Mac | The Webernets

Bringing back the Icon Size Slider in OSX Lion

August 12, 2011August 12, 2011 The Webernets21 Comments

Being a web designer, graphic artist, and a photographer, well you could say I use my mac to deal with images quiet a lot. I estimate that in my “Resources” folder on my server (made up of stock photos and graphics) and my own photograph collection, I have around 100,000 images. When I need to find a texture, or a stock photo to suit a specific purpose, I may need to browse through a folder with up to a 1000 images in it. The great thing about having a 30″ monitor is that you can open the folder up, fill the screen and see a lot of the files quickly. My FAVORITE thing in Snow Leopard was the icon size slider. Just by dragging the slider located at the bottom right of every folder view left or right, you could make icons small to fit more on screen for faster browsing, and when you think you found what you need, you could drag it up to enlarge the icon for a closer look. It was GREAT!

One of the first things to piss me of in Lion was that the slider is gone. (Literally, It only took me about 3 mins to notice it missing).

In search of a solution, I found a icon slider in the “View Options”, but this meant each time I need to change icon sizes I had to open another window, and it was a real pain.

Today, I stumbled upon the solution – The slider is still there in Lion (YAY!), but it is just turned off by default (BOO!). To turn it back on, click any blank area on your desktop to select the finder, then open the View menu, slide down and select/check “Show Status Bar”

It seems a bit ambiguous when you are looking for the icon size slider to have to select “Show Status Bar” to bring it back, but at least it is still there!Another cool feature available in this view menu, is to select/check “Show Path Bar”. Once it is checked, you see a “breadcrumbs” style path to where your file is. Very Handy!

Mac OSX Lion broke my Gigabit Network!

August 11, 2011October 22, 2011 The Webernets4 Comments

I have just been trying to shift some large files around my home network, and found the transfer speeds to be down on what I am used to.So I set about finding out what the problem was. I started by opening the system preferences, and clicked the Network icon.In the left side window I had to highlight the connected Ethernet port (the one with the green circle next to it), as my machine has two ports, and the one that wasn’t connected was selected when I opened the window as shown below. Once I selected the connected port, I clicked the Advanced button to open up all the good stuff.

From here, I clicked the Hardware button to see what was going on. As expected, my machine had auto-negotiated a 100MBPS connection, instead of the much faster 1000MBPS Gigabit connection I have come to love so much.So once I changed Automatic, to Manual, and selected 1000MBPS with Full Duplex, flow control, and set my MTU to Jumbo 9000 (Where it has always been), I saved the settings, rebooted and was ready to enjoy my super-fast network!

Huh? What? Why? – Then the expletives came! Why wasn’t my Gigabit connection working? – I went back in and found the Green circle was gone – Replaced with a very unattractive and disheartening RED circle! A desperate flurry of disconnections, reconnection and more expletives occurred. Sitting helplessly on the floor next to my Gigabit switch, head in hands, my attention was drawn to the pretty color cables…….

This post is dedicated to that gorgeous yellow ethernet cable. Oh yellow ethernet cable, how I love you! It turns out that for some reason, Lion doesnt recognise the 33 miles of blue Cat 5(e) cable I have running around the house as Gigabit capable like Snow Leopard used to! I removed the blue cable, and plugged a black CAT 6 cable I had (Which I never really understood why it was different until today) and beautiful Green lights lit up everywhere! In my connections window, on the switch, it was SUCH a relief!

After a bit of Googling, I learned quiet a few people are having this problem, and not all cables are created equal.

The short solution to the problem is change your cables to Cat 6, and for the reason why (if you are interested in the nuts and bolts) can be found in THIS article on Answers.com.

**UPDATE**

22OCT11 – Apple appear to have rectified this issue in the latest update to OSX Lion (10.7.2) – I have been using my Macbook Pro at Gigabit speed using blue cat 5 cable for a few days now. Can anybody else confirm?

Identify unknown Video Codecs

July 27, 2011August 12, 2011 The Webernets0 comment

Have you ever been sent a video, or downloaded a video from the internet that just wont play? Isn’t it frustrating! Most times it is because the video has been encoded with a codec (compressor/decompressor) that is not on your computer, therefore your system doesn’t know how to play the file.

There are a lot of tools out there to help you with this problem, and with only a few of them, you will be able to play 99% of everything you come across easily.

If you have a windows computer, you will need to download “G-Spot” codec identifier.

And for Mac users, “Video Spec” codec identifier is an equivalent.

Once you have downloaded and installed your codec identifier, just drag and drop your pesky video file onto it, and the identifier will analyse it and tell you everything you wanted to know about it, as well as a bunch of stuff you didn’t! Once you have identified the codecs used in creating the file, you can set about searching for it, installing it, and enjoying your video.

As mentioned in my “How to play almost any video with VLC Media Player” post HERE, you can play pretty much anything with VLC Media Player 😉 – But if you don’t want to download a new player, and you are happy using Windows Media Player, or Quicktime, there are some FREE “plugins” which add extended capabilities to your favorite media player. Windows users will definitely want to get your hands on the K-Lite codec pack. There are small, medium, and large packs, but again, 99% of everything you will want to watch will work if you install the “Standard” pack. For Mac owners, Perian is definitely the first plugin you will want. It will allow you to play AVI, XVID, DIVX, FLV and MKV straight away, and for those who want to watch Windows WMV files, Flip For Mac is the solution. If you go to their site, they will push you hard towards their paid version, but there is a free version if you go via Microsoft HERE which will do everything you want it to do.

How to play almost any media file on Windows, Mac or Linux/Unix

July 12, 2011August 12, 2011 The Webernets0 comment

If you have a Windows based computer, and someone sends you a Quicktime video, or if you have a Mac, and you want to watch an AVI or a WMV video, your computer just isn’t going to play it for you without some additional software. Over the years I have experimented with a lot of different programs, but there really is only one program users of all platforms require – Videolans VLC Media Player. It will play just about everything (including DVD’s and Audio Cd’s), regardless of your operating system and installed codecs, it supports playlists for audio and video, supports sending and receiving streams, and has tons of tweaks to allow you to adjust everything from brightness and contrast, to Digital Audio pass-thru for those of us using Dolby Digital/DTS enabled audio cards with Digital Coax or Fibre Optical SPDIF audio outputs. Below are the supported video playback formats:

And the supported audio playback formats:

These are the supported Audio/Video outputs:

There are also some filters that you can apply to the playback.

The main one I find useful is the de-interlace filter, which stops you getting the “stripped” effect when watch fast moving scenes in a interlaced video (like shown below)

VLC Media Player also supports many formats of subtitles:

But the best part about VLC Media Player, it is ABSOLUTELY FREE!

So go and download it now at VideoLAN.org!

Correctly categorise your video files in iTunes with Lostify

July 11, 2011August 12, 2011 The Webernets0 comment

Mac users, Have you ever wondered how you can ad video’s to iTunes and have them show up under the “TV Shows” headings? This is done via the files meta tags. To make adjusting the tags easy, download the free program Lostify from Major Geeks, and as you will see from the screen capture below, there are plenty of options that you can easily adjust to make your files appear where you want them.

The programs official description is:

Lostify is a metadata tagger for MP4 videos. It runs on Mac OS X, and the tags it produces aim to be compatible with iTunes, the iPod video (5G), and Front Row. This means that after you tag a video using Lostify, it will show up in iTunes, iPod and Front Row appropriately as a TV Show, Music Video, etc., with all the episode information, season information, etc. intact.

Windows Users, The best I can find for you is a program called Atomic Parsley. It’s a command line tool, and free, but I don’t think you will be very happy with it. I Will keep searching for an equivalent and post here if/when I find one.

Awesome File Merge Utility on your OSX Disc

June 17, 2011August 12, 2011 The Webernets2 Comments

I wrote yesterday about how there are some really cool things in the Mac Applications-Utility folder, but if you have ever purchased a Mac OSX operating system disc, there are also some pretty cool programs on it that aren’t actually installed by default. The first one that comes to mind is FileMerge. Its a app that allow you to take two files or folders, and compare them side by side, and it will highlight the differences between the two.

I used this recently when Greg Smith of Cyberhawk Designs modded a WordPress template I created and put three widget positions in the header! I just HAD to know how he did it, so I used file merge to compare my original files with the modded files he sent back! Cool Huh!

Greg has since written a tutorial about adding the header widgets, and you can take a look at it on his cool Cyberhawk web site HERE.

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