The new Safari 4 Beta web browser seems just as fast as the reviews are saying (42x faster than IE7; 3.5x faster than Firefox) and some of the new features are pretty cool: cover flow for bookmarks, CSS animation (now part of WebKit), and even 3D animation using the new HTML5 canvas element. I’m eagerly awaiting a Mac release of the Google Chrome browser to compare with Safari 4. (In the meantime there’s always CrossOver Chromium, a Mac & Linux port of Google Chrome.)
Posts Tagged: OS X
Installing rTorrent on OS X Leopard (10.5) using Fink
I’ve been using Transmission as a BitTorrent client on my MacBook Pro for a while now, but after setting up rTorrent on my Linux server earlier today and seeing how awesome it was, I just had to install it on my laptop as well. I absolutely love text-based applications!
The easiest way to install rTorrent is by using Fink or MacPorts. (Both of these tools allow you to download software that has been ported from Unix/Linux to Mac OS X.) I’ll use Fink since I’m a fan of Debian Linux and Fink uses the Debian dpkg and apt-get package management tools.
Apparently there is no Fink binary available yet for OS X Leopard (10.5), so it must be compiled from source. These directions (which also contain instructions for setting up rTorrent on earlier versions of OS X) helped explain the overall process presented here. Since you’ll need to compile from source, you will need to have Xcode installed (a set of development tools from Apple).
The basic steps for setting up Fink are as follows:
- Download the latest Fink source
- Open up a terminal (Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal.app) and run the following commands
$ cd /path/to/download/directory$ tar xvzf fink-x.xx.x.tar.gz$ cd fink-x.xx.x$ ./bootstrap- You will now be presented with several questions. Answer using the defaults (press Enter) for everything except the question about whether you want to enable the unstable tree; you must answer Yes to this question (see here if you accidentally missed this step).
- When the script finishes, run
/sw/bin/pathsetup.sh- For good measure, run
apt-get update
Great! Now that Fink is installed, installing rTorrent is really easy:
$ fink install rtorrent
You might be notified that a bunch of extra packages need to be installed (there were 46 needed on my system!) so just choose Yes. After the packages have been downloaded and compiled (this might take a while) rTorrent should be on your system and ready to use.
Getting Started with rTorrent
You can launch rTorrent by simply running rtorrent in a Terminal, but before you get started you should look over the man page (man rtorrent) and then set up a configuration file (~/.rtorrent.rc). There are only four lines in my configuration file (check the man page to see what these do):
port_range = 26000-26999
directory = ~/downloads/torrents/
session = ~/downloads/torrents/sessions/
encryption = allow_incoming,try_outgoing,enable_retry
If you’re interested in a lot more options, you might want to grab a copy of the sample .rtorrent.rc config file (why this wasn’t included in the package, I don’t know) and place it in your home directory.
The rTorrent User Guide has information about all the stuff on the screen as well as various commands to navigate the interface.
Using the wonderful screen utility, rTorrent becomes even more powerful on remote systems. I leave rTorrent running on my server and whenever I remotely SSH into the box I can then reattach the screen session that rTorrent is running inside of and instantly have access to it!
Instantly Preview Files in OS X using Quick Look
I discovered this feature as I discover many new things in OS X: entirely by accident. While I had a file on my desktop selected, my wrist accidentally hit the space bar on the keyboard. Instantly a quick preview window popped up giving me a preview of the image:
The feature, known as Quick Look, is one of the more than 300 new features in OS X Leopard (10.5). Quick Look also works on text files, documents, PDF files, and even HTML and PowerPoint. This method of previewing files is so much easier than opening them in their native application! (It’s more than a preview though, since you can also scroll through the pages for multi-page documents.) Closing the preview window is as easy as pressing Esc, or you can simply select another file with the preview open and it will preview the newly selected file.
HOWTO: Remove Google Software Update on Mac OS X
A few days ago I wrote about how evil Google secretly installed software update on my computer. Well, even worse than that, when I choose to continue with the update it gives me this message:
So every other day for the past two weeks I have been prompted to update the Google Talk plugin, and every single time I choose OK this same error message pops up. I had planned to leave the software update installed, but since it’s not working and it’s really starting to bug me, I’m removing it.
According to some discussion on Google Groups, the Google Software Update can only be removed by uninstalling any plugins associated with it (Google Earth, Google Talk, etc). Well that’s not fair. I never installed any plugins to begin with! Time to do it the hacky way.
Hidden away on a page labeled “What is Google Software Update?“, Google provides the single command you need to run to uninstall Google Software Update from your entire system:
sudo /Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate/GoogleSoftwareUpdate.bundle/Contents/Resources/GoogleSoftwareUpdateAgent.app/Contents/Resources/install.py --uninstall
NOTE: Make sure the --uninstall portion of the command actually has two dash characters. It’s possible your browser replaced the two dashes with a single dash character.
If you have something like the Google Gears plugin installed in your browser, you should either uninstall the Gears plugin or use it with caution. The Google Software Update is meant to help keep your Gears plugin (and other plugins) updated with any new security patches. Of course, if the Software Update isn’t working, then it’s really nothing more than an annoying nag screen.
Removing the Update Engine from your Home Directory
Several commenters mentioned the update engine was installed in their home directory. If the update engine was installed on a per-user basis (as opposed to system-wide), then use this command instead:
~/Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate/GoogleSoftwareUpdate.bundle/Contents/Resources/GoogleSoftwareUpdateAgent.app/Contents/Resources/install.py --uninstall
NOTE: Make sure the --uninstall portion of the command actually has two dash characters. It’s possible your browser replaced the two dashes with a single dash character.
Preventing Google Earth from Reinstalling the Update Engine
A commenter provided this solution for preventing Google Earth from reinstalling the update engine:
Google Earth reinstalls the software updater when it’s launched. To prevent this I created an empty file at ~/Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate, then transferred ownership to root and made it read-only for normal users:
touch ~/Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate sudo chown root ~/Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate sudo chmod 644 ~/Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate
HOWTO: Show the Full Path in Finder’s Title
An annoying feature of the OS X Finder is that it doesn’t show the full path of the folder you’re currently browsing — it only shows the name of the folder in the title. I like seeing the entire path of the folder because I do a lot of stuff from the command line, so as you can imagine I was thrilled to discover an easy fix to this problem.
Simply open the terminal (Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal.app) and run the following command:
defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES
You’ll then need to restart Finder by either rebooting or running the killall Finder command. Now Finder will show the full path in the title!
If for some reason you want to revert back to seeing only the folder name (I can’t imagine why you would), simply repeat the process and change YES to NO at the end of the command.
