Category Archives: free & cheap software

fixed : use unsupported scanner in OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion

Posted on by
111

UPDATE : a list of supported scanners for OSX 10.9 Mavericks can be found here

UPDATE : Mattias Ellert has now updated the TWAIN SANE drivers, so there is a new version for OSX 10.9 Mavericks (and OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion), more on this can be found here

———————————

Question :

I have a Canon CanoScan LiDE 20 that used to work perfectly in MacOSX 10.6 Snow Leopard. But now I’ve bought a new Mac which runs OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion, I can’t seem to install it, since Canon doesn’t update the drivers anymore.

What can I do ?

Answer :

In OSX 10.7 Lion and 10.8 Mountain Lion any TWAIN-supporting scanner can be used without any additional software :

– connect your scanner directly to your Mac using a USB-cable

– open the System Preferences

– then click on “Print & Scan”

– then, just below in the list of printers on the left, click on the “+”-sign

– that will bring up the “Add”-window, which enables you to add a new printer or scanner

– if your scanner is TWAIN-supporting, it will show up there, and you just need to select it and click on the “Add”-button

– then it will be listed in the previous (“Print & Scan”) System Preferences window, and if you select it (and you put a piece of paper or a photo in the scanner), a Scanning Preview window will show up, allowing you to scan your document to file or eMail or something else…

but…

…some for some printers, like the Canon CanoScan LiDE 20 and LiDE 30, the TWAIN-drivers are not included in OSX. In that case, you will need to install some generic (FREE) TWAIN-drivers :

– for OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion, download and install these files (in this same order) and restart your Mac after doing so, then your scanner will also show up in the “Print & Scan” System Preferences :

libusb.pkg.tar.gz

sane-backends.pkg.tar.gz

SANE-Preference-Pane.pkg.tar.gz

TWAIN-SANE-Interface.pkg.tar.gz

– for MacOSX 10.7 Lion, download and install these files (in this same order) and restart your Mac after doing so, then your scanner will also show up in the “Print & Scan” System Preferences :

libusb.pkg.tar.gz

sane-backends.pkg.tar.gz

SANE-Preference-Pane.pkg.tar.gz

TWAIN-SANE-Interface.pkg.tar.gz

– if these files do not turn into regular .pkg-files when you click on them, you need unTAR-software like this :

The Unarchiver

– if you get an error-message telling you you can’t install this software (these drivers) since the are not from Apple-appoved developers, you need to :

– open the System Preferences

– then click on “Security & Privacy”

– then make sure the “General”-tab is selected

– click the padlock in the lower left corner and provide an Administrator name & password to unlock the padlock

– then at “Allow applications downloaded from:” select “Anywhere”

– and exit the System Preferences to make this setting stick

Note #1 :

TWAIN-supporting drivers (like SANE and the ones that come with OSX) will enable you to directly scan from within various applications like Photoshop, MS Word, GraphicConverter, OmniPage and OSX’s built-in Image Capture.

Note #2 :

when using the SANE drivers, you will probably not be able to use the ‘one click’-buttons that are on the scanner itself…

Note #3 :

if your scanner lets you scan the first time, but after shut-down and restart scanning seems impossible because OSX can’t find the scanner, just plug-out the scanner’s USB-cable and plug it back in and everything should work again…

Note #4 :

if the “Scan”-button remains grayed-out, make sure that you have selected an area to scan… (put differently : if “Selection:” is set to “Off”, you will need to select an area to scan before the “Scan”-button will be ready to use…)

Note #5 :

if you get a distorted scan when scanning in landscape view (or any other rotated view), just scan normally in portrait view and rotate the scanned image afterwards (in Preview app or another image editing program, like Photoshop or Graphic Converter)

Note #6 :

if you are not able to scan as a JPEG (.jpg-flie), just scan as a TIFF (.tif-file) and convert the scanned image afterwards (in Preview app or another image editing program, like Photoshop or Graphic Converter)

Credits :

Matias Ellert and the Open Source developers of the SANE project

Donate Button (all)

fixed : FREE application for cloning a Mac HD

Posted on by
Reply

Question :

I need to make an exact (bootable) copy of my secondary Mac’s startup-HD. Someone suggested me to use an application called Carbon Copy Cloner, but since I am running OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion on my primary Mac, I would need to use Carbon Copy Cloner version 3.5 or newer, but that’s not free software any longer…

As I only need to do this once, I’m not willing to pay more than €5 to be able to do so. What’s the best alternative ?

Answer :

The best alternative for making a bootable clone version of a Mac startup-HD is what you already have : Disk Utility …and best of all : it’s completely FREE.

Here’s how to do so :

– connect both HDs to your Mac (using USB or FireWire for example)

– on your Mac, open the Disk Utilities application (which can be found inside the folder called Utilities which is in the Applications folder)

– you will now see both HDs appear on the left side of the Disk Utility window (they will be listed as the disk size followed by the manufacturer name and some additional info, directly below them the name of the partitions on it are listed – on Macs there’s normally only one partition per HD)

– on the rest of the page (middle & right), you will see 5 chapter buttons : “First Aid”, “Erase”, “Partition”, “RAID” and “Restore”

– click on the “Restore”-chapter button

– now put the cursor in the white area behind “Source:” and then click on the partition you want to copy in the menu on the left

– then put the cursor in the white area behind “Destination:” and in the menu on the left, click on the HD (or on the partition) you want to copy to (or drag & drop it from there onto the

– if for some reason your chosen Source or Destination now lists something else than what you would like, just try again

– then click on the “Restore” button that’s bottom right

– …now all you have to do is wait (using USB 2.0, about 10GB of used disk space will be cloned in about 10 minutes)

– when the cloning is finished, both HD’s will have the same name, and therefore might not properly mount at the same time, so only one will be visible on your Desktop

– use the ‘drag disk to Trash’ procedure (or the eject-icon next to the HD’s listing), and unmount both HDs

– then plug just one HD back in to make it visible on your Desktop, and check if the cloning went okay (by browsing though it in the Finder)

– then eject the first HD, and check the second HD the same way

– that’s it !

Donate Button (MacManusNL)

Note :

You can quickly check if the HD you’ve cloned is bootable, by connecting it to your Mac using a USB cable and then restarting your Mac with the ALT-key pressed

…that will enable you to choose any connected HD as the startup drive

if the cloned HD turns out not to be bootable, plug it into your Mac again, and use Disk Utility to check if the Partition Map Scheme is ‘GUID’ (it should not be ‘Apple’ !), if it’s not, re-partition the HD and do the cloning process again

info : I can’t get write-permission to external harddisk from Windows-user

Posted on by
Reply

Question :

A Windows-user asked me to put some file on his external harddisk, but when I try to do so, I get a message that I only have ‘read-only’ permissions to the harddisk.

How can I copy the files over ?

Answer :

If you get this problem, it usually caused by the fact that MacOSX does not support NTFS-formatted disks ‘out of the box’. [ NTFS = Windows NT File System ; a format that, mainly for server, has replaced the old DOS-originating formats FAT16 and FAT32, which are fully supported by MacOSX, but are less suited for use on large volume harddisks ]

There are 2 main solutions to this :

– 1 –

If you are going to frequently swap this external harddisk between your Mac and a Windows-PC, you’ll be best off reformatting it to FAT32 :

– connect the external harddisk to your Mac

– copy the entire contents over to your Mac (or to another external harddisk or to a diskimage on your Mac)

– check and make sure you have copied everything over

– then reformat the external harddisk to DOS-format (= FAT32) using OSX’s Disk Utility app

– when finished, copy all content that originally was on the external harddisk back on to it

– that’s it !

– 2 –

If it’s only a one-off for you to use this NTFS-formatted harddrive, you’re probably better off installing a special NTFS-driver/utility for OSX.

– download Tuxera NTFS (to use in demo-mode) :

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/33122/tuxera-ntfs

– install Tuxera NTFS, and open it (NOTE : it’s not a regular application, so it can’t be found in your Applications folder, but it’s a Control Panel in the System Preferences)

– now the external NTFS-disk should appear on your Mac in read&write-mode, and you can start copying files onto it

If you run into problems using Tuxera NTFS, read the FAQ :

http://www.tuxera.com/products/tuxera-ntfs-for-mac/faq/#startup-disk

And if you do exceed the 15 day free Demo-mode of Tuxera NTFS and are not willing to upgrade to the full payed version, you can start using the FREE open source program that is at the origin of Tuxera NTFS ; it’s called  NTFS-3G and can be downloaded here :

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/24481/ntfs-3g

Donate Button (MacManusNL)

tip : easily make FREE screen recordings in MacOSX

Posted on by
Reply

“Screen Recording” means making a video of your screen (i.e. your MacOSX Desktop) while you are using it.

This is a way to make tutorial video’s which you can use to send or give to others, just like the ones you find on YouTube.

(…or you can use this to record online video’s that you can not download)

“Screen Recording” used to be something that would require rather expensive software, but with the introduction of QuickTime X Player in OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard, it’s a simple and completely FREE feature included in MacOSX !

Here’s how to :

– open the “QuickTime Player” application (or maybe it’s called “QuickTime X Player” in your case)

– go to “File” and select “New Screen Recording” from the pulldown menu – or use the key-combo [SHIFT]+[CMD]+[N]

– in the small (shaded) screen that appears, you will see a record-button (with a red dot) in the middle and a grey triangle button on the right

– click on the grey triangle button and you can select your audio input source (e.g. a microphone you’ll be using for your voice-over comments), output video quality and whether you want record your mouse movements and clicks in the video also

– then click on the red-dotted record-button to start recording, but when you do so you will get the option to either select a (static) part of the screen [by dragging the cursor over the area you want to select for recording] or the entire screen [by clicking anywhere on the screen]

– recording will start right away after you’ve made your choice (so do not forget to start talking if you want a voice-over)

– to stop recording, go back to the record-button (which now shows a small black square) and click it

– the recording will stop and it will take a few moments for QuickTime X Player to process it (the longer your recorded, the more time the processing will take)

– the recording will be visible in a QuickTime X Player window right away

– to Save or Share your screen recording, go “File” and choose one of the following :

option 1. “Export” (= normal Save) for saving as a QuickTime .mov-file [you can set the video quality from the “Format” pulldown menu ; either (general) Movie, 480p, 720p or iPhone/iPad/AppleTV ready

option 2. “Export to” to directly upload to a website, import into iTunes or edit in iMovie

option 3. “Share” to directly share your screen recording with your friends through eMail, iMessage (= Apple SMS), AirDrop (= Apple WiFi-filesharing), Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo or Flickr

That’s it ; this might seem rather complicated from these instructions, but it’s actually really simple once you try 😉

tip : using Evernote on an iBook G4 or iMac G5

Posted on by
Reply

Question :

I have Evernote running on my iPhone, my iPad and my MacBook, but I would also like to use it on my old Mac which has a Power-PC (G4/G5) processor.

On the Evernote-website I can only download the latest version of Evernote, which is Intel-Mac only…

How can I use Evernote on my old iMac G5 and iBook G4 ?

 

Answer :

If you are running MacOSX 10.5 “Leopard” on your PPC-Mac (G4/G5), you can use the previous version of Evernote, which can be found here :

http://cl.ly/1I3a0Y3f26282k3p2a0E

If you are still running MacOSX 10.4 “Tiger” (or newer) your only option is to use the online version of Evernote, which can be accessed here :

https://www.evernote.com/Home.action

fixed : repair corrupt RAR-files on your Mac

Posted on by
40

Question :

I have some RAR-archive-files on my Mac that I would like to decompress/unarchive. I have tried several unarchiver-applications, but they all end up telling me that the RAR-file is corrupted.

Is there any way to fix this ?

Answer :

RAR (which stands for Roshal ARchive) is a very popular file-compression that is developed and maintained by the Roshal brothers Eugene & Alexander. Their RAR & unRAR utility is called WinRAR (for Windows) or simply RAR (for all other platforms including MacOSX).

One interesting thing about WinRAR/RAR is that it is also capable of repairing corrupted RAR-archive-files. Slight down-side is that the utility doesn’t have a graphic interface (GUI) like most MacOSX-apps… it is a ‘command line only’ tool…

To repair damaged RAR-archive-files on MacOSX, do this :

– download WinRAR/RAR for MacOSX from the Roshal brothers’ website :

http://www.win-rar.com/fileadmin/winrar-versions/rarosx-4.2.0.tar.gz

NOTE : if you want to be sure you get the latest version of RAR for MacOSX, go to this website to find it :

http://www.win-rar.com/download.html

– After downloading, open the Terminal app that is in the Utilities folder inside your Applications folder and drop the “rar” program file from the “rarosx” folder onto the terminal window.

– Then make sure there’s a space (by typing on the SPACE-bar of your keyboard)

– Then type “r” (without the quotes).

– Then make sure there’s another space (by typing on the SPACE-bar of your keyboard again).

– Then drop the file you want repaired onto the terminal window (it’ll give the path and name of the file).

– Then make sure there’s another space (typ the SPACE-bar)

– and type “/Users/yourname/Desktop” or wherever you want the fixed file to be delivered.

(if you want to deliver to a specific destination folder, it may be easier to just drop the folder where you want it placed onto the terminal window again so there’s no chance at typos)

– Then hit “return” and the repair scan will start. if the file has a recovery record, it will say that it was found almost immediately. Then the repairing the file will start. (this might take a couple of minutes, depending on the size of the file)

– After that, double click the repaired RAR-archive-file to have it unRARed

…that should do the trick!

NOTE : the file will have the prefix “rebuilt” appended to the beginning of the filename. You’ll need to delete that once the repair process has completed before you attempt to join the files again.

tip : play some Plants vs Zombies on your Mac for free

Posted on by
Reply

Question :

I wanted to play the Plants vs Zombies game on my PowerPC (G4/G5) Mac, so I downloaded the demo from the PopCap-website. It installs okay, but when I try to play, nothing happens…

What can I do ?

Answer :

Even though the Plants vs Zombies game is compatible with MacOSX 10.4.11 “Tiger” and newer, it is only compatible with Intel-Macs… so you cannot play the demo, nor the full game on any PowerPC (G4/G5) Mac…

but…

even with a G4 & G5 PPC Macs running OSX 10.5 Leopard you can play the online version…

just use your web browser, and play online from PopCap’s official Plants vs Zombies website :

Plants vs Zombies Chrome (also runs in Safari 5) :

http://chrome.plantsvszombies.com/