Apple’s online store has refurbished Macs for sale. These are often a very good deal — today’s selections range from 13-26% off the original prices.

Refurbished Macs carry the same full one-year warranty as new ones and are eligible for the free printer rebate and AppleCare. (Aside: if you don’t need the support, your credit card’s extended warranty protection many be enough.)

But if you look right now, there’s only one refurbished MacBook:

No, Apple hasn’t sold every refurbished MacBook they own. They’re only sold out for today.

If you check back at 1 AM PDT (4 AM EDT), you’ll see a much larger selection. (Didn’t see much? Try again the next day.)

This means by the time the west coast wakes up, the east coast early birds have snapped up the best deals. Suggestion: stay up late.

Recently, my friend Rob posed a question to twitter:

Is Mac OS X 10.5.7 the single biggest patch Apple has ever released, or just one of the biggest?

I thought that was an easy question to anwser.

I was wrong.

I looked all over the web for this information, and no one seemed to have it in one place.

So, I present to you: the comprehensive Mac OS X software update chart, current as of May 28, 2009. When the downloads are still available, I’ve linked to them on Apple’s site.

Here are all of the Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) updates Apple has released. Leopard updates are all universal (four-way fat: ppc, ppc64, i386 and x86_64).

Answering Rob’s question

There are four different Mac OS X 10.5.7 updates: delta, combo, server and server combo. Each of the updates is the largest in its category.

The 10.5.7 delta update narrowly edges out the 10.5.3 update (by 22 MB). However, the 10.5.7 server update is actually 17 MB smaller than the 10.5.6 server update.

The combo update is 61 MB bigger than its nearest competitor; the server combo is 68 MB larger than its closest rival.

Next, the updates for Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger). The first four Tiger updates are PowerPC-only; after that, Apple released both PowerPC and Intel updates. Some of the later server updates were universal.

Back in Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther), the chart returns to simplicity. All of these updates are PowerPC-only.

Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) has one notable exception. Mac OS X 10.2.7 only shipped with some Power Mac G5s and was never available as as standalone software update.

At this point, things get difficult. The charts have some holes in them. I’m not sure if the updates never shipped, or have simply vanished. Searching Apple’s support site and Google failed to turn up any useful links. If you can help fill in the blanks, leave a comment.

Some good resources for Mac OS X update information:

• Apple: Mac OS X build information
• Apple: CPU-specific builds (Intel)
• Apple: CPU-specific builds (PPC)
• The X Lab’s updates page

The Target popup menu lets you determine the active target. The active target gets built when you click “Build” or “Build & Go.”

But what about the default target? What is it, and why do you care? Well, if you build from the command line—using xcodebuild—the default target (and only the default target) gets built.

So how do you set it? I looked around in the help, and it wasn’t obvious. Turns out the answer is in the xcodebuild man page:

By default, xcodebuild builds the first target listed in your project, with the default build configuration. The order of the targets is a property of the project and is the same for all users of the project. The active target and active build configuration properties are set for each user of the project and can vary from user to user.

The default target is the first target listed. In this example, the default target and active target are the same — The “Palm Pre UI” Cocoa application:

Suppose we wanted to make the “Shell tool” command-line tool the default target. Simply drag it so it becomes the first item on the list:

Now we’re done. The active target is still the “Palm Pre UI” Cocoa application, but the default target is the “Shell tool” command-line tool:

I knew I could do this with an SSH tunnel. I just wasn’t sure how. There are lots of pages explaining how to set up SSH tunnels and proxies, but none were very clear or complete, and they didn’t explain what you had to do on the web browser end.

Step 1: Set up the SSH tunnel

ssh -D 8080 -f -C -q -N user@hostname.ca

Step 2: Set up System Preferences

This is for Safari and other WebKit-based browsers. Note: this will also affect Mail and other CFNetwork-based applications.

1. Select Apple > System Preferences
2. Click Network
3. Select the network interface you wish to use (i.e. AirPort)
4. Click Advanced
5. Click Proxies
6. Select Configure Proxies > Manually (only necessary on Leopard and earlier)
7. Check the box beside SOCKS Proxy
8. fill in “localhost” and “8080″
9. Click OK
10. Click Apply

Step 3: Set up Firefox

1. Select Firefox > Preferences
2. Click Advanced
3. Click Network
4. Click Settings
5. Click “Manual proxy configuration”
6. Besides SOCKS Host, fill in “localhost” and “8080″
   Do not fill in any other fields, including “HTTP Proxy”
7. Click SOCKS v5
8. Click OK

1. automatically, after a set time period
2. after a mouse click

If you’ve picked option (2), you see a “fast forward” overlay when you click the mouse:

I dislike this. Fortunately, there’s a preference to turn this off.

FotoMagico lets you export your slide shows as standalone player applications, and distribute them to anyone with a Mac.

I found one problem, however. Even when you turn off “Visualize Interactive Control,” the standalone player does not respect this preference. That means you always get the “fast forward” overlay. Yuck.

Fortunately, there is a workaround. If you peek inside the bundle for FotoMagico, you’ll notice it has a CFBundleIdentifier of com.boinx.fotomagico.

If you run defaults read com.boinx.fotomagico before and after setting the preference, you’ll see one line appear:
"PrefsKey_DisplayOverlays" = 0;

Now, look at the Info.plist inside the player. Its CFBundleIdentifier is com.boinx.fotomagico.player.

This means, the fix is simply:
defaults write com.bound.fotomagico.player PrefsKey_DisplayOverlays 0

Know your instrument

• Inquisitor: Google inside Safari
• Quicksilver and LaunchBar: application launchers

Collaboration

• SubEthaEdit: collaborative text editor
• Screen Sharing: built in to Mac OS X Leopard
• Address Book: built in to Mac OS X
• Teleport: share one keyboard and mouse between multiple Macs
• Adium: multi-protocol instant messaging

Audiovisual

• Audio Hijack Pro and WireTap Studio: record any audio on your Mac
• VLC and Perian: play pretty much any video

Eliminate Distractions

• Spirited Away: hides unused applications
• Writeroom: full screen text editing

Save Your Ass

• DiskWarrior: recover damaged drives

The slides

| View | Upload your own

Hold down the option key while choosing  > About This Mac, and the menu item will change to “System Profiler.”

That’s much quicker than the old method of (i) select About This Mac, (ii) click “More Info” (iii) close the about window.

The official blurb:

Bug reports that are complete and reproducible help to isolate known issues in system and application software, making a solution much more likely. Learn the bug reporting best practices that Apple has developed in partnership with our third-party developer community. Observe the key components of a great bug report, and how they could expedite your bugs through our processes. You’ll also learn to apply these practices to your own bug processes.

The sound bite version is “I’m teaching developers how to write bugs.”

It’s Wednesday, June 13 at 9 am in The Marina.

Here are some comments from people who’ve attended my previous talks:

• “Paul’s presentation style kicks ass.”
• “Great lively presentation and very interesting content!”
• “Flows well, Paul is a great presenter!”
• “Great information.”