Negative Space: Macintosh
- After Authentication
- Keep your System Preferences padlocks locked unless you are in the process of making changes.
- Apple switches to Intel processors
- Apple’s decision to switch to Intel means little more than that they are out of the business of commissioning custom CPUs. This ensures that Apple’s CPUs are never slower than those used by Windows, and makes a lot of sense.
- AppleScript Basics
- Basic AppleScript to automate the use of your Macintosh.
- Automatic startup items
- One of the folders that can go in /System/Library/ and /Library/ is “StartupItems”. StartupItems contains scripts that run when the computer starts up. These scripts run as root.
- Breaking In to Mac OS X
- Sometimes Apple’s security appears to be akin to the Roman defensive structure: heavily arm the border, but leave the interior unprotected. It works, as long as no one gets through the border. But once they break through, there are some relatively simple ways to gain root access.
- Case matters on the web
- When you use a Macintosh, you’re used to things being relatively straightforward and simple. The web, unfortunately, is based on a strange set of standards where Occam’s razor is a bloody and dull weapon.
- Create a new Admin account
- If you use an administrative account as your regular login account, anyone with a few seconds of access to your computer can create a new administrative account
- Installing OS X Server 10.5 from the command line
- I ran into some very odd trouble installing Mac OS X Server 10.5 (Leopard) on one of our G5 Xserves. So I attempted to use the command-line install to get the error message.
- King Ludd
- There are some decisions that should be left to experts, and some that should not. It makes sense that if you leave acquisitions to experts, they will recommend acquiring what they’re familiar with. And if you acquiesce to a popular vote only among experts, they will naturally choose a course of action that requires more experts.
- The Macintosh SE/30: Forward-Looking Design
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In 1990, a USD team of faculty and programmers created an interactive, multimedia history and ethics project, now on display on a Macintosh SE/30 in my office.
- Macs still easier to use?
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Twenty years down, does buying a Macintosh still save help desk time and user trouble? According to IBM, it does.
- Negative Space Software Select
- Recommended software to make serving and browsing easier.
- Nothing is obvious on a computer
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Some things are only obvious after we know about them.
- OS X Experiences
- A log of my experience installing OS X from the supposedly non-beta version 1.0.
- Persistence of Vision Macintosh Basics
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This tutorial will get you acquainted with the most important preferences and menu items in Persistence of Vision for the Mac, including editing your scene file and creating animations.
- POV-Ray Animation
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Normally, you’ll probably want to create your animations frame by frame. But for simple animations, you can have POV-Ray create the movie directly.
- POV-Ray Application Preferences
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You’ll need to set some items in the preferences before you start using POV-Ray.
- POV-Ray Scene Preferences
- The scene’s preferences are where you’ll control most of POV-Ray’s behavior: how big your image will be, whether it is animated, and how high its quality is.
- Save Me Time, Save Yourself Trouble: Buy Macintosh
- Why the Internet support specialist wants you to buy Macintosh. Hell hath no fury like a Windows user who discovers the Macintosh advantage.
- Scene Quality
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You can greatly increase scene quality by turning on anti-aliasing.
- Scene Size
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The size of your image directly affects the time it takes to render.
- Single User Mode
- If someone has physical access to your computer, they can do a lot more; you can’t ultimately protect yourself from all physical-access hacks, but you can make them more time-consuming.
- Waiting for sudo
- Sudo remains enabled for five minutes from anywhere on your system after you use it.
- Webserving on Eight Megabytes a Day
- This article is a blast from the past. Yes, I used to run Negative Space on eight megabytes. Over a 14.4 modem. Uphill. Both ways. Presumably you could still do it, but it would have to be static files for the most part (and you might want to hook that Macintosh up to Ethernet).
- Year 2000 Minority
- I appear to be in the minority among those writing about Y2K: I don’t feel it to be a world-killer, but I also do not recommend ignoring it.
More Information
- Folklore: The Original Macintosh
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“Anecdotes about the development of Apple's original Macintosh, and the people who made it.”
- Macintosh 1984 commericial
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Macintosh’s 1984 ad riffing on 1984. “Today we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created for the first time in all history a garden of pure ideology, where each worker may bloom, secure from the pests of any contradictory true thoughts.”
- Revolution in the Valley•
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- The Macalope
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“Born of the earth, forged in fire, the Macalope was branded “non-standard” and “proprietary” by the IT world and considered a freak of nature. Part man, part Mac, part antelope, the Macalope set forth on a quest to save his beloved platform.”
