Manuel Studer » Mac

Working Leo dictionary widget for Mac OS 10.5 Leopard.

Manuel — Sat, 31 May 2008 10:31:58 +0000

If your precious Leo dictionary widget doesn’t work as you want in Leopard, download this version and enjoy your day.

How to prevent Mail.app from downloading all e-mails from an IMAP Folder (such as Public Folders).

Manuel — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 22:57:09 +0000

I’m using Mail.app (v. 3.2) and IMAP to connect to an Exchange Server for my e-mails. Unfortunately, I can’t get Mail.app to unsubscribe from thousands of e-mails filling the “Public Folder”. Some users are reporting that it works by right clicking on the account, then “Get Account Info” where you can subscribe/unsubscribe from the “Subscription List”. Not for me, I can’t see a list or something. Hopefully, Apple is going to fix that in a future release (or Microsoft is going to work with standards – hell freezes over). I found a quick & dirty way to prevent Mail.app from downloading an IMAP folder:

Navigate to your home folder. Then from there go to Library/Mail/IMAP-your-account.
Optionally: Go to your disliked folder and delete all the stuff inside.
And here is the trick: Choose the disliked folder, then File -> “Get Info” and make it Locked.

As I said, not a clean fix but simply works!

How to automatically open .torrent and other files in Safari.

Manuel — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 16:28:46 +0000

This an upgrade of the previous post, now much simpler and works with Snow Leopard too.

First, you have to modify what Safari considers as a “safe” file. Check the option Open “safe” files after downloading in Safari’s Preferences panel.
Download this plist and put it in the folder /Library/Preferences.
Finally restart Safari, that’s it!

If you want to digg deeper down: follow this guide.

Create the file com.apple.DownloadAssessment.plist (if it doesn’t already exist) in the folder /Library/Preferences.
Then copy & paste the xml code stated below in the file. In this example for a .torrent file.
Save it, restart Safari … and voilà!

LSRiskCategorySafe

LSRiskCategoryExtensions

torrent

Added on december 26th 2009. Thanks to Pan Maselko for this notice.

The most important part of the XML above is the torrent> part. This describes the extension (.torrent) which is considered as safe for safari. So that, you can do this for almost any type of file, for example for .psd files. And of course you can have more than one extension to be safe at the same time. This can be done like this:

LSRiskCategorySafe

LSRiskCategoryExtensions

torrent
psd
xyz

There are, however, some restrictions which are apparently designed by Apple: the extensions .rar .7z do not work for example.

Ripping Real Media, Windows Media and Quicktime streams (.rm, .ra, .ram, .wmv, .mov) with OS X.

Manuel — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 17:54:53 +0000

So here’s the guide for ripping streams with Mac OS X:

Download and install Macports (open source)
Fire up a Mac OS X terminal window
Type: sudo port selfupdate and give your password so that you are up to date
Then type: sudo port install mplayer and wait some minutes… (Mplayer is open source too)
Then you can rip your favorite stream with the following command:
mplayer -dumpstream “” -dumpfile

If it does not work, try with the playlist option:
mplayer -playlist “” -dumpstream -dumpfile

An example command:
mplayer -dumpstream “http://xydom.com/ram/v/heroes.rm” -dumpfile heroes.rm

Remarks:
i) If you can choose between a rtsp:// and pnm:// stream, take the rtsp stream.
ii) Don’t forget the “” which embraces the url.

For additional information you can check Gentoo’s wiki on Mplayer.

Working Mac OS X Driver for Samsung Laserprinter ML-1750

Manuel — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 18:34:58 +0000

I’ve finally found a working driver for my old Samsung ML-1750 Laserprinter. It is based on CUPS. It is in beta state but works like a charm! It has been working perfectly since many years!
You can download it right here from my website: Samsung SPL2 Installer

Or as an alternative you can use the HPIJS driver.