Osiblog

I have an external monitor attached to my iMac. Sometimes I use it as a secondary display, sometimes it is turned off. When you are already in OSX and turn on your external monitor it will not be detected immediately. You first need to open your display preferences and click on “Detect Displays”. This tweet however, shows that you can use CMD + BrightnessUp (which is in most cases F2 or fn + F2) instead.

Software OSX, shortkey

According to the Cocoa Packet Analyzer website:

Cocoa Packet Analyzer is a native Mac OS X implementation of a network protocol analyzer and packet sniffer. CPA supports the industry-standard PCAP packet capture format for reading, capturing and writing packet trace files.

Features:

• Basic packet capturing (libPCAP/ tcpdump filter expressions can be used).
• Analyze, display and filter packet trace files.
• Supports PCAP packet capture format.
• Quicklook plugin included – it is basic but at least you can get an overview over packet trace files in finder.
• Intel 64-bit CPU support.

Cocoa Packet Analyzer screenshot

Software free, OSX, packet sniffer

I recently do quite some work in SPSS, which is a program used for statistical analysis. A license for SPSS is quite expensive but there is a cheap solution as well…

Read more…

Software gnu, open source, oss, pspp, Software, spss, statistics

Today I added a new Mac section on http://www.basvandijk.eu/mac/. This section might be helpful for people who just started using a Mac and do not yet know which software can be useful.

Software apple, mac, OSX

Angry IP scanner is a free network scanner which supports Mac OSX, Windows and Linux. It has an intuitive GUI which makes it easy to use. You can download Angry IP scanner here, more screenshots are available here.

Software Linux, OSX, Software, Ubuntu, windows

If for example Pages crashes telling you and error occurred with the SFWordProcessing plugin. The steps below might be a solution:

1. Make sure all applications are closed!
2. Open Font book.
3. Scroll down to the Hoefler font and ctrl + click on it.
4. Choose “Remove Hoefler Text Family”
5. Download the new Hoefler font.
6. Extract the Hoefler.zip file and place it in: Macintosh HD/Library/Fonts
7. Launch Pages or iWeb and the everything should work as usual.

Hoefler

Software apple, font, iweb, OSX, pages

Synthesia is a very cool game for beginner, novice and expert piano players. At first sight it looks a little bit like Guitar Hero, but now it is used for piano. Here are some more screenshots. Nice about synthesia is that it is free. The free version can load all the midi files you want, but does not show any sheet music. If you want to see the sheet music you have to buy Synthesia for $18.

Synthesia screenshot

Software free, music, piano, Software

I have a Wacom tablet which a very nice pointing device when drawing vector images, but did you know you could paint with it as well? MyPaint and ArtRage are both great tools to paint virtually. Unfortunately MyPaint is not available for the OSX platform. Interested? Check out the examples made in MyPaint and ArtRage.

MyPaint screenshot

Artrage screenshot

Graphic design, Software artrage, mypaint, paint, wacom

AppCleaner is a free tool which helps you to remove an application completely from your harddisk. If you remove an application in OSX you simply drag it to the thrash. The application is then removed, but some small garbage might be left. AppCleaner makes sure everything is cleaned. The nice thing: it is free!

AppCleaner screenshot

Software OSX

Quintin Smits has wrote an interesting article describing how you can make your server appear in Finder as a share even over a VPN.

Nephys as a share in Finder

Linux, Software bonjour, OSX, VPN