How To Set Up Mac OSX To Print to a Windows Print Share
I found one annoyance about Mac OSX. I could not figure out how to set my Mac up to print to our shared printer that is connected to a Windows XP machine.
Well, thats not necessarily true. I figured it out once, but for some reason it just stopped working using the standard printer setup. Since then, I’ve been printing to PDF, emailing the document to myself, and grabbing it on the machine with the printer and printing the PDF. Since we were setting up Jonna’s new Vista machine anyway and working through those connectivity issues, I decided to work on getting printing to work for real.
After culling through a bajillion posts today, I finally figured out how to do it. I figured this ‘pictorial’ could give you all of the steps you need to do without having to go through the effort that I did to get the information.
As an aside, all images were grabbed and marked up using Skitch.
Apple made it very non-intuitive to get to the advanced options. You have to hold down the Option key, then click “More Printers” in order to get to it. This annoyed me. The advanced option should be there no matter what. I shouldn’t have to do anything special to add the smb: address of the printer.
‘username:password’ is the username and password to log into the Windows machine with. IP Address is the IP of the Windows machine with the printer, and finally share name is the name you gave to the printer when you shared it.
I hope this “graphical representation” of the process helps you get your shared printers up and running. This is what I needed. Rather, I had to read through many false starts and theories before getting to the meat of the issue, which was essentially getting to the ‘Advanced’ options in the print manager. Now you know the secret. Happy printing!
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Tagged with: apple, Macintosh, os-x, printing, samba, shared, windows
iPod Power Adapter - Sold Separately
Photo by rbieber
Kudos to Apple for getting an even larger share of my wallet. When you buy an 80G iPod, the only way you can charge it is through your PC. In order to charge via AC power (say when your getting ready to travel and will not be taking your home machine with you), you have to spend another $40 on a USB Power adapter. These use to come WITH the unit.
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Tagged with: accessories, apple, ipod, Macintosh, sold-separately
- “…the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking.” - Steve Jobs (quote from Quotiki) (0)
First Trip To The Genius Bar
Since buying my Macbook in June, I’ve become extremely addicted. I’ve made an investment in repurchasing software where necessary and buying software that I’ve talked about on the blog and have converted over to it being my primary machine. I’ve been extremely impressed with the machine thus far and actually, at this point, find it torture to move back to Windows for any period of time.
I’ve had really no problems until recently. All of a sudden over the past four weeks or so, I’ve had issues with the magnetic AC adapter plug actually seating properly. At first, I would go into the living room unplugged, come back to plug in and would notice that the light on the AC adapter plug didn’t go on. A quick jiggle and the machine was charging again.
More recently, the light would just turn off randomly and the ‘jiggling’ became a more concerted effort to get the plug seated. So I decided on Saturday that it would be a good time to make my first trip to the Genius Bar over at the Apple store in Woodfield to see what they could do for me.
Once again, I have to hand it to Apple. I walked into the store and explained my problem and the person at the register kindly explained to me that I could walk to any machine in the store, hit the ‘Concierge’ button on any of them, and schedule time with a ‘Genius’. As soon as we registered, my name appeared on a screen above the bar, along with a ton of iPod and OS X tips that circulated on the screen so I knew exactly where I was in line and had something to do while I waited.
When my turn came, I went up to the bar, pulled the machine out of its original box and explained the problem. A quick test of another plug found the AC plug to be bad. A few minutes later I had a brand new AC adapter and was walking out of the store to have lunch with Jonna.
I like the environment that Apple has created in its stores. Its a marked difference from going to the ‘Geek Squad’ at Best Buy. Going with the same problem there would have been standing in line getting irritated because nothing was there to keep my head busy except watching the 4 people in front of me, only to get up to the counter to watch some kid fumble around with the machine (not the plug) until I had to direct him to what the actual problem was (I’ve had this happen, its rather irritating). Apple obviously realizes the problems with standing in line with a problem and has gone to the lengths to keep people occupied and interested in something as they wait.
I also found the staff to be extremely knowledgeable and polite as I watched the people in front of me get their problems solved with their iPods, which usually came down to a reboot, which while is documented in the manual, even I had issues with (I tend not to read manuals). The staff dealt with even these common sense (once you know them) questions politely and like it was the first time they had answered them.
I have to give major kudos to Apple for the concept of the Genius Bar. It made for yet another positive Apple experience for me.
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Tagged with: apple, customer-experience, Macintosh, support
Breathing Room
Photo by rbieber
My recent upgrade to an 80G iPod gives me way more breathing room than I had with the 20G, and I can finally carry family photos around to boot!
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Tagged with: apple, flickr, ipod, mobile, screenshots, Technology
- I found this really cool regular expression widget for the Mac Dashboard. It allows you to test regular expressions against text - and puts it right at your fingertips. Nice! (0)
- Found these Apple UK commercials via Slashdot. I found them quite amusing, especially the vacation one. (0)
Mac Software I’m Finding Useful
I thought I’d take some time to sit down and document the tools I’ve been using lately as I continue my acclamation into the MacIntosh world. These are tools that I’ve found really useful over the last six months or so.
- The Camino Browser - hands down the best browser I’ve found for the Mac so far. It’s my default browser.
- Ecto - Mac Native application for writing blog entries and posting them to your blog. Supports Blogger, Blojsom, Drupal, MovableType, Nucleus, TypePad, and WordPress among others. Doug referred to MarsEdit as another alternative, but Ecto fits the bill for me perfectly. It includes spell checker, Amazon Web Services integration, templates, preview - really everything you would want in an offline authoring tool.
- Vienna Newsreader - Vienna is an open source RSS reader for the Macintosh. It is quite comparable to FeedDemon, which I used on Windows, but I like it a lot better. This tool has become one of the things I use daily in order to keep up with things
- Snap N Drag - Screen capture utility I mentioned in previous posts. I use this all the time as well. Excellent tool.
- BBEdit 8.5 - BBEdit is an HTML editor for the MacIntosh platform. Its the only thing I’ve found comparable to HomeSite for the Macintosh. I’m using a trial version of this application right now, but there is a good chance that when the 30 day trial ends, I’ll be buying a copy. It makes HTML authoring a hell of a lot easier than Emacs.
- UberCaster - This is podcasting software. I have a license for it, but I haven’t had the time to muck about with it. By far the easiest podcasting software I’ve seen so far for the Macintosh. The software is currently in beta.
Some additional software I’m looking at that looks useful, but I don’t have need for it yet:
- Xyle Scope - CSS exploration tool. I’ve messed around with this a bit and it looks really interesting. I haven’t found another tool like it so far. Allows you to explore CSS and how the styles are resolved on your page.
I’m still looking for good image editing software that doesn’t cost a bajillion dollars (like Photoshop) and doesn’t require X-Windows to be installed. If anyone has any suggestions, I’d be happy to hear them.
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Tagged with: apple, Macintosh, software, tools
links for 2006-09-25
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“In perhaps the worst trademark enforcement decision–ummm–ever, it seems Apple is trying to get people to NOT use the term Podcast/Podcasting in the names of their companies.” - Completely rediculous. Witness the “asshole” side of Apple.
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Dave Winer chimes in on the Apple vs. Podcasting stuff.
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The Mac startup sound wasn’t a $$$ marketing exercise. It was a hack that was quietly dropped into the machine by an engineer with a home studio…
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When I first learned that Apple was sending “infringement”-claiming cease and desist letters to Podcasters such as Podcast Ready my first reaction was: OK, iPod has been around for two five years, (sorry-typo) and “podcast” two years, so why is Apple doin
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This article provides a quick and dirty introduction to the model, explaining what it is, how it’s supposed to work, and why it can fail.
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Ruby Meta Programming Techniques
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Many of the top Linux developers have announced their objections to the proposed GPLv3. In a position paper released on September 22, leading Linux developers like Andrew Morton, James E.J. Bottomley, Greg Kroah-Hartman, Christoph Hellwig, and six others
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This is really cool. Create a custom boot disk of the distro of your choice and perform a full network install to build your machine.
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Tagged with: apple, Bookmarks, gpl
- Google CEO Eric Schmidt Joins Apples Board of Directors - Full announcement. Comments Off
iTunes Finally Converted to MacBook
Well, after about two days of file copying, I finally got all of my iTunes stuff moved over to the new Mac. Why did it take so long you ask? I’m not really sure.
Copying between the Windows box and the MacIntosh using Windows File Sharing just didn’t work unattended. It kept failing for some reason. After about three tries at that, I decided to install cwRSync so that I could restart incrementally, but for some reason, this would not run unattended either, and I didn’t want to spend forever running back and forth between the family room and the living room (where my desk is).
Finally I decided to copy my iTunes library up to the Linux server. I started it at about 7:00am and by 7:30-8:00pm on Tuesday the file copy had completed with no interruptions. On Wednesday, I started an rsync from the Linux server to the MacBook. Another 12 hours later and that was complete.
I had heard horror stories about moving this stuff around if you had purchased music and was a little worried that I would have to spend a lot of time getting the machine authorized and stuff like that. Not so. As a matter of fact, I found these instructions on moving your iTunes library with metadata and they worked without a hitch. I now have all of my music on the MacBook. Nice!
I really do like this environment a lot better than anything I’ve used in the past. I’m not clear as to why I had all of the copy failures I had from machine to machine, but thankfully I’ve got the trusty SuSE server to back me up.
Related posts
Tagged with: apple, itunes, Macintosh, osx, Technology
- John Gruber responds to Tim Bray’s posting (see earlier link) and makes a pretty convincing case around why Apple would have a hard time open sourcing its apps. Comments Off
- Tim Bray talks about why he is contemplating Ubuntu over the Mac. Some pretty interesting points here. Comments Off
Its the little things you notice …
Now that I have a few days on the Mac using it full time, I figured I’d post up some first impressions from a new user. More than that, observations from a new user who resisted the Mac when all his friends told him to go that way in the first place.
- When the light in the room gets too low, the keyboard lights up. At first glance this seems completely insignificant, but again, one of those little things that shows the care that goes into the design. It was definitely a pleasant surprise. In a normal company, something this “frilly” would have been cut to remove costs - but as a customer I was absolutely delighted by it.
- I like not having a key on the keyboard for every little thing. The modifier key thing is totally working for me for page up / down, etc. Its extremely intuitive once you figure it out (and it doesn’t take long to figure it out).
- Using two fingers to scroll with the mouse. Tom the Architect told me about this one. Much more intuitive than a touchpad with the right side dedicated to scrolling.
- For years I’ve been irritated with people turning auto hide on the Windows taskbar. For some reason, auto hide makes sense to me with the dock bar. Not sure why, but the whole metaphor of the docking bar works for me on levels that I couldn’t get with Windows
- I love the idea of one menu at the top of the screen, rather than a menu in every application. This also works for me on a number of levels.
- The overall look of things on the screen is beautiful compared to my Gateway box. Same applications, completely different feeling when looking at them.
- Installing software is really a brain dead process. Its the way software should work. On the other hand, I’m going to have to get used to not needing so much detail to get something working. I think I’m finally at the point where I’m ok with this. Must be a sign of getting old.
- There is absolutely no need for a “View Full Screen” option on any of these applications. I have enough of the application visible whenever I need it. I can even collapse the top of the window to get more room. Its a little thing, but another one of those “Wow” moments.
Overall, I’m completely impressed. While my initial resistance to going Mac had a lot to do with the price, there are so many little things that I’m finding that are valuable enough to make me feel better about the purchase price. You get what you pay for and I’m quite happy with the new purchase.
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Tagged with: apple, customer-experience, Macintosh, osx, Technology
The Labs Adds A Mac
Your looking at the first post to this web site completely written on a Mac.
Yep, thats right. A Mac.
Since the release of OS X I’ve wanted to make the leap to the Mac. The idea of a Unix based system with the useability of a Mac intrigued me to no end. I also have a couple of friends that have used Macs from what seems like day one, and have always told me that I was missing out on something cool. I just haven’t been able to justify getting one in my own head.
I think the clincher for me that a Mac was in my future was when Jonna started bringing one home for her testing work and I was watching her use it. It just looked so cool! Its been on my mind for a couple of weeks now, so yesterday we decided to take a road trip out to the Apple store and “just look” at the Intel based MacBooks to see whether it might be something I want to commit to as my next machine.
Well, I wound up walking out with one with the voice of an Apple customer from the store ringing through my head, echoing softly, “Once you make the move, you will never go back …”.
I got the machine home and booted it up. Within literally 15 minutes or so, I was hooked to our wireless network here at the Labs. Another 25 minutes or so and all of the software updates were downloaded. A few trips to grab the software I use most, like FireFox, the Flickr uploader, etc. and I already felt like I was home.
Of course, being a developer at heart, there are a few things I just had to do as soon as I got the base software like my favorite browser installed. I had to dive to the Terminal window and see what was out there.
- Perl? - Check.
- Python? - Check.
- Ruby? - Check.
- Java? - Check
- Subversion? - Nope, but a few clicks and it was installed.
- Screen Capture Tool? Kind of - only supports TIFFS. I need JPG for Flickr. A quick Google search got me to Snap N Drag, a free screen capture utility that supports JPG files.
- iTunes - Check.
- Office Suite? Nope - not there. Have to install OpenOffice, which requires X11. I’ll do that tomorrow.
Here’s the great thing about the whole experience. Every scripting language I use for every day work is on the machine from the moment I opened the box, even my old familiar friend, the bash shell. The important software I use day to day is at least available for me to install.
My email, calendar and news reader? I use Google, for all of that, so there was no setup or importing of data required. I just log in and feel at home.
The loose ends I have to tie off at this point is moving all of my iTunes stuff to the new machine. I’ve found a few articles on this around the NET, but the volume of data I have to transfer is becoming prohibitive. For some reason, rsync just stops part way through the sync — but I’ll get this worked out.
I’m extremely impressed with the machine so far. It has all of the utility of Unix and all the beauty of a Mac. I’m really not sure what else anyone could ask for.
Related posts
Tagged with: apple, customer-experience, hardware, Macintosh, osx, Technology
- Apple Computer has unveiled their new Intel based machines. It looks like I will seriously have to consider the Mac as my next machine. (1)
- Apple has released iTunes 5.01. This release addresses some “stability issues” with the 5.0 release. Download it now. Comments Off
- Would you kill your best selling product in order to realize your vision and keep innovation happening in your market? Steve Jobs did. (2)
