Replace TenFourFox Icon

So I'm reading people are loving the new TenFourFox, Firefox 4 custom made for PPCs on Tiger, except for one nagging issue. They don't like the icon. I know. Some people are very particular about this. I don't know what to say. It's not the ugliest icon I've ever seen. That award goes to the original icon for Phoenix Slides. In fact, I kind of like it. It has a certain kind of whimsy.

But being that people shouldn't have a stupid icon separating themselves from probably the most valuable piece of software you can run on Tiger, here's a quick tutorial on changing it. This will also apply to changing the icon to any other application.

Step 1) Choose the image file you want to use. Here's a sample png you can download. It's the Firefox globe without the tasty critter:



Step 2) If your image file isn't already in .icns format, you need to convert it using img2icns.app (link goes to the Tiger version). It's very simple, just drag and drop. You should now have your .icns file.

Step 3) Right+click or control+click on TenFourFox.app and choose "Show Package Contents." Go into Contents --> Resources, and there you will find a file called firefox.icns. Rename it something like firefox-old.icns, then name your replacement icon firefox.icns and move it into the same folder.

Step 4) Close everything and start up Firefox (if you already had it in your dock, you should remove it first). You should see your new icon.

Update Your Mactubes

I've written a bit about Mactubes for OS X before. It's among the best kept secrets for PPC users as it allows smooth playback of Youtube videos even on something as low end as a Sawtooth. All you do is choose Quicktime for playback in the preferences, and Mactubes ignores the flash wrapper and plays back the videos as mp4 files. Much much easier on the CPU.

However, there's a chink in Mactubes's armor. Every once in a while, Youtube changes something in the urls Mactubes uses to retrieve the mp4's, causing Quicktime playback to go dead. You get a popup alert saying something like, "Can not open video. Please open URL with browser." Luckily this is a temporary problem as all it requires is a minor update from the developer, and everything's fixed. And luckier still, the developer is very prompt about providing updates for when this happens.

So anytime Mactubes gives you a popup alert like the above, wait a day or two, and by then the developer will likely have an updated version for you to download. And we can all safely return to wasting hours and hours watching random videos on the internet:)

Getting Conky To Display Your iBook or Powerbook Battery

I couldn't figure out how to get Conky, a lightweight system monitor for Linux, to display the battery charge on the G3 iBook given that most of the example conkyrc files I saw were for the Intel architecture and used ACPI or APM for power management and monitoring, neither of which is utilized on PPC machines. So off to Google I went.

Long story short, if I knew to google "conky pb_battery" it would have saved me a whole lot of time. It turns out you need to insert the variable pb_battery in your conkyrc file like this: under the TEXT section at the bottom insert {pb_battery percent} in the appropriate spot accompanied by whatever text you want displayed with it, like "Battery:" so that it displays out "Battery: 93%" or somesuch.

percent isn't the only item within the variable you can display. There's also status and time. status shows whether the battery is "fully charged, charging, discharging, or absent (running on AC)."* time shows "the time remaining until the battery will be fully charged or discharged at current rate."* Note that under percent and time, nothing will be displayed if battery is fully charged or is running on AC power. Also note that you can only specify one item. Your variable must read either {pb_battery percent} or {pb_battery status} or {pb_battery time}.

Or if you want to do all this commando style, you can monitor your battery from the command line. Just type cat /proc/pmu/battery_0, and you'll get the output you want.

*Quotes taken from Conky's website.

One last note: the monospace font makes it look like there's a space between "{" and "pb_battery". There isn't. Just copy and paste for the right syntax.

When Mac Cultists Attack

I love Mac forums. I love Mac forums for the information they give. I love them for the community they foster. I love them for all sorts of reasons. But most of all, I think I love them for the occasional outbreaks of genuine cultism in response to what can seem the most innocuous question.

You may have observed the same phenomena yourselves. The process invariably starts like this. Some schlep newbie will come along asking innocently, "Hi, can anyone suggest an alternative to Apple's [insert name here].app? Thanks."

Then the first response comes. "I'm curious. What is your problem with Apple's [insert name here].app? Perhaps I can assist you."

At this point, the victim has no idea what they've walked into. "No problems. I'm just 'thinking differently' as they say. :)"

"I don't appreciate the appropriation of that tagline, and I'm sure you are in violation of the board's code of conduct. I will say again, what is your problem with [insert name here].app? Please respond with specifics."

"Sorry, no offense intended," the OP responds. "I'm really just looking for an answer to my original question. I really wasn't looking to get in a debate about the pros and cons of one particular app. Just looking more for a list of alternatives."

"Listen, troll," a moderator jumps in, "if you continue to be unresponsive, I'm gonna shut down this thread. We can't help you if you won't help us."

Another poster chimes in. "[insert name here].app works for me! I love [insert name here].app!"

The OP bravely weathers the storm. "That's great, and I appreciate that others may have different tastes which is why I'm asking for alternatives. So I'll ask any lurkers, do you know of any alternatives to [insert name here].app?"

Another poster expresses their concern. "I have to say, I'm disturbed by your increasingly hostile attitude which is indicative of a borderline personality disorder. Perhaps rather than question the utility of [insert name here].app, you should look within yourself for the answer to what is truly missing in your life. With all humility, I myself have done so when some of Apple's software have come up lacking at first glance, and I'm a much richer person for it. Good luck with your journey."

"Whuh?"

"That's it," the moderator says. "I'm locking down this thread. The OP can go to Yahoo Answers if he wants to keep up this crap. This is a Mac forum. We will not have our community denigrated by trolls who would slap Steve's hand that feeds them. Best wishes."

Some may accuse me of exaggerating, and I will concede that the above is a composite rather than a re-creation of a single thread, but my larger point about cultism stands. And stumbling upon these incidents of insanity is what, in this day and age, makes my day.

Disappearing HFS Plus Partitions After Installing Debian Linux

Let's say you want to dual boot Linux and Mac OS 9 on that relative's shiny old iBook that's been sitting around gathering dust to show her that, no, the technology doesn't control you, you control the technology. Let's also say that Debian's developers don't tell you that installing Debian on a machine with another partition already housing Mac OS 9 will cause said partition to disappear. What happens? Chaos! Mass hysteria! People at each other's throats, civililation as we know it collapsing before our eyes...

Okay, maybe Debian PPC doesn't have enough users for that to happen, but it would've been nice to know that installing Debian on a two partition, dual boot drive would have the above effect ahead of time. It would have saved me a lot of panic and subsequent googling of phrases like "Debian Mac OS nuked" and "Debian ate my Mac OS." I would have also presumably known that the solution is incredibly simple assuming you have your original Mac OS install disks.

The partition doesn't actually disappear, mind you. You can still "see" it when booted into Debian by mounting the partition. But it no longer functions as a boot volume. Not in yaboot. Not even in Open Firmware will it recognize it as a boot volume.

So here's how you fix it. Start up with the Mac OS install disk and, from Drive Setup, update drivers. That's it. Done. I guess the partition program in the Debian installer somehow flutzes up the driver partitions, but updating the drivers solves it. I hope I saved someone out there some time.

OS X Maintenance Voodoo

One of the things I've liked about using Linux on the iBook is that whatever maintenance goes on goes on strictly in the background. Seriously, whatever it's doing to ensure safe and reliable operations, I don't want to be bothered with it. Just do your thing, Mr. (or in the case of the icebook) Ms. Computer, and I'll happily continue surfing/writing/audiophiling with nary a worry or distraction.

Things are different in OS X. At least we're told. Ever since I started using it, I've been informed by people more knowledgable than me that you had to keep your Mac "clean." One of the earliest utilities for this was Cocktail, which ran maintenance scripts to clear out old log files. Now, these scripts were set to run periodically in the background, but because they didn't reliably run on schedule some users felt it necessary to run these manually with apps like Cocktail. 'Cause having log files build up to literally a few megabytes of disk space was an intolerable situation.

As OS X passed from Jaguar to Panther to Tiger to Leopard/Snow Leopard, many other "maintenance" apps appeared on scene, probably most prominatly Onyx. This utility does all the maintenance you could ever want. It runs maintenance scripts, it clears caches, and repairs permissions, etc. And all of it is a complete waste of your time.

That's right. Running maintenance scripts are a waste of your time. Clearing caches are a waste of your time. Repairing permissions, same thing. As a matter of routine "maintenance," these actions not only waste your time in executing them, but in the case of clearing caches, will actually make your computer operate slower. The only reason you should ever clear caches or repair permissions is if something's going wrong, i.e. if you're troubleshooting. And maintenance is not troubleshooting. In fact, I'd even say that repairing permissions and clearing caches are almost always a waste of time in troubleshooting, too. The only surefire troubleshooting method I've found is Google. It's uncanny how no matter what problem I'm encountering, some other user has had the same problem and has written about it in an easy-to-locate search result.

In OS X, there is only one form of routine maintenance you need to be aware of: keep ten percent of your hard drive space free. If your hard drive fills up too much and lacks the space to create a proper-sized swap file, it will lead to major slowdowns. If all your applications start to feel sluggish over time, that's probably the cause.

So free yourselves from your fellow Machead's tyranny of maintenance. Life's too short. In over four years of running the same Tiger install, I haven't done any of that stuff since the early days when I didn't know any better, and it still runs as fast and smooth as the day I got it.

Firefox 4 on PPC

One of the worries of finding an operating system you like and wanting to stick with it is that the great Browser Wars will leave your OS behind. Such as it is with OS X Tiger. Tiger is the last version to support Classic mode. It has all the vital modern technologies. It's not so hard on the GPU. In other words, it's Leopard/Snow Leopard without so much eye candy. And less ugly. And more efficient. And not as buggy. Okay, so you get why I want to stick with Tiger.

However, there was one catch. Over the course of the last year, all the major browsers announced they were ceasing support for Tiger. In fact, I can't think of any browsers that continue to support Tiger, unless you count Camino 2.0.6, which is powered by an old Gecko 1.9.0 engine. Even Camino's alpha 2.1 prerelease uses Gecko 1.9.2, which is the same as Firefox 3.6.x, the final Firefox version to support Tiger. So how long would it be before the current incarnations of Safari, Firefox, Camino, and Opera became hopelessly obsolete and surfing the web becomes what it must be like for iCab users of today, or for Netscape 1.0 users when frames became widely adopted? (If you don't get that last reference, stick your nose back in your touch screen. There's nothing to see here.)

Well, it looks like we'll never have to find out thanks to TenFourFox. It's a fork of Firefox 4, heretofore available only to Leopard/Snow Leopard Intel users, that runs on PPC Macs running Leopard and Tiger. There are some advanced features that won't work because they require Barftel processors, but the new rendering engine is there, as well as HTML 5 and CSS 3 support.

So how does it measure up? I took it for a spin and found it to have a similar feel as 3.6 as far as speed. It's more of a memory hog, but being in beta, that's to be expected. I read one report that repeatedly pressing the back button will cause a crash, and I can confirm that. It also seems to have trouble opening a bookmark when no window is previously open. But other than that, it's stable. There are some GUI changes that I suppose are a matter of taste, but I mostly liked what I saw.

This is a promising start, and maybe I can hold off a few years switching to Linux on my everyday desktop just to find a modern, supported browser.

Update: TenFourFox 4.0 Final is out. Javascript much improved over early betas. This is now my default browser.