mac geekery

Can anyone point me to a good reference on ipfw? I'd like to be able to set up rules such as "allow port X from address Y on interface Z" rather than the standard OS X all-or-nothing approach for each port. Bonus points if theres a way to do this customisation without disabling the built-in firewall controls in System Preferences.

I have an ancient IBM ThinkPad 380ED that I want to use for an installation of Ubuntu linux. I've downloaded the ISO image from the Ubuntu site, but no matter how I burn it to CD I can't get it to boot on the ThinkPad. So far I have used hdiutil to burn the ISO file itself to a disk, and Finder to burn the contents of said ISO to a CD. Neither works. Inside the ISO image is an "install" folder that contains a copy of SBM (smart boot manager), which went written to a diskette using rawrite does boot the ThinkPad, but produced a cryptic error code when used to subsequently boot from the CD drive. There's more »

I've kinda noticed some slowdowns with my iMac over the time I've had it, but it wasn't until I tried playing around with a friend's Powerbook that I noticed how snappy that ran. So, I've started disabling stuff I don't need, and deleting applications I don't use.

I've turned off the http server, mysql and most other stuff I can remember I've turned on.

What I am interested in is what stuff seems to take up the most resources, or what other people have removed from their systems? Whether just having Applications sitting around makes the OS run slower. How the hell I stop 6 copies of nfsd starting, when I don't use NFS anyways?! That kinda thing. There's more »

So, here’s a doozy I’m dealing with, and it’s a bitch to hunt down, lemme tell ya: I can’t get fonts to show up in Font Book. Well, my fonts.

The system comes with 119 fonts by default. When I make a new user and add in a font it works fine. Back on my user if I add a font it drops to 89 fonts and doesn’t show my font at all. If I add a font straight to the ~/Library/Fonts/ folder it will not show up.

I’ve deleted the ATS preferences, the Font Book preferences, and restored the font collections to their defaults from a new user. I’m stumped. Anyone else run into this?

I have been using Mail.app since getting my G4 Powerbook almost two years ago. I have six active POP accounts that I check automatically through Mail. Over time the count of messages that appears to be downloading, and the number of new messages that actually appear in my inbox, have diverged. Currently when I download my mail there are 195 messages that appear to download and yet don't appear in any mailbox. Looking at the activity window (COMMAND-0) while d/l the mail shows that all the phantom headers belong to one account. I have contacted my ISP (pair.com) and they can find no evidence of the messages there. I have used the web mail component offered by pair to access the offending account and sure enough, there aren't messages there after I've downloaded my mail. I do have Mail set to remove messages immediately from the server. There's more »