Getting cheap/unsupported laser printers working on OS-X

Got a Dell, Samsung or Xerox printer where the manufacturer has dropped support AND it was too cheap to have a full Post Script implementation? Whereas Windows seems to support a very broad range of budget printers natively OS-X is more picky when it comes to PCL-models.

So - this saved us at the workshop; http://guigo.us/mac/splix/

Recovering corrupt flash memory cards

The good thing about paid-for photo-recovery software is that they have an easy trial-model; they show you the images and videos they can recover and you stump-up your $50 to register the software and get at your pictures. I've had varying success with a coule of paid-for apps but I came across PhotoRec yesterday (it's part of a larger suite of tools).
Now, granted, the pay apps have nice GUIs while PhotoRec runs in the UNIX shell in a text-based interface, but it requires little interaction and gets the job done. It also runs on just about any common OS platform from Mac OS X to Windows to Linux to Solaris, etc. Link in the title.

VNC on the Mac

I've been bugging my colleagues for a better VNC client than Chicken of the VNC but nobody knew of one! It turns out that Remote Desktop (which has VNC as a subset protocol) also includes a lightweight client (in Leopard). From Finder do;

Go > Connect to Server and enter VNC://machine-name-or-IP

and enjoy the love - it is a lot more responsive than Chicken as well.

Windows XP SP3 & Parallels VM

As I mentioned a few months ago I ditched Vista after a year of really wanting to like it but being intensely frustrated at how unproductive I felt using it - staring at the spinning blue disk and finding my gigabit LAN behaving like a dial-up connection!

Anyhow - I've been rocking XP in Parallels on my MacBook Pro - XP runs faster in the virtual machine than Vista ever did on the metal! The only time I ever boot natively into Windows is for gaming (you'd not expect Halo to run well in an emulated environment!). A couple of days ago I upgraded to SP3 and although booting into XP directly showing no problems I realised that now my VM under OS-X was broken. So - I did what I should have done before starting(!) and read the release notes. The approved way to do it is;

• Boot XP directly and upgrade Apple BootCamp to v 2.1 here


• Install SP3 (again, booted natively into Windows)


• In OS-X upgrade to Parallels v 3 release 5600

I did it in the opposite order and found myself unable to even create a new working VM from my BootCamp partition. The solution;

• Once OS X boots and you are logged in, start Parallels, but DO NOT start the VM!


• Open your VM configuration, and select 'Hard Disk -> Advanced'


• Click on the "Clear..." button under the "Cleanup Boot Camp partition" section. This allows Parallels to 'learn' about the changes made by the SP3 install.


• Start your VM.


• Once the VM is started and logged in, *RE-INSTALL* the Parallels Tools!

Interestingly the guys who work for me in the Systems Integration deptartment at Root6 (the firm I work for currently) all use Parallels but the guys in Tech Support all use VMWare Fusion. I think the two are as good as each other. All of Root6's engineers run Intel Macs and the Sales guys all run Dell laptops.

Hamachi for OS-X

My life is complete!

More Vista thoughts

One of the biggest challenges... is to fight that perception that old versions of software are good enough,

- Chris Capossela, Microsoft.

I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions and how you might paraphrase that particularly insidious bit of marketing speak! Anyhow - having decided I'd lay off Vista until at least SP1 (good advice with any Microsoft product!) I heard Paul Thurrott's most recent Windows Weekly podcast where he put to rest some of the fears over licensing and even suggested that on most hardware the Vista experience was a good one. My five month old MacBook seemed too under-powered (having motherboard graphics) to be a candidate but he reckons he's tried it and it's all good. Then I caught last week's Security Now! with Steve Gibson who had a totally different take on things. Oh well - I don't anyone who has build 6000 (the final RTM version) and so I can't get any real advice.