MacPorts and tiff2pdf

One of my favorite commands in the Unix-World is tiff2pdf since it produces nice pdfs with a very small file size especially from black/white tiff images from a scanner. To get this command on a Mac, install MacPorts as can be found on this page: http://www.macports.org/. After successful install, you can install the tiff2pdf command by installing the package tiff. Open a terminal and cast the command

sudo port install tiff

After that, you can use the command tiff2pdf from the terminal.

Teaching the Webserver of MacOS 10.8 to use Imagemagick

The problem: MacOS 10.8 Mountain Lion screws up quite a bit of the built-in web server functionality. Since I wanted to have a fully functional web server for testing purposes I wanted to use the built-in system and didn't want to install an additional MAMP server (you can find one for free in the xampp project). Additionally, the cgi script used relied on imagemagick for thumbnails so the apache server should work with that.

KDE 3.5 on MacOS 10.6 mainly for Kile

Kile is a very nice and comfortable LaTeX editor (yes, and it runs under MacOS 10.6 - hint hint hint for avocadohead). It is installed quite comfortably using MacPorts.

Matplotlib, NumPy and SciPy for Python 2.6 on MacOS 10.6 - the hard way

Prerequisites: have Macports and Python 2.6 installed on MacOS 10.6 (for 10.5 users, please note the side note at the bottom of this post) as explained e.g. in this blog post.

MacOS 10.6, python and PIL

Since I got a python script from avocadohead (kudos and thanks for saving a lot of time) for easily creating a plain html gallery with thumbnails using imagemagick, I needed to get python running. The version included in MacOS 10.6 is known somewhat troublesome when installing the PIL library so I chose the easy way: