When Mac Cultists Attack

I love Mac forums. I love Mac forums for the information they give. I love them for the community they foster. I love them for all sorts of reasons. But most of all, I think I love them for the occasional outbreaks of genuine cultism in response to what can seem the most innocuous question.

You may have observed the same phenomena yourselves. The process invariably starts like this. Some schlep newbie will come along asking innocently, "Hi, can anyone suggest an alternative to Apple's [insert name here].app? Thanks."

Then the first response comes. "I'm curious. What is your problem with Apple's [insert name here].app? Perhaps I can assist you."

At this point, the victim has no idea what they've walked into. "No problems. I'm just 'thinking differently' as they say. :)"

"I don't appreciate the appropriation of that tagline, and I'm sure you are in violation of the board's code of conduct. I will say again, what is your problem with [insert name here].app? Please respond with specifics."

"Sorry, no offense intended," the OP responds. "I'm really just looking for an answer to my original question. I really wasn't looking to get in a debate about the pros and cons of one particular app. Just looking more for a list of alternatives."

"Listen, troll," a moderator jumps in, "if you continue to be unresponsive, I'm gonna shut down this thread. We can't help you if you won't help us."

Another poster chimes in. "[insert name here].app works for me! I love [insert name here].app!"

The OP bravely weathers the storm. "That's great, and I appreciate that others may have different tastes which is why I'm asking for alternatives. So I'll ask any lurkers, do you know of any alternatives to [insert name here].app?"

Another poster expresses their concern. "I have to say, I'm disturbed by your increasingly hostile attitude which is indicative of a borderline personality disorder. Perhaps rather than question the utility of [insert name here].app, you should look within yourself for the answer to what is truly missing in your life. With all humility, I myself have done so when some of Apple's software have come up lacking at first glance, and I'm a much richer person for it. Good luck with your journey."

"Whuh?"

"That's it," the moderator says. "I'm locking down this thread. The OP can go to Yahoo Answers if he wants to keep up this crap. This is a Mac forum. We will not have our community denigrated by trolls who would slap Steve's hand that feeds them. Best wishes."

Some may accuse me of exaggerating, and I will concede that the above is a composite rather than a re-creation of a single thread, but my larger point about cultism stands. And stumbling upon these incidents of insanity is what, in this day and age, makes my day.

Disappearing HFS Plus Partitions After Installing Debian Linux

Let's say you want to dual boot Linux and Mac OS 9 on that relative's shiny old iBook that's been sitting around gathering dust to show her that, no, the technology doesn't control you, you control the technology. Let's also say that Debian's developers don't tell you that installing Debian on a machine with another partition already housing Mac OS 9 will cause said partition to disappear. What happens? Chaos! Mass hysteria! People at each other's throats, civililation as we know it collapsing before our eyes...

Okay, maybe Debian PPC doesn't have enough users for that to happen, but it would've been nice to know that installing Debian on a two partition, dual boot drive would have the above effect ahead of time. It would have saved me a lot of panic and subsequent googling of phrases like "Debian Mac OS nuked" and "Debian ate my Mac OS." I would have also presumably known that the solution is incredibly simple assuming you have your original Mac OS install disks.

The partition doesn't actually disappear, mind you. You can still "see" it when booted into Debian by mounting the partition. But it no longer functions as a boot volume. Not in yaboot. Not even in Open Firmware will it recognize it as a boot volume.

So here's how you fix it. Start up with the Mac OS install disk and, from Drive Setup, update drivers. That's it. Done. I guess the partition program in the Debian installer somehow flutzes up the driver partitions, but updating the drivers solves it. I hope I saved someone out there some time.

OS X Maintenance Voodoo

One of the things I've liked about using Linux on the iBook is that whatever maintenance goes on goes on strictly in the background. Seriously, whatever it's doing to ensure safe and reliable operations, I don't want to be bothered with it. Just do your thing, Mr. (or in the case of the icebook) Ms. Computer, and I'll happily continue surfing/writing/audiophiling with nary a worry or distraction.

Things are different in OS X. At least we're told. Ever since I started using it, I've been informed by people more knowledgable than me that you had to keep your Mac "clean." One of the earliest utilities for this was Cocktail, which ran maintenance scripts to clear out old log files. Now, these scripts were set to run periodically in the background, but because they didn't reliably run on schedule some users felt it necessary to run these manually with apps like Cocktail. 'Cause having log files build up to literally a few megabytes of disk space was an intolerable situation.

As OS X passed from Jaguar to Panther to Tiger to Leopard/Snow Leopard, many other "maintenance" apps appeared on scene, probably most prominatly Onyx. This utility does all the maintenance you could ever want. It runs maintenance scripts, it clears caches, and repairs permissions, etc. And all of it is a complete waste of your time.

That's right. Running maintenance scripts are a waste of your time. Clearing caches are a waste of your time. Repairing permissions, same thing. As a matter of routine "maintenance," these actions not only waste your time in executing them, but in the case of clearing caches, will actually make your computer operate slower. The only reason you should ever clear caches or repair permissions is if something's going wrong, i.e. if you're troubleshooting. And maintenance is not troubleshooting. In fact, I'd even say that repairing permissions and clearing caches are almost always a waste of time in troubleshooting, too. The only surefire troubleshooting method I've found is Google. It's uncanny how no matter what problem I'm encountering, some other user has had the same problem and has written about it in an easy-to-locate search result.

In OS X, there is only one form of routine maintenance you need to be aware of: keep ten percent of your hard drive space free. If your hard drive fills up too much and lacks the space to create a proper-sized swap file, it will lead to major slowdowns. If all your applications start to feel sluggish over time, that's probably the cause.

So free yourselves from your fellow Machead's tyranny of maintenance. Life's too short. In over four years of running the same Tiger install, I haven't done any of that stuff since the early days when I didn't know any better, and it still runs as fast and smooth as the day I got it.

Firefox 4 on PPC

One of the worries of finding an operating system you like and wanting to stick with it is that the great Browser Wars will leave your OS behind. Such as it is with OS X Tiger. Tiger is the last version to support Classic mode. It has all the vital modern technologies. It's not so hard on the GPU. In other words, it's Leopard/Snow Leopard without so much eye candy. And less ugly. And more efficient. And not as buggy. Okay, so you get why I want to stick with Tiger.

However, there was one catch. Over the course of the last year, all the major browsers announced they were ceasing support for Tiger. In fact, I can't think of any browsers that continue to support Tiger, unless you count Camino 2.0.6, which is powered by an old Gecko 1.9.0 engine. Even Camino's alpha 2.1 prerelease uses Gecko 1.9.2, which is the same as Firefox 3.6.x, the final Firefox version to support Tiger. So how long would it be before the current incarnations of Safari, Firefox, Camino, and Opera became hopelessly obsolete and surfing the web becomes what it must be like for iCab users of today, or for Netscape 1.0 users when frames became widely adopted? (If you don't get that last reference, stick your nose back in your touch screen. There's nothing to see here.)

Well, it looks like we'll never have to find out thanks to TenFourFox. It's a fork of Firefox 4, heretofore available only to Leopard/Snow Leopard Intel users, that runs on PPC Macs running Leopard and Tiger. There are some advanced features that won't work because they require Barftel processors, but the new rendering engine is there, as well as HTML 5 and CSS 3 support.

So how does it measure up? I took it for a spin and found it to have a similar feel as 3.6 as far as speed. It's more of a memory hog, but being in beta, that's to be expected. I read one report that repeatedly pressing the back button will cause a crash, and I can confirm that. It also seems to have trouble opening a bookmark when no window is previously open. But other than that, it's stable. There are some GUI changes that I suppose are a matter of taste, but I mostly liked what I saw.

This is a promising start, and maybe I can hold off a few years switching to Linux on my everyday desktop just to find a modern, supported browser.

Update: TenFourFox 4.0 Final is out. Javascript much improved over early betas. This is now my default browser.

Changing Gamma Settings on Your Mac (OS X and Debian)

One of the things about having an older Mac like an iBook or a Sawtooth running a pre-Snow Leopard system is that the default gamma values on the monitor are too bright. I've found this true under both OS X and Debian Linux. Long story short on the Apple side is the default setting of gamma 1.8 on systems before Snow Leopard was a relic from the black and white monitor days of early Macs, and they never bothered changing along with the rest of the computer world till Snow Leopard. As a result, colors on the web and in photos can look too washed out compared with being viewed on Windows computers, which they were likely calibrated from in the first place.

So to fix this and have photos and web pages display in Tiger and Leopard the way they were intended, simply go into System Preferences-->Displays and click the Color tab, then the Calibrate button. It will ask you to adjust a bunch of settings, and when you get to the "Select a target gamma" section, select "2.2 Television Gamma" and then continue through to the end and save. Afterward, you'll find that pictures look less washed out and have more depth, but you may also find that black text on a white background looks a little harder on the eyes. Try it out and see which setting you prefer.

On Debian, I also noticed the dafault gamma values seemed a little too aggressively bright, so--this being Linux--after extensive research I found you can tone it down a bit by editing your xorg.conf file (if you don't have a xorg.conf file by default and need to create one, learn how here). First you want to find the best setting to your eyes. You test this by using the xgamma application in the terminal. For example:

xgamma -gamma 0.9

will reset your gamma settings 1/10th of a point off the default of 1.0, and will slightly darken your screen's gamma output. You can play around with it, entering 1.1, 0.8, etc. until you settle on a setting you like best (I chose 0.9, slightly off the original too-bright default). Then you open your xorg.conf file and, under the section "Monitor," add the line:

Gamma 0.9 #or whatever value you settle on, and with a tab between Gamma and 0.9.

This will keep your settings on restart, and you can confirm it worked by running xgamma again with no arguments, and it will display the current gamma settings.

UPDATED for clarity.

Sound on a Debian iBook

In Debian, one of the things that didn't work out-of-the-box on the iBook G3 was sound. Forensic research reveals that it's all due to one G5 somewhere in Germany many years ago that went on the fritz when loading the PPC sound module "snd-powermac" during testing (At least this is what I remember from scanning the many forum threads and mailing lists on the subject. But I may have been stoned.). So it wasn't activated by default. This isn't a problem for people with newer PPC machines which use the "snd-aoa" module (Apparently. Again, stoned.), but for people with older Power Macs and 'Books that require the snd-powermac module, you can see how this will cause difficulties.

Luckily it's easy to load the module yourself. First open a terminal emulator and enter:

modprobe snd-powermac

Now test the sound on your Mac. An easy way is to backspace at the terminal prompt--you should hear beeps.

If you hear nothing, then I can't help you. But if you hear sound and you want to keep it functioning on reboot, simply add the line

snd-powermac

to /etc/modules and you're all set.

Also, if you're working from a minimal install, be sure you've installed the packages alsa-base and alsa-utils. Alsa is the sound driver, and it's of some importance to the above.

Speed Up Celestia

If you haven't used Celestia, the free open source astronomy simulation, you're definitely missing out. Not only can you fly all around the solar system and beyond, you can also change the dates and view the universe at any time in the past or future. Wanna see Halley's Comet but you're worried you won't make it to 2061 for its next arrival? Fire up Celestia and move forward to the date in question and see its tail flare in the night sky just as it would in the future.

However, Celestia is very mod-dependent with add-ons for planets, moons and nebulae, etc., which greatly enhance the experience and also greatly add to the system load. There's one tweak, though, you can do which can speed up certain add-ons. Say for example you install a Jupiter add-on that looks fantastic but slows your frame rates to a crawl. Well, if the add-on is a .jpg file, you're in luck. Try converting the .jpg to a .png file and you may find that your frame rates go back up to a non-stuttering rate. This may have something to do with the .png format being uncompressed and therefore less processor-intensive in rendering, making for a much smoother animation.

Either that or my computer's messing with me. And judging by previous behavior, I don't preclude that possibility for a second.

Improve Ad Blocking in Camino Browser

The ad blocking that comes with Camino out of the box is already pretty good. It's configured through a .css file, but the problem is, as set up, it's not customizable. So what do you do if you're satisfied with Camino's ad blocking except for that one obnoxious (or worse) banner ad that it fails to catch? What do you do if your OCD won't let you move on with your life and say, "Hey, it's just a banner ad. Forget about it"?

Well, it turns out there's a way to make Camino's ad blocking customizable with a simple tweek. The .css file that governs ad blocking is actually in the package contents of the .app folder. So first, uncheck "Block web advertising" in Camino preferences and quit Camino. Then control or right-click on Camino.app in your Applications folder and choose "Show Package Contents" from the menu. Then double click on the "Contents" folder, then the "Resources" folder where you will find the file ad_blocking.css. Move this to ~/Library/Application Support/Camino/chrome and rename it to userContent.css. Now you're all set to start customizing ad blocking by opening the file in a text editor and adding new rules.

For example, if you see an image ad you want to block, find the section in the .css file where the lines start with "img" and add the domain from whence the hell spawn arises. Like if you see a banner and find by right clicking on it and choosing "View Image" that it originates from www.ad-douches.com, you add a new line to the "img" section like img[src*="www.ad-douches.com"], (don't leave out the comma at the end). Now all images from said domain will be blocked.

And that's just the beginning of it. There are more tips on customizing .css files here at Mozilla.org.

This same method also works in Firefox. You can download a popular .css file at www.floppymoose.com, but I think the one that comes with Camino is more comprehensive and up-to-date.

A Couple of Linux Speed Tweaks

Here are a couple of quick things you can do to speed up your Linux system. First, add "noatime" to your fstab file by typing sudo nano /etc/fstab and in your root directory line (and home directory if you have them separate), under options add the noatime option with a comma like this (from my Debian fstab file):

errors=remount-ro,noatime

And no spaces between the commas. This will greatly reduce the writes to your hard drive as your system will no longer write file access times to disk (not needed for the typical user).

Another quick change is to switch your display's color depth from 24 to 16 (millions of colors to thousands). To my eyes I could never tell the difference on a laptop, so I just opened my /etc/X11/xorg.conf file as root and under Section "Screen" I added a tab space followed by DefaultDepth 16 or if you already have a line for it, just change the 24 to 16.

Using glxgears, the frames per second on my Mom's iBook went from 340 to 550 after the change. Not bad for a few seconds work (and a few hours research).