OS X Odds & Ends: Command-Option-Forward Delete; Freehand follow-up; more

Command-Option-Forwad Delete yields odd symbol Andrew Dunning writes: "From any text-based Cocoa application (such as TextEdit), hold down Control, Option and Forward Delete (the key under the Help button on extended keyboards). When you do this, a weird box comes up, with the words "Private Use, F8FF, E000, Private Use" around it, and a W on top of an M in the center." Pick a large font size to see it clearly. He posted a screenshot.

Update: Dave Krug informs us of a thread on MacSlash that discusss this. The claim is that "The character itself is a Wum, as in Wumbus from the Dr. Suess book 'OnBeyond Zebra,' which describes a 'new' set of letters found past the letter Z."

Freehand printing problem: a follow-up Regarding our previous posting on Freehand 10 printing entire documents only?, David Rosenfeld adds: "On my machine CarbonLib 1.4 broke Freehand 10’s ability to print PostScript fonts to a Stylus Color 1200 (jagged characters). Downgrading to v1.3.1 solved the problem under system 9.2.1. However, OS X 10.1 wants to update CarbonLib to 1.4 when starting Classic. Replacing CarbonLib 1.4 with 1.5d7c2 from the ADC download site seems to make both Freehand 10 (under 9.2.1) and OS X 10.1 happy."

CD burning and 700MB Hubert Chan notes that Disk Copy does not list 700MB as a CD image size. The largest size listed is 660MB. Thus suggests that OS X software does not take advantage of the extra 40MB.

Update: Jim Kateley adds: "The image sizes in the new blank image window are simply suggestions. There is also a custom option to create any size image. Disk Copy will burn any size image that will fit on the media inserted. If a 700MB CD-R is inserted, and is recognized by the OS as supporting 700MB.

Update: Hubert replies: "The Finder will still only format a 700 MB CDR to hold 660 MB of data. While Disk Copy can burn at least 690 MB to 700 MB CDR, as in OS 9, I still can't get it to format a disk image as 'HFS /ISO 9660' (Mac/PC hybrid)."

X key at startup We have gotten several reports that when booted from Mac OS 9, holding down the X key at startup forces Mac OS X to load. This has never worked for us. Not sure why.

Update: This technique only works if both systems are installed on the same volume, and the Mac is one of the newer machines.

Update: Pieter Coolsma found that, even with OS X and OS 9 on the same volume, it did not work. We can confirm this for our Dual USB iBook setup. So, we still have no sure explanation for why this seems to work in some cases but not others.

UNIX hacking on OS X Safe and Happy UNIX Hacking with Mac OS X discusses the use of Fink, a program that creates its own UNIX directory tree (separate from Mac OS X) where it keeps all its files.