David Vielmetter

Tag: MAC

  • Macbook pro palm rest discoloration

    A few months ago I noticed that my brand new Macbook Pro had developed some permanent stains on the palm rest. A trip to the Apple store “genius bar” ended in a 45 minute wait session followed by an interrogation about my palm moisture levels. Finally I felt I needed to make the following concession:…

  • My MacBook’s trackpad clicks aren’t registering

    I recently got a 2009 MacBook Pro. I wrote about my experience with it a few months ago (generally positive), but now six months in I’ve got a really annoying problem. My trackpad (or touchpad) doesn’t register some clicks. The most annoying part about it is that the problem isn’t consistent. It just happens sometimes…

  • Serial commuications on a MacBook Pro

    Connecting to a device using via a rs232 using a MacBook is not straight forward, but possible if you have one of the more popular USB-to-Serial adapters. The PL2303 adapter is sold by a number of manufacturers under different model names. Luckily, however, most of them run on the same basic chip for which an…

  • Extend your desktop to a notebook

    Want to add your notebook to an existing display environment? Then Synergy is for you. It’s a cross platform open source application that lets you control a systems mouse and keyboard through the network. Its server/client architecture let you extend the reach of your mouse and keyboard to other computers. Here’s how I configured Synergy…

  • Snow Leopard a few months later

    It’s been about five months since I got my MacBook Pro and I’ve gotten much more comfortable with both the new hardware and operating system. Like most reviews this post will boil down to a list of features I like and ones I don’t. It’ll be a cliché in the sense that this is yet…

  • SATA to USB adapter issues on the Mac

    I had an extra Western Digital SATA notebook hard drive lying around and figured I could use it as a time capsule for my MacBook. So I hopped on eBay and bought a $5 USB enclosure for it. I had no sooner plugged the thing in than my problems began. First I had issues copying…

  • Sorting Folders before files in Finder

    I know that the mac works differently (so everyone keeps telling me!) but I’m sorry, that’s not a valid solution to a host of real annoyances. It’s true that I’m a Windows user and that I’ve got Windows habits (think delete key), but listing folders sorted separately from files in a window just seems something…

  • Grabit on the Mac

    Heard about WineBottler for the Mac? It’s open source software that lets you “bottle up” Windows applications and run them on your Intel Mac OS X. Since there aren’t any good or free usenet downloaders available for the Mac (boo), I tried bottling up Grabit from Shemes and it works! Here’s how:

  • Irfanview on MAC with WineBottler

    There are a lot of Windows Apps I miss on my MacBook Pro. One of them is an awesome free Swiss army knife of image manipulation tools called Irfanview. It lets you batch rename/convert/modify entire directories of images and it’s not bad as an image viewer either. Well, here’s how to get it running on…