Category Archives: OS X

New Brother printers and OS X 10.6

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On one of my machines I run OS X 10.6. I recently ran into a situation where I needed to print from that machine to a Brother HL-L2360DW printer. Brother has evidently stopped advertising that they support 10.6, or they have stopped testing their products against 10.6. It is understandable. It is an older operating system.

To get the Brother HL-L2360DW to work via USB from OS X 10.6, I updated the firmware on the printer (via the Java based app brother provides). Then I downloaded the 10.7 full driver install package and installed it. It ran the installer no problem. After the installer was finished the HL-L2360DW CUPS driver was found and the printer was able to work with duplexing.

So there you have it. The Brother HL-L2360DW does work with OS X, at least via USB.

Software Needs for a Language Documentation Project

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In this post I take a look at some of the software needs of a language documentation team. One of my ongoing concerns of linguistic software development teams (like SIL International's Palaso or LSDev, or MPI's archive software group, or a host of other niche software products adapted from main stream open-source projects) is the approach they take in communicating how to use the various elements of their software together to create useful workflows for linguists participating in field research on minority languages. Many of these software development teams do not take the approach that potential software users coming to their website want to be oriented to how these software solutions work together to solve specific problems in the language documentation problem space. Now, it is true that every language documentation program is different and will have different goals and outputs, but many of these goals are the same across projects. New users to software want to know top level organizational assumptions made by software developers. That is, they want to evaluate how software will work in a given scenario (problem space) and to understand and make informed decisions based on the eco-system that the software will lead them into. This is not too unlike users asking which is better Android or iPhone, and then deciding what works not just with a given device but where they will buy their music, their digital books, and how they will get those digital assets to a new device, when the phone they are about to buy no-longer serves them. These digital consequences are not in the mind of every consumer... but they are nonetheless real consequences.
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Design Review…. of iTunes 11

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I was having some difficulties with iTunes 10.7 so I opted to update to iTunes 11, now I want to roll back. My opinion is that the UI (and to an extent the UX) sucks, sorry Jonathan Ive. – Yet at the same time I realize that as artists when we have come to a new “enlightened” state about one of our designes solving more relevant problems we have to wipe away the old version and reach out for the new potentials. But in this case I think bringing over the design elements from iOS is a bit overkill. It does not respect the device and the mood created by the device (bring touchscreen to the Mac and I might reconsider).

I have several beefs Continue reading →

Gmail challenges

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I have been using GMail since 2005 (along with other products for email). Yesterday, I deleted 3000 messages from my “All mail” folder. Bringing my message count down to 21,000 messages. I know there is still a lot of Junk left in there. So I want to target the non-personal messages by sender and make a choice as to if I delete them or not. So I need some stats… Searching for Stats packages for GMail… Finding Google system blog. And Mail Trends via lifehacker. We’ll see how it goes.

The only other problem I have had with GMail has been that somehow in 2008 a message got corrupted and I could not download any mail from Gmail. So I got rid of my .mbox and tried to re download my email, about 4GB worth. Whenever OSX hit the corrupted message the POP3 download would fail. – grrr. But, I still have no way of knowing for sure what the message was, which was corrupted. (And navigating to a specific date in GMail is all but impossible.) So I have a gap in my email records on my computer corresponding to 2005 through 2008. I have not found a way to fix this. Additionally, Gmail, via POP3 does not distinguish between sent messages and inbound messages. Though I suppose through some rules magic one could sort the messages after import. My question has been, How do I download the entire 4GB of Emails in a usable format?
I have looked at solutions like http://www.gmail-backup.com but have not yet implemented anything.

Pulling text messages off of iPhones

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I had an interesting situation where I wanted to pull off some text messages from my iPhone. I started Googling around and found a few solutions for jailbroken iPhones. But being a good citizen I have not jail broken my iPhone. I did find a solution. It might be the only one… but none the less I found one.

DiskAid

DiskAid is a really nifty little program which grants access to the files and file structure on iPhones, iPod touch and iPads. Additionally, if one has a student email address they can get a free (gratis) educational license.

From a forensics perspective, the iPhone is full of data. The DiskAid guys also had a note on how to disable geo-logging.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9x_KzBMMfjk

PHP Code Editors on OS X

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I have been looking for a decent coding application for OS X. I don’t do it fulltime. And I want something intuitive to use, simple to discover the workflows in, and has syntax highlighting. I do CSS, xHtml and am getting into some PHP. I don’t favor Aquamacs‘ command-line-like interface when saving documents.

I have had a few recommended to me:

I have been looking at developing some plugins/themes for Drupal (modules) and for WordPress. Being at DrupalCamp Austin 2011.

XCode and Emacs can be used.

Apple App Store

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I know I am bit late to the party, but I just updated to OS X 10.6.6. I have been resisting the App Store for ages. (I am doing a slide scanning project with Nikon CoolScan scanners, whose drivers require OS X 10.6 and lower.) But I needed to re-install Developer Tools and my OS disk was scratched. – A real pain. So I had to download 10.6.6 to get the new development tools to work. And a part of the package I get the App Store. So I might as well check it out. It is a real pain to use.

  1. There is no way to save an app I am interested in purchasing but am not going to purchase right now. – This is a feature in the iTunes store.

    2. No feature for saving interesting apps.

  2. The search algorithm for apps does not help me get the apps I want. – I thought I would try a search for a metadata editing tool. Some apps which I know are in the Apple App Store, and this is their primary function are not showing up. Disappointing.

MAMP Helps

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I use MAMP for my local test environment. But I have recently moved beyond just PHP apps. I am also looking at using Tomcat. I would like to mess around with DSpace locally and use Solr also. But I have found a couple of helps for adding things to MAMP.

One of the problems I am facing is that I really like apps like MacPorts. But I do not want to tinker with the CORE and default setting of my OS X machine. So I find that MAMP is a good alternative, but I can not type a command in the command line and have all the dependencies download automatically. I recently found that I could do something like this with Homebrew…. Never used it before but it looks to be the tool for the job. So I have collected a few tutorials like: installing php5.3, Using an gmail as a smtp server, and setting up solr.

Using Time Machine Buddy to solve Error 11

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Time Machine is a life saver. I was backing up a machine recently and error was thrown. Indicated in a form like this message (this message occurs on a machine running Lion and I am running Snow Leopard 10.6.5).

Error From Time Machine

Due to the suggestions by James Pond [1] James Pond. 8 August 2011. C3. Time Machine – Troubleshooting. http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/C3.html. [Accessed: 9 October 2011] [Link] , I found that there was a widget called Time Machine Buddy [2] James Pond. 16 August 2011. A1. Time Machine – Troubleshooting. http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/C3.html. [Accessed: 9 October 2011] [Link] . I downloaded the widget and it told me what the offending file was. I deleted the file and happily backed up the rest of my drive. I don’t know what caused Error 11 or exactly what that is but, the deletion of the file, which was not crucial to keep, allowed me to continue.

References

References
↑1 James Pond. 8 August 2011. C3. Time Machine – Troubleshooting. http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/C3.html. [Accessed: 9 October 2011] [Link]
↑2 James Pond. 16 August 2011. A1. Time Machine – Troubleshooting. http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/C3.html. [Accessed: 9 October 2011] [Link]

TIFFs, PDFs and OCR

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In the course of my experience I have been asked about PDFs and OCR several times. The questions usually follow the main two questions of this post.

So is OCR built into PDFs? or is there a need for independent OCR?

In particular an image based PDF, is it searchable?

The Short answer is Yes. Adobe Acrobat Pro has an OCR function built in. And to the second part: No, an image is not searchable. But what can happen is that Adobe Acrobat Pro can perform an OCR function to an image such as a .tiff file and then add a layer of text, (the out put of the OCR process) behind the image. Then when the PDF is searched it actually searches the text layer which is behind the image and tries to find the match. The OCR process is usually between 80-90% accurate on texts in english. This is usually good enough for finding words or partial words.

The Data Conversion Laboratory has a really nice and detailed write up on the process of converting from images to text with Adobe Acrobat Pro.

Daily Designer has a tutorial on how to do it on OS X.
David R. Mankin explains on his blog what the process looks like using Windows.

One of the beauties of Adobe Acrobat Pro is that this process can be scripted and the TIFFs processed in batches.
[On Windows] :: [On OS X using AppleScript] :: [Cross platform help from Adobe]

University Illinois Chicago explains how to do use Adobe Acrobat Pro and OCR with a scanner using a TWAIN driver.

The better OCR option

Since I work in an industry where we are dealing with multiple languages and the need to professionally OCR thousands of documents I thought I would provide a few links on the comparison of OCR software on the market.
Lifehacker has short write up of the top five OCR tools.

Of those top 5, in this article, two, ABBYY Fine Reader and Adobe Acrobat are compared side by side on both OS X and Windows.

Are all files used to create an orignal PDF included in the PDF?

One thing to remember, Which I have said before, is that not all PDFs are created equal. This Manual talks a bit about different settings inside of PDFs when using Adobe’s PDF printer.

The Short answer is No. But the long answer is Yes. Depending on the settings of the PDF creator the original files might be altered before they are wrapped in a PDF wrapper.

So the objection, usually in the form of a question sometimes comes up:

Is the PDF file just using the PDF framework as a wrapper around the original content? Therefore, to archive things “properly” do I still need to keep the .tiff images if they are included in the PDF document?

The answer is: “it depends”. It depends on several things, one of which is, what program created the PDF and how it created the PDF. – Did it send the document through PostScript first? Another thing that it depends on is what else might one want to do with the .tiff files?

In an archiving mentality, the real question is: “Should the .tiff files also be saved?” The best practice answer is Yes. The reason is that the PDF is viewed as a presentation version and the .tiff files are views as the digital “originals”.