Month: January 2012

An easy how-to install guide for Gnumeric on a mac.

Gnumeric is a great program for those wishing to migrate from MS Excel but desiring the same functionality and user interface.  It’s free, easy to use, and even has some improvements with regards to statistical computation.  Unfortunately it doesn’t support pivot tables yet, but they’re likely to be included in future updates. 

Download and install GCC:

https://github.com/kennethreitz/osx-gcc-installer

Install the macports installer package:

https://github.com/kennethreitz/osx-gcc-installer

Run the macports self-update command by opening a terminal window and typing:

sudo port -v self update

Then in the terminal type:

sudo port -v install gnumeric

Now download and install the gnumeric wrapper from here:

http://maururu.net/2007/gnumeric-wrapper-for-mac-os-x/

Drag the icon to your applications folder, keep it in your dock, etc.  it should act like a normal Apple program with the exception that it opens the X11 interpreter and the menu for the program is inside the window instead of at the top of the screen.  

Happy spreadsheeting!

Binchunker is a great command-line utility for converting .bin and .cue format cd-rom backups to .iso format for easy mounting / burning.  It also has a .raw and .wav conversion functions for use with video and audio disk images.

I’ve primarily been using it for converting video and sample CD (.VCD and SCD) images I’ve downloaded off the web, using the -r (.RAW) and -w (.WAV) flags for video and audio conversion.

Installing binchunker on a mac —

This post assumes you have homebrew installed.  Find out how to install it here:

http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/

Once homebrew is installed, type:

brew -v install chunk

The ‘-v’ is optional, it gives you more feedback about the compile process.

Then to use binchunker, type:

bchunk -v infile.bin infile.cue outfile

the ‘.iso’ extension will automatically be appended to your ‘outfile’ name.

For reference, the bchunk executable is installed in this path:

/usr/local/Cellar/bchunk/(version#)/bin

Happy chunking!