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Mac OS X – Page 5 – A changelog by Daniel Mettler

Category: Mac OS X

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How to compile Textual (open source IRC client) on Mac OS X

Textual is a heavily modified fork of LimeChat and looks and feels more native and light-weight than most other IRC clients for Mac OS X. Further, it doesn’t seem to have problems with window refreshing as observed with XChat Aqua/Azure (App Store link) and XChat for X11 (installed/compiled using ‘brew install xchat’).

Though Textual is also available in the App Store for 4.99 USD, I wanted to compile it from sources myself.

Here’s how to build Textual from sources (tested on Mac OS X Mountain Lion):

  1. Download and install Xcode 4 from the App Store.
  2. Download/checkout the latest Textual sources from https://github.com/Codeux/Textual
  3. Open the file Main Project (Textual).xcodeproj in Xcode.
  4. In Xcode’s Preferences -> Downloads -> Components, install the Command Line Tools.
  5. In the opened project in Xcode, disable code signing:
    For the target Textual, navigate to the tab Build Settings. In the “Code Signing” section, set “Don’t Code Sign” for “Debug” and “Release”.
  6. On the top left of the Xcode IDE window, select the scheme Textual (Standard Release) -> My Mac 64-bit
  7. Click on the “Run” button to start building the project
  8. The “Textual” app will be built in the subfolder “./Build Results/Release/” of your Textual source directory
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iTerm2 – Mac OS Terminal Replacement

iTerm2, the successor of iTerm, seems to be quite a bit better then the default Mac OS X terminal app:

iTerm2 – Mac OS Terminal Replacement.

If only every Mac OS X app (i.e. Quartz) would also support copy on select, middle button paste and the other X11-like features! [1] Further, I’d love to see a terminal app that disallows pasting (cmd-v) from the keyboard-controlled clipboard completely as this is potentially a very dangerous thing.

[1] Note: It’s possible to emulate X11’s behaviour to some degree using BetterTouchTool. It’s still not the same though as X11 distinguishes between the mouse-controlled buffer and the keyboard-controlled buffer and doesn’t just “paste from the clipboard”. For reference, see:

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Mac OS X Snow Leopard Server: Configuring outgoing SMTP authentication for postfix

More and more ISPs require customers to use the ISP’s own SMTP server for sending mail (to effectively block spam coming from hijacked customer workstations). Or you simply might want to send outgoing mail using your own SMTP mail server somewhere in the Internet, which  should only accept encrypted, authenticated connection requests.

If you’re lucky, you can configure postfix on your Snow Leopard Server (and later) using the supplied ‘Server Admin’ GUI tool and enter your authentication credentials and the name of your (or your ISP’s) SMTP server there. This is explained in the following Youtube video: Using Your ISPs Mail Server in Snow Leopard Server.

In my case, this wasn’t sufficient, i.e. didn’t work and hence I had to use the CLI tool instead (which appears to be buggy, see later). The configuration of outgoing SMTP authentication for postfix on Mac OS X Snow Leopard Server is analogous to my quite old post about configuring SMTP auth for postfix on Linux, only the commands slightly differ.

Here are the commands I had to use:

# serveradmin settings mail:postfix:smtp_sasl_mechanism_filter = "plain"

mail:postfix:smtp_sasl_mechanism_filter = “plain”

# serveradmin settings mail:postfix:smtp_sasl_security_options = "noanonymous"

mail:postfix:smtp_sasl_security_options = “noanonymous”

# serveradmin settings mail:postfix:smtp_use_tls = "yes"

mail:postfix:smtp_use_tls = “1”

 

The last command reveals a bug in the ‘serveradmin’ tool which will prevent postfix from working correctly as the value is set to “1” instead of “yes”! As a workaround, you need to manually set the value to “yes” in /etc/postfix/main.cf:

 

# vi /etc/postfix/main.cf

smtp_use_tls = yes

 

# vi /etc/postfix/sasl/passwd

# cat /etc/postfix/sasl/passwd

smtp.mydomain.com login:password

# postmap hash:/etc/postfix/sasl/passwd

# serveradmin stop mail

mail:state = “STOPPED”

# serveradmin start mail

mail:state = “RUNNING”

Done that, you can test the new settings by composing and sending a message using the ‘mail’ command:

# mail -s "a test message" myaddress@mydomain.com

(enter the body text and finish editing the message by entering a dot on an empty line)

Check the mail queue with

# mailq

Requeue messages that couldn’t be delivered using

# postqueue -f

[Edit 20130401: Fixed some typos, clarified the phrasing, anonymized data]

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Got a Zeppelin Air? Upgrade its firmware now.

All in all, after several months of using it, I can strongly recommend the B & W Zeppelin Air. It’s a truly great iPod/iPhone speaker, filling even larger rooms with quite impressive depths and crisp heights. And in contrast to its competitors (e.g. think of the lousy hardware of the otherwise innovative Sonos speakers – what a pity!), you can see, feel and hear its excellent build quality. It’s been engineered by the guys who equip the famous Abbey Road Studios, supply the audio system for Jaguars and invented extravagant speakers like the Nautilus, after all.

The only thing which wasn’t satisfying so far, is the Zeppelin Air’s buggy default (software) implementation of Airplay, i.e. that the Zeppelin Air lost the Wifi connection after a while in stand-by mode. As I finally found out, all that’s needed to fix this is a firmware upgrade to version 2.00.24 [updated 20120930]. At least, my Zeppelin Air hasn’t ever lost its Wifi connection anymore since. So, if you experience Wifi connectivity issues with your Zeppelin Air (likely), don’t hesitate and upgrade the Zeppelin’s firmware now, although it’s somewhat cumbersome (you need a suitable USB cable, e.g. from an external hard drive or printer, as this isn’t included in spite of the Zeppelin’s upmarket price). It’s well worth it!

Zeppelin Air firmware download at Bowers & Wilkins Support.

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MagicPrefs

MagicPrefs.

“MagicPrefs is a free application for OS X which aims to improve the functionality and configuration options of the Apple Magic Mouse, Magic Trackpad and the MacBook glass trackpad.

It features the ability to bind a variable number of finger clicks, taps, swipes, pinch and other gestures to functions like Middle Click, Hold Down Both Mouse Buttons, Spaces, Expose, Dashboard, Recent Applications, Tweet, Read Tweets, Google Reader etc.”

A must-have.

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Notes on tracing code execution in Django and Python « SaltyCrane Blog

Eliot from the SaltyCrane blog wrote a nice Django management command that allows to easily trace a Django runserver simply by executing ./manage.py trace runserver. Works great!

Django trace tool, django-trace is [..] a Django management command that uses sys.settrace with other Django management commands. https://github.com/saltycrane/django-trace.

via Notes on tracing code execution in Django and Python « SaltyCrane Blog.

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Essential Mac OS X tools: Shades app

Shades is a FREE utility for controlling the brightness of your screen. It runs in the background providing always-available fine-grained control over the brightness of your display via a slick Mac-like interface

via Shades | Software | Charcoal Design.

My new Thunderbolt Apple Display seemed to be rather dark, compared to other displays and what I expected. Thanks to the Shades app I then found out that the display had a factory brightness setting of only about 50% of its maximum brightness. Shades now lets me control the Apple Display’s brightness.

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Essential Mac OS X tools: Scroll Reverser

Scroll Reverser is a free app for Mac OS X that reverses the direction of scrolling. You can use it with OS X Tiger, Leopard and Snow Leopard to make your scrolling match the ‘natural scrolling’ in Lion.

via Scroll Reverser for Mac OS X.

I use it on Mac OS X Lion in order to use natural scrolling with the trackpad of my MacBook Air and unnatural scrolling with the attached mouse.

(kudos to @romeroabelleira for the hint)