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How to disable Chrome’s Print Preview in Chrome 20+ (on the Mac)

2012/08/04 by

Google introduced their Print Preview functionality back in the Chrome 15 days, and until Chrome 20 or so, you could go into “about:flags” and turn it off. In Chrome 20 or so, they took that option away. Now all the threads online are full of “just use the “Command-Option-P” crap1. While I rarely print, I do frequently “Save as PDF”, and I find the process, and output much easier/better using the system dialog.

But! It’s still there. Just not easy to set via the GUI. So, open up a terminal, and paste in the following:

defaults write com.google.Chrome DisablePrintPreview -boolean true

And then quit and relaunch Chrome. Enjoy your native print dialog.

Thanks to the Chromium Admin documentation here. I knew this had to be there still for all us admin’s that want to enforce this stuff on labs, etc.

  1. Google seems to think Adobe had the right idea when they created their own Print dialog, when in fact, it’s really stupid. Augment the dialog, don’t replace it with something completely different than every other app [↩]
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Mac Pro 1,1 CPU Upgrade

2012/07/25 by

My work machine is a Mac Pro 1,1, and it’s obviously getting a bit long in the tooth. I upgraded the video card from an X1900 to a Radeon HD 5770 (which works fine) last year, and just yesterday, I undertook the process of installing two Xeon X5355‘s rather than the stock 5150 processors. The process is pretty simple (I’d call it a medium difficulty), but is easy enough to follow instructions online1 (the hardest part was removing the cowl from the processors). You’ll need a 3mm 9″ hex key (I happened to have one), and some thermal compound (I used Arctic Silver 5).

The processors I used were purchased off ebay for all of $54/each with free shipping. BTW, make sure to buy the SLAEG revision, as this version halves the idle power usage down to about what the stock CPUs use2. Install time was about an hour with pulling everything apart, and doing the thermal compound correctly (clean the CPU/heatsink, prime/tint both surfaces, etc).

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  1. I’ve actually found this to be the best written instructions on getting MOST of the way there [↩]
  2. The stock 5150′s use 24W idle, and about 65W full power. The X5355 SLAEG use 25W idle, and 120W at full power. Decreased power usage seems to be from the SLAEG supporting Demand Based Switching. [↩]
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Final Cut Studio 7 co-existing with FCP X

2012/06/14 by

Here at work, we have FCS7 and FCPX on all our lab machines, but we’ve always had a weird issue where the Mac App Store (MAS) shows updates being available, but they won’t install due to some error. After thinking about it for a while, I took at look at the Final Cut Studio 7 apps that have FCP X equivalents (Final Cut Pro.app, Motion.app, and Compressor.app), and interestingly, I found in Contents that each had a _MASReceipt directory. Interesting. It seems at some point the MAS put receipt files in the older versions of the apps, and that confused it thinking that there were updates.

Anyway, removing these directories from each of the apps fixed the issue. Seems like a bug on Apple’s part. =/

UPDATE: Upon looking further, it actually seems like the MAS put the receipts in the wrong apps. The _MASReceipt directories were in the old versions, but not in the proper versions. This SEEMS to be because, for our students sake, I renamed the MAS versions of FCPX apps X.app1 but left the older versions by their original names. Once we switch to using FCPX primarily, I’ll file the old versions away, but for now, it just appears that Apple does things based on the name of the app, and not any kind of application signing. At least, in 10.6.8. =/ I was, however, able to move the _MASReceipt directories into their respective, correct, apps, and the MAS saw that, and now reports them as installed. Weird.

  1. So, Final Cut Pro X.app, Motion X.app, and Compressor X.app [↩]
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