10.5: Safer sleep during networked Time Machine backups

The problem: You have Time Machine set up using a sparsebundle on a network drive, such as a Time Capsule or an AirPort Extreme-connected hard drive. Most of the time, everything works great. Consider this reproducible scenario, however:You are working away at home and a hourly backup starts. Time machine automagically mounts the sparsebundle.You need to leave and put your laptop to sleep, not paying attention to the fact that time machine is working.You move your laptop to work/school and wake it up.The sparsebundle is still mounted, but obviously does not work. Finder and Spotlight grow increasing stuck until you have to reboot your machine. It occurs to you that the image back home was not closed properly and that eventually, this will corrupt your backups!Solution:Install SleepWatcher (I ...

published on Wednesday, the 19. November 2008

Disable Skype's auto-changing of microphone volume

Skype always irritated me with its automatic microphone volume changes. The Windows version has the ability to disable this option in the preferences pane, but the Mac version does not. Today, I spent some time trying to solve this problem. After some searching on net, I found a solution for the Windows version which also works on the Mac.Quit Skype and open the folloving file with TextEdit: ~/Library » Application Support » Skype » shared.xml. At the end of the document, you'll see this section:<VoiceEng> <MicVolume>77</MicVol​ume></VoiceEng>Simply change this section to look like this (adding one new line):<VoiceEng> <AGC>0</AGC> <MicVolume>100</MicVo​lume></VoiceEng>AGC means Automatic Gain Control, and setting it to 0 disables this feature. Set it to 1 if you want to enable it again. The MicVolume can range from 0 (mute) to ...

published on Wednesday, the 19. November 2008

Use Quicksilver for Finder cut and paste

For those of us who miss being able to cut and paste in the Finder, I just found a pretty functional way to do it through Quicksilver triggers. Here's how: Invoke Quicksilver (probably by pressing Control-Space) Press Command-, to open its preferences Go to Preferences » Application, and make sure 'Enable advanced features' is checked Go to Catalog » Quicksilver and make sure 'Proxy objects' is checked Go to Triggers and click the plus sign to add a new trigger and select Hotkey Start typing Current Selection, and when the item pops up, press Tab Start typing Move to... and then press Tab In the last box, press Command-X clear the field. It must be completely empty for this to work -- no text, nothing Click Save Click the 'i' at the bottom right of the screen to show the trigger options Under hot key, choose your preferred ke...

published on Tuesday, the 18. November 2008

Show a one-line weather forecast on the desktop

I love Wunderground.com's forecast. You can read all of the numbers, and look at radar all you want, but 95% of the time, it's too much info. Wunderground has a one-line forecast that relates today or tomorrow's temperature to today's. "Today is forecast to be colder than yesterday" is all I need to know.Once you've installed GeekTool, you'll also need Lynx, a popular text web browser. Once GeekTool and lynx are installed, create a new shell entry in GeekTool and enter this code, substituting in your zip code for 12345:lynx -dump http://www.wunderground.com/cg...|awk '/Tomorrow is/ ...

published on Tuesday, the 18. November 2008

Call the bit.ly URL shortener for the current site

I use bit.ly as my URL shortening service, mainly because I like the way that it links to Twitter and tracks statistics on shortened URLs that I send folks. I am, however, lazy and I don't like to do any more clicking, copying, or pasting than I have to.So I created a bookmark on my bookmarks bar in Safari which opens bit.ly in a new window and passes the current page I am on as a parameter. The net effect is that most of the work is done for me when the window opens. The JavaScript bookmark is:javascript:window.open('http://bit.ly/?url='+location.href);This approach will probably work with other shorteners as well, and the above shortcut should work in any browser.

published on Tuesday, the 18. November 2008

10.5: Edit multiple events at once in iCal

In 10.5, the iCal user interface is quite limiting. For instance, you can edit only a single event at a time. But there is something of a workaround to that problem: open multiple iCal windows at a time. Here's how. Quit iCal, then paste the following line into Terminal:defaults write com.apple.iCal IncludeDebugMenu 1Now launch iCal and select Debug » New Calendar Window, or just press Command-L. You can now edit an event in one window, and another event in the other window. iCal keeps the windows in sync, so that a change in one appears in the other.[robg adds: The iCal debug menu was covered in this hint, but I thought this workaround for editing multiple events was worth sharing.]

published on Tuesday, the 18. November 2008

How to possibly fix an 'ALLOC-MEM too big!' error

Over the weekend, my 12" PowerBook G4 was involved in an incident that, I thought, spelled certain doom for my all-time-favorite Apple laptop. I was using the machine with it perched on my knees, and happened to be applying the Safari software update when disaster struck. The update was at that point where the OS has shut down and the progress bar is marching across the screen. Just then, our youngest child came sneaking up on me and applied a running hug-tackle (I was on the sofa at the time, but hug-tackles can happen anywhere). At impact, the PowerBook flew off my knee and landed on the back right corner on the (thankfully) carpeted floor. When the machine hit the floor, it instantly kernel panicked, and I thought "well, that couldn't have happened at a worse time."When I tried to boot it, I got a chime, but nothing else. Every trick I tried, including booting from a CD and setting it up in FireWire target disk mode, failed. Then I tried resetting PRAM, which also didn't ...

published on Monday, the 17. November 2008

A collection of tips for those with problematic Apple TVs

I must have gotten a bad first-generation Apple TV -- I've had so many issues troubleshooting it that I've almost become an expert. This afternoon, I finally found the time to write up all my Apple TV troubleshooting tricks, including one that involves a freezer:But one day I had a bunch of friends over and we wanted to watch a movie on the Apple TV. And wouldn't you know it, the damn thing got too hot and froze again. Restarts weren't working and I didn't have hours to wait for it to cool down. So I tossed my Apple TV in the freezer for 10 minutes. After that, I hooked it back up and it worked fine.WARNING: Before you even entertain the freezer trick, let me just say this: don't do it. I'm just telling you about something I did to get my Apple TV working again that involved my freezer. If you decide to put your Apple TV in the freezer and it cracks, explodes or gets soaked by an...

published on Monday, the 17. November 2008

Another method of using an external editor in iPhoto

I wasn't happy with the red eye editing in iPhoto, so I bought Photoshop Elements 6, which gives much better results. One thing I discovered is that with iPhoto open, I can drag a photo onto Elements in the dock, do the red eye adjustment, save it, and the newly-adjusted photo appears directly where it was in iPhoto. The original can still be reverted, too.[robg adds: iPhoto offers, of course, the Edit Photo pop-up in the General section of its preferences, where you can specify any image editing program to use when editing a photo. I wasn't aware, however, that you could (successfully) drag-and-drop an image from iPhoto to a program in the dock.]

published on Monday, the 17. November 2008

10.5: A simple fix for a vanishing boot disk icon

Under some unknown circumstances (I haven't been able to consistently duplicate the issue), it happens that the system's disk icon vanishes in Leopard. Toggling the Show Hard Disks setting in Finder's preferences has no effect, and the various repairing tricks do not solve the issue.What happens is that the system disk (by default, named Macintosh HD) becomes marked as a hidden (invisible) file. Why? Who knows. But fortunately, it can be reverted to visibility with a simple Terminal command:sudo chflags hidden "/Volumes/NameOfTheVolume"To make this work, change NameOfTheVolume to the actual name of your system disk. Note that the chflags can be useful for hiding/unhiding regular files and folders, too:$ chflags hidden "/path/to/file"$ chflags nohidden "/path/to/file"

published on Monday, the 17. November 2008