I just picked up a Toshiba USB thumb-drive. Nice and cheap so I figured it would be fine.
But it is one of these silly U3 jobbies. You can install software on the drive which can run from the drive without being installed on the host computer. Great if you are running Windows. On a Mac, plugging in the drive mounts the drive and a 6mb CD image which you can’t delete. So ejecting the drive means having to eject the CD image and the drive.
Not difficult, just annoying. So I searched for u3 uninstall, and found a program on the U3 website. One of the reasons you can give to download the package is “I use mac/linux” – that gave me hope. But the stupid package is a windows executable. How is that supposed to help me on a mac or a linux box.
Anyway, to stop ranting, I ran up vmware and uninstalled the software. But it is just stupid.
I know there seems little reason to have a virtual printer that prints PDF files on a Mac, every program can use the print dialogue to create a PDF.
But in a hybrid network of Windows and Macs it makes good sense and allows you to create PDF files from any program on a Windows PC. Just use CUPS-PDF to setup a PDF virtual printer on a Mac, and share the printer.
Now every Windows PC on the network can create PDF files printing to this shared printer.
I wanted to add a shared windows printer in Leopard. I couldn’t browse it, so I needed the advanced printer adding dialog thingo. (I am pretty sure that is it’s techical name).
In Tiger I just held “option” while clicking the add printer button, but no such luck in Leopard.
The solution is stupidly easy but seems a pretty sideways approach. Right click (control+click) on the tool bar in the add printer dialog and customize the toolbar. Add the “Advanced” button. Now I hust had to click that button and enter the smb:// URL of the printer. Easy.
