Tiger

This annoys me.

Go into Mail and select the top-most message in your Inbox. Make sure your system sound volume is loud enough to be audible, then, in Mail, with that top-most message active, press the up-arrow key.

Did you hear a system alert sound?

On my PowerBook, sometimes I do and sometimes I don't... and that really ticks me off. I have confirmed this misbehavior on another PowerBook, too. I have no idea if it is limited to Mail or to the PowerBook or to a specific OS. I can't predict when it does or does not happen. But it annoys me.

Can anyone explain it?

Glenn Fleishman, over at the Seattle Times, has a [nice piece](http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2002532576_ptmacc01.html) about sharing on the Macintosh. In just a few paragraphs, he does a great job of describing two OS X's core technologies, AppleShare and Printer Sharing. Both make it easy for you to take advantage of all of the technology you have on your network, easily, with minimum setup and headache. Check it out!

First, a story: Back in high school, I got my first Mac. It was an all-in-one Mac Plus, which came with a whopping 1 MB of RAM, the brand new, double-sided 800 KB floppy drive, and a built-in SCSI port. It is this SCSI port around which our story revolves.

You see, after a week or so of use, I decided that 20 swaps of the MacWrite application and data disks was too much labor for just opening a document. I needed a hard drive, and that SCSI port was the answer. I got myself an external, 20MB hard drive and simply basked in it's glory: 20 megabytes! I couldn't even really conceive of how much space that was. The empty vistas of possibilities were dizzying.

Of course, that hard drive eventualy became too small. And now, 15 years later, the 40GB drive in my PowerBook, which once seemed equally enormous, is no longer satisfactory.

Two years ago, I got into video editing and discovered the (now) obvious fact that video files are big. More than big... they're *frikkin' huge!* Once I got over my initial shock, I decided to buy some blank CDs and offload files to make space. Eventually I switched to DVD-Rs because CDs were too small to hold much video. The problem is that, in order to burn 4GB onto a DVD, you need 4GB of blank space on your hard drive to cache the file you're burning. Since the free space on my internal drive was hovering right around 800MB, this was not an option.

So, echoes of high school in my mind, I bought myself an external hard drive. It's a firewire drive with a dizzying 160GB of space. I partitioned into two drives, one 100GB for storage and the other 60GB for backup. Then I was set. Right?

Wrong. Over the past year I've created several videos for school and, once finished, archived the various raw video, completed DV, iMovie and iDVD files onto the firewire drive. Problem is that that stuff adds up. Fast. Now my rediculously large external drive is filling up... I need another solution.

The answer is, again, DVDs. The problem now is how to fit video files - which are often 8 or 10 gigabytes! - onto DVDs. The answer is a technique called segmenting and I've found two methods, one free, one not.

**Segmenting - for a fee**

The first solution is to use Aladdin System's venerable compression program, [Stuffit Deluxe](http://www.digitalriver.com/v2.0-img/operations/aladdins/site/promos/stuffdlx_mac_home.html) for Macintosh. I recommend that version, as opposed to the earlier one you may already have, because they've finally broken the 2GB barrier.

You see, Stuffit has always compressed files, using some magic formula to turn a 10MB file into a 3MB archive which, when uncompressed, is exactly the same as before. But, with such large video files, even compression isn't good enough! My last movie, a 45-minute ordeal involving my son's first grade class discussing the alphabet, weighed in at 8GB, stuffed. This file was obviously too large to burn, even to a DVD. What's a guy to do?

Segment! This feature of the newest version auto-magically turns that 8GB file into three other archives, each just under 4GB in size (well, the third is actually much smaller, but you get the idea). I can then burn each of these segments to DVD-R and safely erase the orignal file (of course
DVD backups don't last forever, but then again, what does?).

So, there's the solution. Even the largest file can now be stuffed, segmented and burned, to create space on rapidly-filling hard drives. What's that you say? $80 too much to pay? Then let's do it... for free!

**Segmenting - for free**

Be warned. This method relies on some slick UNIX tools that are built into OS X. They're not hard to use, but you're going to have to - gasp! - use the Terminal. So, go ahead and launch it (/Applications/Utilities/Teminal). You will find yourself in your Home Direcory, the folder which lies at /Users/YourName/.

Your screen will say:

Welcome to Darwin!
[YourComputerName:~]YourLogin%

From now on, when I want you to type something into the Terminal, I will format the instuctions like this:

%Stuff you type

You should not type the `%` sign... it's just there so you know where you're supposed to be typing. Got it? Good. Let's have some geeky fun!

You should navigate to the folder that contains your honking big file. Let's say it's in your Home Folder. First thing you should do is jump out to the Finder and create a folder, in your Home, for this project. So create a folder called Big (for example) in your Home Folder. Back in the Terminal, type:

%cd Big

(Note that the case - upper or lower - matters to the Terminal. So be sure to get it right.) Now, if you give the command `ls`, like this:

%ls

...you will see a directory listing of everything in the Big folder. Right now, there's nothing there except the honking big file (let's call that "honk.mov"). Ready for the magic? Here's the command you should type:

% split -b 690m honk.mov honk_seg_

Before you do that, let's take a look at it. You're using the Unix "Split" command, which simply splits a file up into smaller files, according to the parameters you set (for more info, type `%man split` into the Terminal).

* The "-b" part tells the computer that you're going to measure the file size in bytes.
* The "690m" says that no single segment should be larger than 690MB.
* The next term, "honk.mov" is the name of the file you want to segment.
* The final term, "honk_seg_" is the name you want the Terminal to give to each segment it creates.

The Terminal will automatically add a suffix to each segemnt's file name, so you will get something like `honk_seg_aa`, `honk_seg_ab`, `honk_seg_ac` and so on. The command will take some time to run and won't give you any feedback, but as long as there's enough room on your hard drive and nothing terrible goes wrong, it will create as many segments as it needs to break the original up into pieces no larger than the 690MB you specified.

Why 690 MB? Good question! In this example, I imagined you wanted to burn the pieces to CDs, which are much cheaper than DVD-Rs. If you'd rather burn to DVD and save time, just adjust the size parameter of the split command to 4GB (which would actually be 4000m, or 4000MB.

Whichever way you set it, once it's done, you can simply burn each segment to disk in the Finder by dragging it onto a blank disk's icon and ctrl-clicking on the disk then choosing "Burn Disk..." from the pop-up menu.

Now, the last thing to talk about is how to re-join the segments in the future, to restore your file to former glory. The process is pretty straightforward: First you copy each segment from the CD/DVD onto your hard drive, putting them all into one folder. Then you wave your magic UNIX wand and tell the computer to re-join (or concatenate) the segments into one file. Here's the command:

% cat honk_seg_?? > honk.mov

Let's take that apart:

* The "cat" is the UNIX concatenate command (man cat), which joins files and outputs the result to another file, according to your specifications.
* The "honk_seg_??" tells the computer which files to join. You could list each segment by name, but the wildcard character,?, allows us to say, "Just use all the files that being with 'honk_seg_' OK?" The computer will grab honk_seg_aa, honk_seg_ab, etc, in order, and do the deed.
* The "> honk.mov" tells the machine the name of the new file you want it to create.

You should use the same name that the file had originally, before you segmented it. A good idea is to type out the command you will eventually use to re-jion the pieces, select it, and drag it out to the Desktop to create a text clipping. Then, burn that to the CD/DVD along with the first segment so that, in 5 years, when you pop a disk labelled "Honking Big Video - Part 1 of 6" into your DVD drive, you will have the exact command you need right at your fingertips.

Good luck, and happy segmenting!

(I got some of these instructions from feedback posted to [VersionTracker](http://web.archive.org/web/20041022115509/http://web.archive.org/web/20041022115509/http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/14956) by a nice person named robleroo. Thanks!)

This is remarkable. I just read about it at [Salad With Steve](http://web.archive.org/web/20041111063451/http://web.archive.org/web/20041111063451/http://saladwithsteve.com/osx/2004/11/word-completion-in-cocoa-apps.html#comments) and was blown away. When I saw it in action, I said a naughty word; you've got to check it out.

Open up TextEdit. This feature also works in all text-entry fields in Safari. Type the first couple of letters of a long word. I always spell "unnecessarily" wrong, so I used that. Once you type the beginning of the word (i.e., "unnec"), hit option-escape.

Unless you've done something wonky with your system-wide keyboard shortcuts, this should bring up the word-completion dialog from the Cocoa text editing engine. In other words, that little pop-up menu of words that begin with the letters you've typed will appear in any application that uses Cocoa's built-in text-editing engine (including any application you write using AppleScript).

I can't wait to figure out where else this works. Post the apps it works in as Comments as you discover them!

Here's a neat one you might not know: Instead of invoking Exposé or Dashboard by hitting F9. F10, F11 or F12, you can press and hold the Function Keys, instead. If you do, the effect you're calling will happen for only as long as you keep the key held down. Once you release the F-Key, things will go back to the way they were.

I use this all the time to check my iCal Events Dashboard widget. I press and hold F12, look at what time my next appointment is, then release it to go right back to what I was doing.