Walt-O-Matic

Parallels is a virtualization package for the Macintosh that primarily is used for running Microsoft Windows in a virtualized environment on OS X.

At some point you’re going to run into the problem of wanting to print something from the guest OS. Do not try to install a Windows XP print driver for the device that’s connected directly to your Apple. That’s not how it works.

You have a virtual machine. Surprise, you have a virtual printer too.

To set it up is trivial:

1. Stop your Windows VM if it’s running.
2. Open VM Configuration Editor (Parallels Desktop menu – Edit – Virtual Machine)
3. Add Parallel Port Printer to the VM Configuration: click “Add” – select “Parallel Port”, hit “Next” – select “Use a printer” – select the printer you have available in the Mac OS.
4. Make sure that you are able to print using that printer from the Mac OS side.
5. Start Windows and try printing some document using “HP Color LaserJet 8500 PS” (it’s generic driver that’s being used for printing from the Virtual Machine to any Mac OS compatible printer).

This creates a HP Color LaserJet 8500 PS printer, which then gets redirected to the host operating system’s default printer. Printing then works normally, queuing and all.

Now, I did run into this problem using Microsoft Office on Windows XP with a HP DeskJet 6980 connected wirelessly through an Apple AirPort Extreme in bridge mode:

Here’s how I solved it.
I deleted the print queue on the host operating system, then I turned the power off and back on again on the printer, and tried again.

Seriously. I power cycled the printer. That’s all that was required. Second time through, it worked like a champ.

Big scary error message, itty-bitty solution.

NOTE: You will want to scan through your document if you’re using exotic fonts. In my case apostrophes were coming out as í.

A while back I started having problems with Safari 4 being able to download files. Normally when one clicks on a .dmg or .zip file, Safari downloads it.

Recently, it stopped working, either doing absolutely nothing or trying to load the file into the browser itself for display. It was as if the MIME type wasn’t properly being handled.

Here’s how I fixed it.

It appears that Speed Download’s broswer plugin is to blame. While it works amazingly well with Safari 3, it doesn’t seem to work quite right with Safari 4.0.3.

1. Quit completely out of Safari.
2. Go to /Library/Internet Plug-Ins directory and locate the file SpeedDownload Browser Plugin.plugin and move it out of that folder.
3. Restart Safari.

This is a geek entry for resolving the problem:

* Restarting web server apache2
/usr/sbin/apache2: symbol lookup error: /usr/sbin/apache2: undefined symbol: apr_ldap_ssl_init [fail]

Non-geeks will want to move along…
(more…)

A while back I installed a pretty neat Mail extension called MailTags, which was used to tag mail messages with additional information. Cool concept.

However, at the time the usage I was personally getting out of it didn’t warrant the price for the app, and I uninstalled the application after the trial period was over.

Unfortunately, things didn’t end there, because I kept getting repeated log messages like this when I looked at the console:

1/1/09 2:52:05 PM Mail[362] Cannot restore width of table column with identifier 24

It was really obvious (and annoying), as I use GeekTools to monitor my console on my desktop in order to keep a bird’s eye view on what’s happening in the background.

I found out that I was not the only other user having this problem, and the MailTags site had a solution invoked from the Terminal:

$ defaults delete com.apple.mail TableColumns

I’d done this before, but the problem resurfaced. Not sure why. And, doing it again seems to have fixed the problem, again. My log is back to normal.

Meanwhile, I discovered that that MailTags has a new version out, and perhaps I’ll give them a second chance.

I just tend to get worried when an extension appears to go deep, especially when we know Apple is about to revamp things with the next release of the OS, and cruft somehow got left behind before.

I happened to sign on to my desktop Mac and noticed something very strange, the Harddisk icon was no longer on the desktop.

Other clever tricks for looking at the file systems showed the file was most certainly present, although Finder operations were treating the volume as if the hard disk was hidden or invisible. The drive was there when I used terminal and did $ ls -l /Volumes

Finder Preferences showed that icons should be shown, but just the drive icon wasn’t appearing.

Then I found this aritcle, which suggested firing up the Script Editor and running this script:

tell application “System Events”
set visible of disk “NameofDisk” to true
end tell
tell application “Finder” to quit
delay 1
tell application “Finder” to launch

I believe I got myself into trouble by accident when I did the last disk repair using Disk Warrior or Disk Utility. Somehow the operation marked the drive as invisible. Undoing it was as simple as asking the system to make it visible again.

I own a Garmin GPSmap 60CSx in order to geoencode my photography using HoudahGeo.

Garmin now has a means up updating the firmware in their GPSs by using a WebUpdater, of which I use the version for the Mac.

I Got Myself Into Trouble
In retrospect, I got myself into trouble by starting the program, it failed to detect the GPS, to which I turn on the GPS, and plugged it into the USB port. While the WebUpdater saw the device and went to update, it stayed in the “Erasing… Do Not Unplug” state for about two hours before I got brave.

What I Did, And Boy Was I Lucky
I couldn’t cancel. I couldn’t Quit. So I had to Force Quite by using Command-Option-Escape, that at least got WebUpdater to stop. The GPS was still stating “Loader Loading…” when I pulled the USB, and when that didn’t change anything, I turned off the power to it. I wasn’t so sure I was going to see much of anything when I powered it back on.

I got lucky. I turn the power back on and I was still at the old revision. Then plugged in the USB to the computer. Then started WebUpdater, which again noticed the GPS version, downloaded the firmware again, and had no problems installing it. Seems doing things in this order works just fine.

My Plans If I Was Unlucky
Over on Bill Turner’s site, he’s written an article about Fixing a Dead Garmin GPSMap 60CSx. It seems he’s learned holding down the Power Button and the Up Arrow at the same time while starting the WebUpdater software (I think he has three hands to pull this off), he’s able to force the GPS to identify itself to the updater. Problem is, according to his instructions, you have to keep holding down these button chord during the update; some comments on the blog state it isn’t necessary, and there’ve been mixed results as to whether this works universally or not.

I’m not sure I would have had the bravery to just go killing processes plain outright, but since Bill did such a nice job of providing an alternative, I felt it was worth the risk — even if I didn’t have to go that route. Thanks Bill for blogging your GPS recovery notes.

Ever want to rename a bunch of files to the same prefix, but have an incremental count after them?

From Explorer, select all the files that you want to bulk rename, right click, and select Rename.

While all of the files will be selected, only one is editable. Give the file a name, let’s pretend for the sake of discussion you typed ABC.jpg.

All of the rest of the files will be renamed ABC (1).jpg through ABC (n).jpg, where ‘n’ is the number of files minus one, since the first one doesn’t get a number.

Knowing this, you can do some clever stuff. Create one bogus file renamed to ZZZZZZZZ.TXT at the end of your list; select all the files, and bulk rename them as shown above. Then delete the bogus file, it should be the only one without a number, and you’ve just made a sequence of files.