mattfarmer [dot] net » Mac

HOWTO: Burn .bin/.cue files on a Mac

POS — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 00:58:05 +0000

Since Tiger there’s been a utility called ‘drutil’ which is a tool to interact with CD/DVD burners. To use it you simply need to drop down the your favorite shell and type ‘drutil burn .cue’ and your off and running. Its an easy fix, but I always seem to forget the name of it when I need it so I figured I’d make a post for your and my sakes both. Enjoy!

Windows Mediaplayer for Mac Discontinued.

POS — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 13:18:00 +0000

From Slashdot:

According to News.com, Microsoft has had no plans to update or improve Windows Media Player and has instead thrown its weight behind a third party plugin to fill the void. Adam Anderson, Microsoft public relations manager, told News.com, ‘It’s basically a business decision for Microsoft. Like any other company, we have business priorities. Our focus really is in delivering the best experience to Windows customers.’

I for one am very excited to download and try this plug in and hopefullly rid my Mac Mini of the annoying Windows Media Player for Mac program/plugin (which rarely plays the streaming video files I want to see).

.bin/.cue files on Mac OS-X

POS — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 05:17:00 +0000

.bin/.cue files are a somewhat popular file format created by a Windows program called CDRWin. Unfortunately, these files are not well supported on non-windows operating systems. Fortunately enough there’s a program call bchunk which will convert these nasty files into an iso image. Compiling it is a cinch, and using it is a breeze. I had used this before in Linux about a year ago, and again just now on Mac OS-X and it works great!

sha1sum for Mac OS-X

POS — Thu, 16 Jun 2005 16:10:00 +0000

Well the other day I downloaded the latest version of Fedora Linux (Core 4) (.torrent) (mirror), and was surprised to see that instead of having MD5SUM check files there were SHA1SUM files. Since I am using Mac OS-X (10.4) and have Fink installed (which provides many ports of popular linux apps, such as md5sum), I was surprised to find that I did not have sha1sum installed. To fix the situation I just went over to the coreutils website downloaded and compiled the source, and moved the sha1sum file into my path (I put it in /sw/bin/ since that’s where fink installed my md5sum). Knowing that others would probably run into this same problem and might be too lazy to do the same, I figured I’d provide the binary for this file here. Enjoy!

Dash Blog

POS — Tue, 03 May 2005 13:29:53 +0000

I’ve recently upgraded to Mac OS X 10.4 – Tiger. So far I like it, it works great on my Mac Mini. One of the cool new features in it is the Dashboard. Coming from Linux before making this switch, these remind me of GnomeDesklet. The main differance between GnomeDesklets and Dashboard Widgets is that they act more like application windows than embedded into the desktop. DashBlog in particular allows you to make posts to your Blogger.com blog with out using their webpage. So far all of the posts in the blog have been made using it. My only complaint about it is that I just don’t like the colors of the UI, but really not that bad. You can download the latest version from here where they also have a screen shot.