't used any of these myself, but several are listed here. If you try any of them let us know what works best for you.

Joe asks

I have a few computers on the home network, sometimes they all automatically appear in finder, but what do I do when they don't automatically show up, I want to refresh the network so I can swap files between computers.

In the Finder invoke the Connect to Server... option in the Go menu ( ⌘+K ). You should then be able to hit the browse button. If you know the actual locations of the other computers (i.e. their IP addresses) you can also put those in directly. In fact, once you connect to them it's a good idea to save their locations in the Connect to Server window (with the plus button) so you can easily access them in the future.

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Jon

Question for next week:

I got a white iPhone 3G for Christmas and immediately after taking it out of the box, I covered the front and back with Best Skins Ever skins. In these short few months, they have become discolored and are starting to peel off. I am thinking about removing them altogether and letting my phone go out in the nude, but I'm not sure how it will hold up. I understand the screen is pretty much scratch-proof, but how well does the plastic case withstand the elements?

March 17 2009 at 4:05 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Paul S

I have a couple of unrelated questions for next week's Ask TUAW.

First, I was wondering if there was anyway to limit the amount of CPU is dedicated to an application. I am running VisualHub (RIP) to convert some files and want to cut the amount of CPU the app uses down in half (from 150% to 75% of my 2ghz Intel Core 2 Duo). I understand this will slow the conversion process but would like to do it nonetheless.

Second, I was wondering if anyone knew how to send text messages via bluetooth from one's Mac to one's iPhone 3G. I remember back in the day I had a Sony Ericsson T610 that you could connect to the Address Book app with bluetooth and send a receive SMS' on your Mac. I know that they discontinued this with the AB but was wondering if anyone had found a workaround or some way of sending SMS' from your Mac and having it appear to be from your mobile number (instead of one of these online services that comes from a number like 10001010).

Thanks in advance,

Paul

March 17 2009 at 11:17 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Duncan McGregor

Sorry for the shameless plug, but I've so given up waiting for a cheap and easy to use OCR app for the Mac that I've started to write one.

At the moment VelOCRaptor only runs on Leopard and Intel, but then at the moment it is free.

If you've some time please come over, try it out and leave feedback, as I'd like to know what to prioritize, and whether it works well enough.

Thanks

Duncan McGregor
http://www.velocraptor.com

March 14 2009 at 6:07 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to Duncan McGregor's comment

macuser

I've found that OnlineOCR.net does not always work. So I tried out VelOCRaptor. First off great name, velociraptors are easily the coolest dead animal around. Second it works really good, and is a great offline solution. Though I think the app icon should look less cartoonish. I was easily able to read a jpg after a short time trying to figure out how to use it. There could be some more instructions in the future. So thanks Duncan McGregor, TUAW, and everyone else.

March 15 2009 at 8:39 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

macuser

Thanks TUAW for helping me out. OnlineOCR.net seems to be a good quick solution.

March 14 2009 at 2:34 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

HandyMac

Here's a new OCR app, available free in beta (haven't tried it):
http://www.velocraptor.com

March 12 2009 at 9:50 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to HandyMac's comment

now4real954

@HandyMac

thanks for the option link but the OCR problem was that they wanted to be able to edit the document...not to take it from one format he cant do anything with to another...anyone with a mac can take a photo...click print then click PDF and make it into a pdf...whats the point?

he wants to take a PDF or JPG and make it editable...into word or textedit...understand

hope that didnt come across too rude...sorry

March 13 2009 at 12:46 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Pierce

I have an external HDD formatted with NTFS connected to my iMac 24" running Leopard. My entire iTunes and iPhoto libraries reside on the external HDD. I'm using the Paragon NTFS solution to read/write to my external HDD, but I get the feeling it could be faster if the external HD was formatted with Mac OS Extended: is this true? If so, what is the best way to get the contents of my external HDD off the drive - and on to my iMac's HDD - so I can then reformat the external HDD? Also, I've put a lot of work into organizing my iTunes library with proper song titles and artist names - I'm hoping my solution ultimately retains this information too.

Thanks in advance for any help.

March 12 2009 at 9:38 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

2 replies to Pierce's comment

now4real954

@pierce
all you really have to do from my understanding is...just take the itunes folder and the iphoto folder and move them to your internal drive if possible...space considering...format the drive and move them back...if itunes gives you a problem...hold down the option key while clicking the itunes icon and it will give you the option to choose a library or start a new one...you will choose one...and then just navigate to the correct itunes library thru the finder...

personally i dont know much about NFTS...but i would think this could work

and you will have a hard drive that is completely compatible with Mac OS X and you dont have to use the 3rd party app to write to it...and everything should stay the same...

your itunes files have the data either embedded into the file or they are in the itunes plist/database file

make sure you name the drive the same name so you dont have to find each of your songs when you return to playing them in itunes

does anyone have an easier option for this???

March 13 2009 at 12:41 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Pierce

Actually, drag and drop was my first approach, but the transfer would always encounter an error during progress and force the transfer to stop; I'd never be able to find where it stopped because I'm transferring so many files and folders.

So then I decided maybe the command line would help. I used a good ol cp command in a Terminal window to get the contents of my external HD to a folder on my iMac desktop, but I found somehow it wasn't transferring complete files. I did a comparison and found some single files would be perhaps 4GB on the external HDD, but only 376MB as a copy on my desktop - I'm not terribly sure why. I thought about cloning the drive, but I believe that will bring the file system along with it, which I don't want. I'm a bit stumped at this point.

March 13 2009 at 1:12 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Jean MacDonald

Steve: Jean from SmileOnMyMac here. I'm sorry to hear about your disaster. That is certainly not the way PDFpen is intended to work. It's possible your PDF source document is somewhat off-spec. We'd definitely like to investigate. Please feel free to contact us at support@pdfpen.com. Thanks!

March 12 2009 at 3:53 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

adam

Hi,

I have a MacBook (Intel Core 2 Duo, Mac OS X 10.5) and a Vista home PC. Both have a copy of iTunes, activated to the same account. What I'm looking for is a free (or very cheap) solution that works on both, to sync my library over the network, automatically copying across everything / asking me what to do with duplicates and such. A Google with a few well choosen phrases fails to bring anything up, so was wandering if you have heard of anything.

Adam

March 12 2009 at 1:59 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Sebastian

I've got another question. I just bought a 1TB MyBook Studio, fomatted 100GB for Time Machine, the other 850ish in FAT32 for files. I am however quite annoyed by the upper case title of it, I always associate it with screaming of some sort, which I don't like.
I know that FAT32 doesn't support lower case characters, but Windows seems to know some sort of way to do it, because when I plug it into a Windows computer (whole point of it being FAT32; Windows can't even read HFS) I can rename it to have lower case characters.
So is there a way I can tell OSX to maybe just display the first character of each word upper and the rest lower case? Would be only visible on my computer of course, but as long as I don't have a hard drive screaming at ME all the time, I don't care.

March 12 2009 at 11:35 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

matteorampazzi

Question:

I work in a small office, Mac-only. No server, only 2 TimeCapsules and 8 Macs (2 MacPro PPC, 3 iMac C2D, 1 MacMini (C2D), 1 MBP (C2D), 1 MB (C2D)). All on 10.5.6.

We have:
1 HP plotter (LAN)
1 Panasonic WorKio (LAN)
1 Brother Printer (LAN)
1 Minolta (attached to iMac and shared to the rest).

I would like, at least for the Plotter and the Panasonic, to be able to track prints and assign a number on them, so that we can bill to customers the prints (architect office, so a lot of paper at times).

I would love to have a solution which is "client only" and doesn't need a central management. I didn't find anything and thought I would create an Excel file for each person to fill before printing (small office = people who still trust each others).
But on the other hand I would very much favour a sistem that prompts to enter a code and then does it on it's own.

It is especially important for plotter and printing on the Workio, as most of our job is done on these machines.

Panasonic, AFAIK, doesn't offer a solution for Mac and HP doesn't recognize users and/or jobs when printing from ArchiCAD 12 (which we use)