We manage our printers and print jobs using Mac’s System Preferences->Print & Fax. Beneath the hood, Mac OS X is using a powerful printing system called CUPS. Turns out that CUPS has a web interface for you to manage and administer printers and jobs on your Mac.

To view the web interface, just point your browser to http://127.0.0.1:631/.

CUPS (some say stands for Common Unix Printing System) is by Michael Sweet and debuted in 1999. It is a free software under GNU General Public License and is also the default print engine for several Linux distributions such as Red Hat. Apple adopted CUPS since Mac OS X 10.2 in March 2002. In February 2007, Apple hired Michael Sweet and purchased the CUPS source code.

This is a useful trick to find out info and statistics of shortened URLs by bit.ly: just add a “+” at the end of any bit.ly URL on your browser. For example to find out details on bit.ly URL “http://bit.ly/dcV9Bm”, visit the site “http://bit.ly/dcV9Bm+” which will bring you to the bit.ly info and statistics page for the URL. The page shows you who owns the URL, original URL, number and traffic of clicks in graph, and even tweets mentioning the URL.

This will also work for shorten URLs using bit.ly as backend service such as http://huff.to (Huffington Post), http://tcrn.ch (TechCrunch) and http://nyti.ms (New York Times).

Photo JPG files from modern digital camera has a high resolution that is often not necessary if you are posting the photos on the web for viewing. For example a 10M pixel camera typically produces photos in 2816×2112 resolution. For web viewing purpose, you might want to scale down to 1024 or 800 pixel for faster uploading and viewing.

You can use iPhoto or Preview to scale JPG file, but Automator can help you automate the process if you have large number of JPGs.

For this tutorial, we are getting Automator to automate the following:

• Prompt to ask us to choose the photos
• Copy the photos to Pictures>output folder so that original photos are not changed
• Apply resize action to the photos in the Pictures>output folder.

We are going to create an Automator workflow for this task, and will drag the necessary actions from the library to the workflow to achieve the above tasks.

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We are starting a new automation series where we post tutorials and tips on automating repetitive tasks and batch processing on the Mac. We will cover topics on Automator, AppleScript, Bash scripting and Ruby/Python programming. We give a brief overview to these tools and languages in the first post of the series.

Automator and AppleScript

Mac OS X comes with Automator app to assist you to create automated tasks using an easy to use drag-and-drop user interface. Automator and its underlying AppleScript programming language is Apple’s recommended automation tool and language on the Mac. Most aspects of the Mac can be automated and controlled using the AppleScript language. Many third party OS X apps also provide an interface to allow you to control them via AppleScript.

(The definitive guide by Apple on Mac OS X automation is at www.macosxautomation.com.)

AppleScript is available only on the Mac but is not the only scripting language on the Mac. Depending on the tasks at hand, there are several other choices.

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Google has added a new “What’s here” option to the pop-up menu when you right click on Google Maps. This option, depending on your zoom level, will display relevant location info on the left pane about the point of interest.

This feature takes into account the zoom level you’re looking at, and gives you the most appropriate geographical entity at that point. For example, if you’re zoomed in closely on Manhattan, you can get the full address of a point by clicking on “What’s here?”. Additionally, by combining this with the “At this address” feature that you may have seen in the left-hand panel, you can also see a list of the businesses located at that place.

Microsoft recently launched a series of “Laptop Hunters” ads, promoting the price benefits of PCs. These ads are well-timed, praying on the sentiments of people in this difficult period. But value is a very subjective matter. For people who have used a Mac before, these Microsoft ads are just lame and trying, and are not to be used when making an educated purchase decision.

There is no doubt that Mac is not for everyone. We list below 5 reasons why Apple Mac is not for you. But outside of these reasons, an Apple Mac or MacBook should be in your final shortlist.

1. You like to build your own computer

You cannot buy computer parts and assemble your own Mac, at least legally. If building your own computer is a hobby or addiction, then Windows or Linux PCs are the way to go.

2. You are a hardcore PC gamer

If you are a hardcore PC gamer and do not see XBox 360 or PS3 gaming as alternative, then Windows PC is the best choice. Apple has never positioned any of its product targeting hardcore gamers.

The best computer games are available mostly exclusive and first on Windows PCs. Some games come to Mac eventually but the selection paled considerably compared with what is available for Windows. The only Mac that allows graphics card add-on is the Mac Pro, but video card choice is limited due to the availability of device driver on Mac OS X.

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