mac | The Webernets

Speed Up Your Mac – Quick Easy way to make Mac OS X Lion/Mountain Lion faster

August 21, 2012May 3, 2013 The Webernets3 Comments

I am sure there are dozens of methods, and dozens of programs and apps that do wonderful things for your Mac computer running OS X Lion/Mountain Lion, but in my opinion, the folks at Apple have built in the best, quickest, and easiest way to give your Apple computer a boost. It’s called “Repair Permissions”.

A few years ago I was involved heavily in editing high def video for a motorsport operation, and it never ceased to amaze me how much quicker and happier my mac pro was after a permissions repair.

**NOTE** – It can take a while for this operation to complete, so make sure you have plenty of down time before tying up your computer with this procedure.

The good thing about OS X Lion/Mountain Lion is that you don’t have to go and find your install disk to do this anymore (Like you used to have to do with Snow Leopard, Leopard and Tiger). When you installed Lion/Mountain Lion, it created a rescue partition for you, and to access this partition, and speed up your mac, all you gotta do is hold down your “ALT” key, and turn your mac on! Once you here the “BONG” sound, you will see this:

When your Mac boots, it selects the regular hard drive automatically. But when you hold down the ALT key, your telling your Mac that you want to see what other devices you can boot. Lion/Mountain Lion creates a very small “Virtual” hard drive, that you can boot into instead of your normal hard drive and operating system, that lets you perform maintenance operations. To restore your permissions, click the arrow for “Recovery HD”. Your computer will boot from this second partition, leaving your main partition unmounted, so you can perform maintenance.

Once your computer has booted up from the Recovery Hard Disk you will see Utilities Window.

To get started, select the “Disk Utility” option, then click continue in the bottom right corner. The Disk Utility will now open.

Select/Highlight your main hard drive partition (the one you want to speed up) in the left side of the window, and click “First Aid” to get to the repair window. Here you can verify/repair the condition of the disk. I usually just hit “Repair Disk” and let it do its thing. This can take a bit of time, so go put the coffee on!

You will see all kinds of activity, but the only thing you need to worry about is that green text that says the disk is ok, and that the repair is complete. The next step is to click “Repair Permissions”. Again, this may take some time, but when it is complete it will tell you down the bottom of the window in bold font.

When its done, Quit out of Disk Utility using the “Disk Utility” menu bar option.

Then Quit out of the Utilities Window from the Mac OS X Utilities menu bar option.

The final window/step is to click “Restart” from the “Choose Start Up Disk” Window. As we didnt permanently change the start up disk, there is no need to change any other parameters here, just click Restart.

Your computer will now restart (It may take a little longer than normal to do so – so don’t worry if it does!) and hopefully you will notice a pleasant increase in performance!

If you want to go one step further and clean your caches and log files, rebuild indexes and execute your Macs built in maintenance scripts, check out my follow on article about using the free application called ONYX!

How to Save your OS X Mavericks, Mountain Lion and Lion Install Program and make a Install/Boot DVD or USB key

August 18, 2012October 26, 2013 The Webernets3 Comments

UPDATE – **I HAVE TESTED THIS METHOD WITH OS X MAVERICKS AND IT WORKS GREAT!**

This tutorial was written using Mountain Lion as an example, but it works for Mavericks as well – just follow the same process

Just like OS X Lion, it is really important to save your OS X Mountain Lion and Mavericks “Install File” BEFORE you install it. Without it, you can not make an install disk, and it is deleted automatically once you install your new operating system.

Once you have purchased Mountain Lion or Mavericks, your purchase/price button will turn into a “downloading” button.

A short time after, your launchpad may spring open and show you the downloads progress.

You can leave it open and watch the progress if you want. Close it up when your finished watching, or when the file has completely downloaded.

**CRITICAL** – When the file has finished downloading, a window will pop up and ask you if you want to go ahead and install the new software. QUIT THE INSTALLER IMMEDIATELY! This can be done by clicking the file menu and selecting the “Quit” option.

Don’t worry, you are not going to loose the program you just bought, you are just telling your computer that you want to install later. Once you have closed out of the installer, open a new finder window, then open your “Applications” folder. Inside this folder you will see your OS X Mountain Lion or Mavericks Install File.

Right click and “Copy” the installer file, then “Paste” it onto your desktop.

Once the file finishes copying to the desktop, you can go back into your applications folder and double click and run the installer, if you are ready to install your update.

If you want to make a bootable install DVD disk or a USB Key, the easiest way to do this is with Disk Maker X (Formerly called Lion Disk Maker).

Go to the Disk Maker X web site HERE and download the latest version of the program. Once downloaded, unzip and run the program.

TO MAKE A DVD DISK:

With Disk Maker X open, select Mountain Lion to make a Mountain Lion DVD, Or Mavericks to make a Mavericks Install DVD.

Once you select your Operating System, the program will try to locate the install program automatically. It doesn’t matter if it uses the one in your Applications folder, or the one on your desktop. In my case, it found the one on my desktop.

The next step is to tell Disk Maker X if you want to make a DVD or a USB key. Keep in mind, if you want to make a DVD you will need a 8.5gb Dual Layer DVD, and a Dual Layer DVD Burner, as the installer will not fit on a single layer 4.7gb DVD.

Click “Burn A DVD”. Disk Maker X will ask you to select your Burner.

You will now be prompted to insert a disk, and begin the burning process.

TO MAKE A USB KEY:

With Disk Maker X open, select Mountain Lion to make a Mountain Lion USB or Mavericks to make a Mavericks install USB key.

Once you select your operating system, the program will try to locate the install program automatically. It doesn’t matter if it uses the one in your Applications folder, or the one on your desktop. In my case, it found the one on my desktop.

The next step is to tell Disk Maker X if you want to make a DVD or a USB key. Keep in mind, if you want to make a USB Key you will need a 8gb thumb drive, due to the size of the installer. Click “Create a Boot Disk”.

Next, Disk Maker X will ask you about your Thumb Drive. In keeping with the recommendations of the makers of the program, we will select “8gb USB Thumb Drive”.

(My understanding is, that this option will completely erase the entire USB drive, and ALL existing data will be over-written. If you have a larger drive, which is divided up into partitions, and you do not want to erase the whole drive, use the “Another kind of disk” option. IF this is incorrect, or there is also another reason, please reply in comments.)

You will now be asked to confirm your drive selection, and its location.

One last warning! Your thumb drive will now be erased COMPLETELY!

Disk Maker X will now begin crunching files to make your USB Installer.

During this process, particularly towards the end of the process, a lot of new windows and “Get Info” dialogues will pop up, and disappear. This is normal. This is just your computer acknowledging the creation and mounting of new drives and volumes.

Once it is all completed, you will hear Homer yelling “WooHoo!” and see your new USB drive ready to go!

Make and print a Directory Listing or Index of all files in a folder in Mac OS X

July 4, 2012 The Webernets1 Comment

Lately I have been backing up a lot of files to DVD for archiving. I was looking for a quick easy way to print out a list of all of the files on each disk that I could slip into the jewel case as well, so I know what is on it at a glance.

The simplest solution I could find was to open the folder in the finder, select all with command A, then command C to copy. Now that all of the files are in memory, open TextEdit and create a new text file. To paste in a “Listing” of the file names only, press command-option-shift and then V. You can now save and/or print if required.

This method works well so long as all of the files are in the same folder. If you want to print out a listing from a folder that has sub-folders, you will only get the sub-folders names, it will not display the names of the files in the sub-folders.

Do you know of a better method? Is there a program you know of that will do this better?

3D Video for Beginners Part 2 – Watching your 3D Video on Mac, Windows or Linux with BINO

May 16, 2012 The Webernets5 Comments

So now you have created your 3D video file, its time to watch it back and see how it looks. If you try to open it using Quicktime or Windows Media Player, you will see your two camera feeds simultaneously in “Side by Side” format.

In order to see the 3D effect, and watch your video in 3D you will need to use a player that is capable of handling Stereoscopic Video files. There are quiet a few out there, but my Favorite is called BINO. I like it because it is really easy to use, can play your side by side video file back in lots of different flavors of 3D (like red/cyan, amber/blue, green magenta), there are versions for Windows, Mac and Linux/Unix, and the best part, its completely free!

You can download BINO from the bino3d.org web site HERE.

Once you have downloaded, extracted and installed BINO you can launch it, and from the file menu select your Side By Side video file, and the player will appear. You now need to set only two parameters, you need to tell BINO what kind of file it is you want to play, and how you want it played back.

In the “Input” drop down menu, select “Left/Right Half Width”, and in the “Output” drop down menu, select the display method that corresponds to the 3D Glasses you will be using to watch the video. I have the ones with the Red and Blue lenses, so I use Red/Cyan High Quality mode. Now, just push play and see how you did.

You can make your video go full screen by double clicking the playing video. Double clicking on it again takes you back to window mode.

Easily Watch or Fix Aspect Ratio Problems in MPEG Video with MPEG Streamclip on Windows and Mac

May 9, 2012May 11, 2012 The Webernets0 comment

Earlier this week one of my favorite movies “The Scorpion King” was on TV, and as I recently bought a new digital set top box with USB recording capabilities, I thought I would give it a try. I remember when I saw The Scorpion King at the movies it was in a very widescreen aspect ratio, and it looked great! But, as soon as it started on Sunday night, I could tell something was not right. Rock Johnson looked more like a character from Avatar than the WWF! He seemed over 10 feet tall and as skinny as a broom handle, which as we all know, isn’t the case!

My suspicion is that someone at the TV station got lazy, or maybe a setting in my set top box was wrong, but the bottom line is I have a 2+ gigabit video file of one of my favorite movies, and it is virtually unwatchable because the aspect ratio is way off.

Thankfully, there is a nice easy way to straighten things out. Now, If I intended to watch the video file on my computer, I would use VideoLAN’s VLC Player, because it’s free, it plays practically everything, and it has nice built in feature’s that amongst dozens of other tricks, will adjust your movies aspect ratio on the fly, so no re-encoding is required.

VLC Player falls into my “I can’t Believe it’s free” category. No matter what OS your running, they have a player for you that will knock your socks off. But if you want to watch that distorted video file on something like a WDTV, or plug a USB key into your flat screen TV, your gonna have to re-encode it and repair the problems.

Luckily, my set top box records in MP4 format, so my tall and skinny video file will drop straight into a really cool, and again FREE program, called MPEG Streamclip, which is what I am going to use to fix my aspect ratio problem in my video file.

Thankfully, MPEG Stream not only fixes tall and skinny video’s, but short fat ones too 🙂

To get started, if you don’t have it already, get your free copy of MPEG Stream clip right HERE! You can do a bunch of cool stuff with it, it’s free, so there is no reason not to have it in your video tool kit! Once your installed, FIRE IT UP!

Once the main window is open, drag your wonky video clip into it, and you will see a preview window.

To begin reshaping, open the file menu and select “Export to MPEG-4”, or if you want to cross encode to another format, you can choose it here instead.

Once you have selected your preferred export format, a new window will pop up where you can adjust your settings, and de-distort your movie.

As you can see from the above capture, my video was recorded in 720px wide by 400px high, so I am now thinking I really do need to go and take a look at the default settings on my set top box. To start repairing the problem, I clicked “Other”, left the width at 720px, and started to play with the vertical height. After I changed the setting, I clicked “Preview” to see if my changes made the aspect ratio better.

A new window popped up and the movie started to preview, and I noticed a secondary window which looked like it had already begun encoding, but this doesn’t appear to be the case. It seems to me that it is just encoding your preview while you are watching it, but its not the final pass.

If the preview looks good, or even if it doesn’t, click the stop button after you have assessed your changes. If you want to re-adjust your settings, you can go back and do so, or if you are happy with your changes, go ahead and click “Make MP4” in the bottom right hand corner, and give your FIXED video a new unique name.

Like most video encoding, it will take some time to process the file and apply your changes. But when it’s done, everything will look like it should again.

Make a Mac OSX Lion Virtual Machine in Mac OSX Lion

May 5, 2012May 5, 2012 The Webernets0 comment

A OSX Lion Virtual Machine running on OSX Lion I hear you cry? Why?

Much like Windows (but not quiet so bad) Mac OSX creates support files for most program you install. Even though a lot of programs you download seem like a self contained package, and if you don’t like it, you just trash it and its gone, that isn’t really the case. Like Windows, your mac has a large amount of hidden files, and new ones are created with most programs you run. Things like preferences files, registration data, and a swag of other stuff that hangs around after the main app file has been deleted.

(If you are interested in viewing this sort of stuff, and easy way to get started is to Download Tinker Tool, set it to “Show Hidden Files and Folders”, click “Relaunch Finder” and open up hard drive/library folder. BE WARNED! – You can do a LOT of damage in there, tinker with care!)

If you are like me, and feel uncomfortable with the possibility that clutter and orphaned files may be affecting your systems performance, a great way to test out new programs to see if you want to commit to them long term is to try them in a Mac Virtual Machine. This way, all of the files stay in the Virtual Machine, and you can roll back to a previous snapshot, or even delete it when your done, and your live system hasn’t been modified at all.

It’s pretty easy to install a Mac OSX Lion Virtual Machine in VMWare Fusion………as long as you managed to intercept/save your “Install Mac OS X Lion” Installer app from your Applications folder before you installed OSX Lion on your computer.

The problem here, is that a lot of us didn’t. I certainly didn’t. And for some reason it seems to be automatically deleted once you have installed it. I tried lots of methods that claimed to be able to reclaim the installer app, but none of them really worked. I ended up wiping my hard drive completely, re-installing Snow Leopard, then going back into the App Store and re-downloading the Lion Installer App, and saving it out before I ran it. As I had already purchased it, there was no cost, but it was still a lengthy process.

Once you have the Lion Installer app, open VMWare Fusion and click “Create New” in your virtual machine library to create your new Virtual Machine.

The next Window will ask you for your installation file. As you most likely don’t have OSX Lion on a disc, you will need to point it to your Lion Installer App. Click “Continue Without Disc”

Next, select your installer app’s location from the drop down menu and click continue.

The installer is pretty clever at picking what operating system you want to install, so in most cases you can just click “Continue” once it has correctly identified the installer.

The next window allows you to customize aspects of the new virtual machine. You can assign more memory, more hard drive space, and a lots of other variables by clicking “customize settings”. Again, VMWare is pretty clever about choosing the best settings for you, so feel free to accept them and click “Finish”. You can always change them later if you need to by right clicking your virtual machine in the virtual machine library and selecting “Settings”.

The final step is to name your virtual machine. VMWare Fusion selects a default name based on your operating system, but you will probably want to change it to something a little more meaningful. In my case, I changed it to “Lion Test Area”, as this is where I will be testing software.

And now it begins!

And before too long, your in business! You now have a sand-boxed version of OSX Lion running inside of OSX Lion!

Now, again, if your like me, your probably thinking “Can I use the same technique to run Leopard or Snow Leopard in Lion so I can use my old PPC apps?” At this stage, I am not aware of any simple easy way to make Leopard or Snow Leopard run. I am looking into it though, and if you already know, please let us know!

Enjoy!

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