Building a Hackintosh

Just a quick note to say that I've successfully built a Hackintosh. The full report can be found here.

QuickLook for Markdown Documents

I'm a huge fan of the Markdown simplified markup language and try to use it for most of my prose. There are lots of tools out in the world to transform Markdown into other formats: Markdown itself does HTML, but you can also get a tool like Pandoc with a huge number of output formats for Markdown.

However, one piece I was missing is the ability to "Quick Look" Markdown documents within Finder. Be default, it shows the generic "I'm a file" icon when you do Quick Look, and I would like either just the text or the rendered results.

Found it! QLMarkdown is a utility that you add to your ~/Library/QuickLook folder and gives you the rendered rich output from your markdown source document (and it works with either the ".md" or ".markdown" extensions). One more piece of the puzzle solved.

Tidying up Finder's "Open With" menu

Many applications can open common file types such as HTML or JPG, and they all, conveniently, get an entry in Finder's "Open With" contextual menu. Under many circumstances this is even true for applications that are installed in VMware Fusion or Parallel Desktop. Unfortunately, when you delete these applications, or you decide that you don't want applications in virtual machines to open files, the context menu items remain. In my case some context menus became cluttered to the point of being unusable.

This is such an obvious problem that I expected to find an answer using Google straight away. Maybe my search skills failed me but it took me a good while to find the right answer for Leopard, which is why I want to share it here.

There is this article on Lifehacker. However, the article itself has it wrong; the real solution is in a response by "mtts" halfway down the page, and even then the command doesn't work as described on Leopard. What did the trick for me, on Leopard, was the following command:

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user

There is no manpage for lsregister but invoking it without any arguments will display some help.

Mac Boot Mysteries

This is long, digressive story about diagnosing a hardware problem on a Mac; if you dislike such stories, feel free to leave now.

About a week ago, my wife Candy complains to me that her Mac won't boot up. This is my hand-me-down Mac (we have a new policy in our house: Candy gets my hand-me-down computers, and I get her hand-me-down cameras), which means that it's about 2 years old, but it has a relatively new hard drive that I installed last November. A long time ago, I had set the startup option to always run in Verbose startup mode (on demand by holding COMMAND-V upon startup, or permanent by issuing the following command:

sudo nvram boot-args="-v"

Anyway, I could see from the startup porn that she was having a kernel panic with 2 likely suspects: the fan control daemon and something about Cisco VPN. Now, Candy doesn't have a Cisco VPN, but given that this was my hand-me-down machine, that explains why some of that stuff is there. Candy hadn't installed anything in the last week or so, leading me to think that one of these two was the culprit. She had been complaining that her machine was getting slower and slower, including things like window resizing, which had me puzzled. Perhaps a dying fan was causing the processor to overheat and thus slow down?

I tried safe boot (no joy), and at this point I suspect the fan. I'm certainly not afraid to crack open a Mac (with proper respect), but replacing a fan isn't high on my list of fun things to do, so we made an appointment at the Genius bar. To Candy's credit, she had a SuperDuper! backup that was just a couple of days old, so virtually everything was safe.

We went to the genius bar where the GenX slacker (this is a compliment) booted the Mac from an external drive. I hadn't tried this (even though I have several bootable drives laying around) because I was fixated on the fan problem. After booting it up, his suspicion now lies with the VPN stuff, and I reluctantly concur (especially after he ran some fan diagnostics). Now, though, the question remains: why did this problem suddenly occur? What was his (depressing) advice to fix this problem? Reinstall Leopard and all your applications. What?!? Is this a freakin' Windows machine? I couldn't believe that was real Genius advice. I've never yet had to do a ground-up reinstall of everything, but if that's the only way...hmmmm. He was very knowledgeable, and obviously he doesn't tread in the realm of VPN stuff. He also correctly pointed out that a bad fan shouldn't cause slowness: redrawing windows is mostly handled by the GPU on the Mac. The slowness was as far as I can tell a red herring.

When I got home, the first thing I did was boot Mac OS X from an external drive and get a real SuperDuper! snapshot, getting the real current snapshot. Once I have that, I can play. Candy has already agreed to the pain and degradation of reinstalling everything, but I have to think there's a better way. Then, I had a brain storm: I took the SuperDuper! snapshot I just made and booted the machine from the external drive. Success! That suggests that some part of the internal hard drive that houses the VPN stuff has somehow gotten corrupted, but still allows it to boot using the same image from an external drive. Because I have the SuperDuper! safety net, I decided on an experiment. I reformatted the internal hard drive and ran Drive Genius on it to scan for bad sectors. Nothing of note came from that, but then I overlaid my most recent SuperDuper! snapshot back onto the internal drive.

Success! The internal drive now boots, and everything appears back to normal. I'm guessing that my bad sector theory was correct.

Lessons:

• Don't reinstall everything! My record is still clean on that account: I have never had to do that on a Mac yet (and it was a once-a-year chore on Windows because of bit rot).


• Always have good backups. This would have been a tragedy rather than a comedy if Candy hadn't been using SuperDuper!. It has yet to let me down, and it has saved my bacon on several occasions.


• I immediately latched onto the fan because it seemed to support other observed phenomena. I should have booted it myself from an external drive and run Drive Genius, but I thought I had it figured out.


• Stop and think. It was a good thing that we had dinner plans with a neighbor when we got back from the genius bar. It was over dinner that I had the idea of just overlaying the snapshot again. If I had started on it as soon as we got back, I would have been creating a lot of movement without a lot of forward progress. Sitting and thinking about it opened my mind to alternative options.


• SuperDuper! rocks. I can't imagine life without it.

SmartSleep Preference Pane

A while back, Erik blogged about the Unsafe Sleep setting for Macs, allowing for ultra-quick sleep and wake up. The only two problems: 1) it takes a little terminal magic to set new defaults for your machine and 2) you can't change the battery when the machine is only asleep (thus, "unsafe" sleep).

Now that's changed with the SmartSleep preference pane. It allows you to set all the possible settings plus a new one. From the preference pane itself:

• smart sleep: sleep if battery charge is above the sleep & hibernate level. Hibernates only when battery charge is below 5% or less than 5 minutes.
• sleep: machine will go to sleep only (saves state in RAM only, battery keeps RAM contents)
• sleep & hibernate: machine sleeps and hibernates. (default)
• hibernate only machine will go to hibernate only. (saves state on disk, battery will not be used)

The first one is new: it dynamically allows the machine to do "unsafe sleep" until the battery gets low, then switch to "sleep + hibernate", allowing changing the battery while the machine is asleep. Very nice: best of both worlds.

MenuMeters & Text

Lots of OS X geeks I know use Menu Meters to monitor the goings on for their machines. But here's a nuance that remembered last week, watching one of my colleagues give a presentation. I can't remember exactly where I heard (overheard?) this, but apparently it's quite relatively expensive to paint letters and numbers on the task area of the menu bar as opposed to graphics. Not sure why, and it may just be a rumor, but in any case, I tend to keep the graphical version of the CPU meters up, not the numeric one, just in case.

Open in Terminal (4 Ways)

One of the cool little helpers I talk about in The Productive Programmer is "Command Prompt Here" or "Bash Here": little context menu items for Windows that allow you to select a folder in Explorer, right click, and open a command prompt (or bash shell, if you are using Cygwin) at that location. Someone recently asked me if you can do this on the Mac, and it turns out you can, in a surprisingly large number of ways.

The first way leverages Automator to create a little script that makes an Automator plug-in for Finder. This trick appears here. The cool thing about this tip is the stuff it teaches about building Finder extension via Automator, which is a pretty cool subject unto itself. However, the bad thing about the final solution proffered by this tip is the location where the context menu appears: 2 levels down in the right-click menu, under Automator. Too much clicking.

Not being satisfied with the above, I found an alternative, which creates a toolbar icon at the top of Finder that opens the current selected folder (or the folder of the currently selected file) when you click on it. This trick appears here. The only downside of this version is the number of windows it spawns: one per request, instead of opening new tabs (it was created before Terminal supported tabs in Leopard). So, not to be outdone, the author describes the steps to upgrade it to tabbed terminal in Leopard here. One gotcha exists in his instructions: he says to replace the original script with the one found on this page, but I assumed you could do that with a text editor. It turns out that you need to use the script editor that launches when you double-click the main.scpt file. Otherwise, it works like a charm.

The reason I haven't pursued this before on the Mac? I generally use PathFinder, which includes not only a context menu for "Open in Terminal", it also has an embedded Terminal, which opens in the current folder. Highly recommended, but it you don't want to spend the money, you can get the same effect by harvesting the links in this entry.