Install XQuartz for XWindows support on Mac OS.
Start an xterm.
ssh -X user@ipaddress
-X enables XWindows forwarding. Any XWindows app you start at that point will get forwarded to your Mac.
Mac Pro 2008: dead ATI 200 XT GPU replaced with not so dead Nvidia 120 GT
The ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT that came standard in the 2008 Mac Pro was a good looking card. I mean, chrome flames?! But unfortunately in this case, mine died:
I primarily used this card only to access the Mac boot screen to switch between MacOS and Windows 10, as my other card, an Nvidia 750ti doesn’t support the boot screen. Once the ATI card died, I was stuck in Windows 10 and couldn’t boot back into MacOS.
Not really needing an upgrade, just a replacement that supports the boot screen, I picked up a cheap Nvidia 120 GT on ebay for $30. Nowhere near as flashy looking as the ATI:
Got the card installed, and it works great:
Turns out the fan on that ATI card was also the noisiest fan in my Mac Pro. Now with the new Nvidia card, my Mac Pro is barely audible. I have 2 SSDs and one 2.5″ HDD, so other than the system fans, I guess with low usage it really shouldn’t be spinning up the fans that loud anyway. Turns out this new card is significantly quieter. Bonus!
Bulk converting image file formats with MacOS Preview
The Preview app on MacOS has a ton of useful features, from annotating images to converting file formats. Recently I had a bunch on .png screenshots that I needed to convert to jpegs. While I was aware you can Export an image file in Preview and save it in any other supported format, I was looking for a quicker way to bulk convert a large number of files.
Turns out, as explained in this article, if you select a group of images in Finder and double-click one of them to open them all in one go, you can select all the images from their thumbnails on the left:
… then from File click ‘Export Selected’. From the dialog chosoe where to write the converted files, and press Options button to change the file format. Done!
Converting Mac OS 9 .pict screenshot files to jpegs
The Shift+Cmd+4 key combo is common from all the way back to Mac OS 9 (and maybe earlier?) to all Mac OS X and current MacOS versions and takes a screenshot of a selected area on the screen. On current MacOS versions the file saved to your desktop is in png format (Mac OS X versions around 10.4 saved screenshots in .tiff format), but on OS 9 it’s in a less common .pict format.
By today’s standards the .pict file format is even more unusual as it uses Classic Mac OS file system features called a ‘resource fork‘ and a ‘data fork’. The issue with copying these .pict files from a Classic Mac OS filesystem to a modern file system is described here – when you copy the file you get the ‘resource fork’ but lose the ‘data fork’, in this case losing most of the image file data. When I tried this and viewed or converted the file on MacOS each of the files only has a section of the image, or none at all.
To convert to a jpeg or other more commonly used format today, this post suggests using the Resize! app, which is still downloadable from kstudio.net.
The trouble with this approach is if you’ve already copied the .pict files from OS 9 to a SMB network drive, you’ve already lost part of the file and it won’t convert as expected.
The best option as described in the first post is to convert to a jpeg or gif on OS 9 before moving elsewhere. I’ve seen posts suggesting to use Quicktime Viewer, but the version I have on mg G4 running OS 9.2.2 doesn’t have a Save As or Export feature, not that I could find anyway.
Instead what I found that worked for me was to download GraphicsConverter from Mac Garden here and use Save As changing the file extension to .jpg
