Due to my being a remote employee, I get to juggle with PDF files quite a bit. A great tool for common PDF manipulations (changing page order, combining files, rotating pages etc) has proven to be pdftk. Sadly, a current version for Mac OS X is not available on their homepage. In addition, it is annoying (to say the least) to compile, which is why all three third-party package management systems that I know of (MacPorts, fink, as well as homebrew), last time I checked, did not have it at all, or their versions were broken.

Now I wouldn’t be a geek if that kept me from compiling it myself. I took some hints from anoved.net who was nice enough to also provide a compiled binary, but sadly did not include the shared libraries it relies on.

Instead, I made an installer package that’ll install pdftk itself as well as the handful of libraries you need into /usr/local. Once you ran this, you can open Terminal.app, and typing pdftk should greet you as follows:

$ pdftk
SYNOPSIS
       pdftk <input PDF files | - | PROMPT>
            [input_pw <input PDF owner passwords | PROMPT>]
            [<operation> <operation arguments>]
            [output <output filename | - | PROMPT>]
            [encrypt_40bit | encrypt_128bit]
(...)

You can download the package here: pdftk1.41_OSX10.6.dmg

I only tested it on OS X 10.6.2, if you use it on older versions, please let me know in the comments if it worked.

When skimming through my pending Mac OS X upgrades this morning I noticed one saying:

This update eliminates the noise made by the optical disk drive during system startup and wake from sleep on MacBook computers.

Wow. As long as I’ve been using a Mac, the sweep-sweep noise has been characteristical for a Mac startup sound, reminiscent of the floppy drive seek sound computers made when they still came with floppy drives (yes, dear children, I am that old).

I wonder what this was for in the first place. Maybe to find out reliably if there is a disc in the drive already? <crystal ball>Possibly, the operating system did not check again and just relied on the hardware status flag being set correctly on startup, and if it was wrong, evil things could happen?</crystal ball> And now, almost suddenly, the Mac engineers found out that it is unnecessary altogether? The wonders of Snow Leopard.

What comes next? Removing the gong on boot to avoid Mac-obsessed college kids from making fools of themselves during lectures?

For the longest time, I was sending my laptop to “hibernation” mode every night. Why? Not because I particularly mind the minute power consumption it might have while sleeping, but because it would randomly wake up during the course of the night. My “zombie laptop” would particularly annoy me because it’d log back into my messaging service in my absence (thus prompting people to think I am awake at 3 a.m.), get unnecessarily warm (due to its being closed), and when I opened it back up, it’d not switch its monitor back on (due to a feature that OS X calls “clamshell mode”).

Today, I had enough, and after a little more googling, I stumbled across a comment in a macosxhints article mentioning Bluetooth settings: Apparently, there’s a setting for letting bluetooth devices power your Mac up from sleep. As I have a bluetooth-based wireless Mac keyboard, I tried out switching that setting off — and long story short, it seems to have worked.

If you have the same problem, uncheck the following box in System Settings / Bluetooth / Advanced Settings to give it a shot:

Happy zombie-Mac killing!

Yesterday, Apple released a system update that is supposed to fix the severe “keyboard unresponsive” bug in OS X Leopard:

With hardly 800K in size, the patch is a lightweight that could have a big influence. If that’s not the right place to use the word of the year, where else: W00t.

I just installed it and so far, the keyboard works fine, but of course I haven’t sent the box to sleep yet, so by now I can’t tell yet if the patch actually fixed the bug. Of course, the reboot the update asked for promptly resulted in a kernel panic (great start), but luckily, another reboot went through without problems.

If you like, please let me know in the comments if the patch worked for you or not. Good luck!

(Thanks Justin, Jean Pierre and Marc, who all told me about the update being available.)