Macs

Happy Birthday Mac!

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Can it really have been 30 years ago today that the world was introduced to the Macintosh?

Before the presentation the 27 year old Steve Jobs was shaking with fear and anticipation; “I’m scared shitless” he uttered and then stepped on stage and changed the world – a feat he would repeat several times.

Today, when all computers work like the Macintosh it is hard to imagine what was so special about windows, menus, scrolling text, graphics, speech synthesis etc. all chugging along on an 8 MHz Motorola 68000 processor and 128 Kb of RAM. The wonderful Cathode can take your modern Mac back to those wonderful pre-Mac days…

Jobs and Steve Wozniak had defined what a personal computer would be like and how it would work. IBM dominated the world of computing and were venturing into the fledgling personal micro computer market (micro computers as opposed to the mainframe and mini computers widely used at the time). The Apple II dominated the personal computer market of the day; introducing the world to the Spreadsheet and providing work for a small company called Microsoft..

microsoftcard1980

The Apple II would continue to sell well despite the appearance of the Mac. The personal computer belonged to the individual and would empower them in their daily lives; liberating them from the corporate controlled IBM computers operated in the basement by boffins. That was the Big Brother that the Mac was designed to destroy….

Jobs saw the personal computer as something you could pick up and carry – the Apple II was a wedge shape so you could tuck it under your arm and the Mac had a built in carrying handle. The IBM personal computer models fail this basic requirement…

Just one year later Jobs will be sacked not to return to the then nearly bankrupt Apple in 1997.

Shove Lemur from an iPad on a Mac

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Adapted from this Windows tutorial…

It is much the same procedure but as the Mac speaks fluent MIDI there is no need to add anything.

Ingredients:

A Mac
Ableton Live
iPad
Lemur app
Shove template
ClyphX/Push folders
(Requires a RAR Unpacker if you do not have one)

Procedure:

Right click on the Ableton Live icon and select Show Package Contents

showpack

Drill down to the MIDI Remote Scripts folder

contents

appres

MIDIrem

Rename the Push folder as Original_Push

Unpack the RAR file containing the ClyphX/Push folders and put those folders in the MIDI Remote Scripts folder

If your WiFi network is liable to interference/lag you should create an ad-hoc network. The video below just connects via the regular WiFi network.

adhoc

In the iPad’s WiFi settings select your ad-hoc network if you created one

Start the Lemur app and load the Shove template from the Lemur editor on the Mac

In the Mac’s MIDI/Audio set up Utility select the Network button

Connect the iPad to the Session

Open Ableton Live and then its Preferences

Select Push and Cyphx as Input Devices and the network session as Input and Output

livepref

Shove away…

Minecraft is not damaged and should not be moved to the Trash

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I will usually dismiss most applications that claim to work across Macs/Windows/Linux as not worth downloading to take a look at as they are usually written with Java and so they will be slow and clunky and ugly. [wikipop]Minecraft[/wikipop] is the exception that proves the rule.

It seems a fairly common problem on a Mac that Minecraft refuses to run reporting that it is damaged and needs to be Trashed…

Minecraft damaged warning window

Although my son has had it running on his own account on this Mac (OS X 10.8.3 / Java version 1.7.0_07) it has never worked for me. The official fix suggests that it is related to the Mac’s Gatekeeper and you should right click on the Minecraft icon, select Open from the menu and then Open again in the warning window. This did not work for me.

There are various fixes suggested on various forums but none seemed relevant to my problem. Mac apps, beneath the single icon, are bundles of all the various bits and pieces that the app requires. I went mining into the app with a right click and selecting Show Package Content….

Show Package Contents

and I found the Java (.jar) file to launch Mincraft… MinecraftLauncher.jar which was in the Java folder which was in the Resources folder which was in the Content folder
(or in the order of opening … Content > Resources > Java > MinecraftLauncher.jar)

Double clicking the MinecraftLauncher.jar file opens the Minecraft window, and you can log in, and it downloads the bits it needs, and then… it crashes 🙁

Looking through the crash log there was mention of LWJGL (Lightweight Java Game Library) files and so they were updated from the LWJGL site.

These need to go into the Application Support within the Library. Select Go from the Finder menu and then Library (if you do not see Library listed hold down the Alt key). From the Library folder select..

Application Support > Minecraft > bin

and pop the lwjgl.jar and lwjgl_util.jar files into there. Then in the Natives folder add your other lwjgl files.

Now double clicking the Minecraft icon opens a window… that informs you that Minecraft is damaged and should be dumped in the Trash… but double clicking the MinecraftLauncher.jar icon opens the Minecraft window and away you go 🙂

MInecraft working

To save digging down to the launcher everytime I right clicked on it and selected “Make Alias” to make a shortcut icon that I dragged onto the Desktop.

Lazy Sunday

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So you find yourself in bed on a Sunday morning and you have flicked through Flipboard on the iPad when you remember that the new [wikipop search=”EPUB”]ePub[/wikipop] edition of Programming in Objective-C by Stephen Kochan is on the iMac downstairs. Phew! Downstairs! No problem. We have Prompt with which we can log into the sleeping iMac and [wikipop]mv[/wikipop] the book into the iMac’s Dropbox folder from which automagically it appears in the iPad’s Dropbox and then opens in iBooks.

Of course you could just get the iBooks version 😉 but where’s the fun in that?

Lazy Sunday = Small Faces…

…and thence Stanley Unwin.

Menu Bar Clutter

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Well as you asked so nicely…

Right now it looks like this…

From the left:

  • Hot Mouse Flower – a virtual keyboard thingy.
  • SoundFlower – rewires sound between your apps.
  • Found – a searcher that comes and goes – seems to hog a lot of CPU at times.
  • Vienna – RSS reader.
  • Littleipsum – comes and goes as required.
  • Dropbox – cloudy goodness.
  • Cookie – clutter clearer.
  • Growl – venerable growler.
  • Interarchy – FTP goodness.
  • ClipMenu – clipboard manager.
  • 1Password – password manager which I rarely use from the menu bar.
  • FreeMemory – shows (and reclaims) the free memory you thought you had.
  • BwanaDik – IP/Network displayer now discontinued but still going strong with Mountain Lion. Note the Zappa reference.
  • ClipTwin – quick clipboard swap with the iPad.
  • Caffeine – keeps me and the Mac awake.
  • PopClip – how did we ever manage without it?
  • And then the Mac’s regular Messages, AppleScripts, BlueTooth, Time Machine, WiFi, Clock, User switcher, Spotlight and Notifications.

Last time we looked (February 2010) it looked like this.