Category: How-To (Page 6 of 7)

The energy saver preference panel in Mac OS X offers a simplistic approach to managing energy saving settings, such as sleep time for the computer and disks. A user might think that by deselecting “Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible”, the drives would be prevented from spinning down. This is not, however, true.

As everyone with an external FireWire, USB or internal RAID array knows, these disks will spin down after 5 minutes of being idle, regardless of whether the aforementioned check box is deselected.

What is a computer user to do when confronted by this wholly unexpected (and dare I say, ‘illogical’) situation? We’ll use Mac OS X’s UNIX underpinnings to change this behavior, using the pmset command to set all drives to never spin down (no, that’s not ecologically friendly). Continue reading

Here’s a quick way to resize a large number of photos using a built-in feature of Mac OS X, that also generates a web page while it’s at it for an easy photo album.

In Finder, click the “Go” menu, and select ” (shift-command-G), then copy in this path: /System/Library/Image Capture/Automatic Tasks/. Alternatively, you could open your hard drive and navigate to it.

Once there, you will notice ten automated tasks. The one we’re interested in is “Build Slide Show”. Double click on it to launch it. Notice that it’s icon is now in the Dock.

We’re going to use photos stored in our iPhoto library. Alternatively, you could use photos stored anywhere. Open iPhoto, select the photos you wish to process, and drag them to the “Build Web Page” icon in the dock. Presto. The script processes the images, and builds a web page for you, opening it in Safari (or your default browser).

You can derive the location of your resized photos and the HTML by looking at the URL, beginning with the word “Photos”.