MAC tips and tricks

OS X Mavericks has proved once again that Apple not only cares about the Mac — it cares about making the best operating system in the world. Mavericks includes a ton of updates and tweaks that bring the beloved Mac OS one step closer to perfection. While many of the changes are under the hood, Apple also included some visible alterations and features that we’ll cover in this article. So get your boards ready, because we’re going surfing at Mavericks with 70 tips and tricks that you can apply to daily use to make your Mac even better.

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70 Mavericks Tips and Tricks

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  3. Purchasing iBooks
  With Mavericks, iBooks has finally come to the Mac. In addition to viewing your purchased iBooks, you can also purchase new books right from your Mac and have them sync between your iOS devices. Simply open the new iBooks app, and select the iBooks Store button in the upper-left-hand corner of the window (or press Shift + Command + H). Peruse the iBooks Store, and purchase books with the same ease as the iTunes Store.

Airport Utility 6.0 WDS broken?

My WDS setup (a wireless daisy-chain to extend the range of my WiFi network) stopped working with the Airport Utility 6.0 update. Airport Utility 6.0 only has options to "Create a Wireless Network" and "Extend a Wireless Network", and my 3-node daisy chain was no longer working, however many times I tried resetting and restarting.



Finally, I found that Airport Utility 5.6 still has the manual WDS option, hidden from view. To configure an Airport for your WDS network in Airport Utility 5.6, open (double-click) the base station(s) you want to configure, select the Airport icon (top left) and click on the "wireless" tab. Now, while holding down the option key, select "Participate in a WDS network" Wireless Mode (this option only appears when you hold down the option key).



A "WDS" tab now appears, and you can follow Apple's instructions for setting up a WDS (if you haven't done this before, read these first).

SPSS 17 on Snow Leopard

Follow the suggestions at the this link � but then also create a symbolic link CurrentJDK -> 1.5 in directory /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions


By running sudo rm CurrentJDK, then sudo ln -s 1.5 CurrentJDK


Clearly this leaves your Java installation broken for anything requiring 1.6!

Python and UTF-8 on OSX: UnicodeEncodeError

an acute problem

UnicodeEncodeError:
'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe9'


I'm on a Mac Air with the latest Snow Leopard (10.6.2). I'm using Python 2.6.4 with unicode strings. I can't print appliqu� !?

I tried adding

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

at the head of my Python script, but I still get this complaint.

Solution

The encoding used for standard input, output, and standard error can be specified by setting the PYTHONIOENCODING environment variable before running the interpreter.

The value should be a string in the form <encoding> or <encoding>:<errorhandler>. The encoding part specifies the encoding�s name, e.g. utf-8 or latin-1; the optional errorhandler part specifies what to do with characters that can�t be handled by the encoding, and should be one of �error�, �ignore�, or �replace�.

export PYTHONIOENCODING=utf-8

does the trick.

� or you could just add this setting to your environment file: ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist

MacPorts on Snow

MacPorts on Ice?

the move from Leopard to Snow Leopard can be slippery

... emacs-app won't compile; different versions of python fall over each other; NLTK won't build ...
Here are some tips others have found helpful:

try

% sudo port selfupdate
% port installed
% sudo port uninstall installed

sudo port selfupdate

brings your MacPorts installation up to date. If this fails you should just start over

port installed

shows you what you currently have installed.

Much of what you see you won't recognise as this also lists the
prerequisites installed to support the things you asked for explicitly.

sudo port uninstall installed

removes all your installed ports

or just start over

I had some problems when I moved to snow leopard, so I also removed
all trace of macports

sudo rm -rf /opt/local \
/Applications/MacPorts \
/Applications/DarwinPorts \
/Library/Tcl/macports1.0 \
/Library/Tcl/darwinports1.0 \
/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.macports.* \
/Library/StartupItems/DarwinPortsStartup \
/Library/Receipts/MacPorts*.pkg \
/Library/Receipts/DarwinPorts*.pkg \
~/.macports

then reinstall MacPorts

use the Snow Leopard MacPorts disk image

then do

% sudo port selfupdate

check

which ports are available for snow-leopard? before you decide which ports to install.

% sudo port install  <????>

sudo port install <????>

will install whatever you specify
<????> should be a space-
separated list of port names,
with no <   >

There is a problem with emacs-app—and we can't work without emacs...

install emacs-app

To install emacs-app, first download
emacs-app-Portfile-snow-leopard.patch

and

emacs-23.1-snow-leopard.patch

% sudo port clean emacs-app
% sudo port install emacs-app
% cd $(port dir emacs-app)
% sudo patch -p0 < ~/Downloads/emacs-app-Portfile-snow-leopard.patch
% sudo cp ~/Downloads/emacs-23.1-snow-leopard.patch ./files/
% sudo port -D . install

Works for me, but your mileage may vary ....