Andrew's Blog

Found here Turn off menubar transparency in 10.5 sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.WindowServer EnvironmentVariables -dict CI_NO_BACKGROUND_IMAGE 1 Then reboot the machine.

I just got a warning pop-up from time machine reminding me that I hadnt connected my backup drive for 10 days, so I should either connect it or set a new backup drive. After I connected my drive, it started backing up 11GB of data, which got me thinking where is it storing the changes that are made to my drive and is it resetting them later? At the moment I have no clue but it could be an interesting side project. I'll post more here once I find something out.

Hi, there might be a few days gaps in posts soon as any day now my daughter should be born :) So if I suddenly vanish, you know why :)

So as I mentioned in my earlier post about upgrading Leopard I was having issues with the screen saver under Leopard. Basically I would start the screen saver using my dock shortcut but then after a while a second version of the screen saver would run super imposed over the top. I actually solved this issue inadvertently when I reinstalled Leopard but I came across the following hint over at macosxhints today, that also provides a solution, which I thought would be useful to share.

There are a lot of people out there having problems with Skype on Leopard. The issue is that if you have your firewall switched on, then Skype simply crashes on launch. There are a number of workarounds for this but most of them involve switching off the firewall, which is something that most people dont want to do. Ive came across a couple by myself just from my own trial and error. The first is to reinstall skype, it will then work when you launch it but after closing it, it stops working and needs to be reinstalled again, which obviously can become a hassle. To get around this - just keep the .dmg file for Skype and run the application from there, from here it runs and you save at least a couple of clicks from reinstalling it into the Applications folder. Skype is currently working on a fix.

So as most of you know from my posts below I recently did a clean install of Leopard which I used as an opportunity to reinstall my apps as well. One of the apps that I reinstalled was my EyeTV 2 software (I have the Hybrid USB model) but what I wanted to do was copy across all of the channel information and favourites to save having to re-tune everything again later. Although I managed to find a few of the files needed, I missed some and as a result ended up doing what I wanted to avoid and re-tuning in all of the channels. This provoked me into writing to Elgato's technical support and after a couple of days they responded with the answer to my woes, so I thought I would share their response here so that those of you out there in a similar position can avoid my fate :) The EyeTV preference files that contain all of the relevant settings are stored in the following locations and files; /Library/Preferences com.elgato.eyetv.devices.plist com.elgato.eyetv.plist com.elgato.eyetv.worl...

I picked up on this article from Daring Fireball - after reading it, I can honestly see a lot of what I do in there and I suspect that a lot of you may feel the same, go take a look :)

Hi Googe, please, please give me imap support for Gmail - it seems that everyone else has it already, colleagues at work, my wife, the dog at the end of the street but you forgot me! :) Please can I have it? TIA

In terminal; Tiger - lookupd -flushcache Leopard - dscacheutil -flushcache

In terminal; hdiutil eject -force device_name Device_name can be determined with the df command

In terminal enter; hdiutil convert dmgfilename.dmg -format UDT0 -o imagefile.iso mv imagefile.iso.cdr imagefile.iso

Im still waiting for the CCC to finish cloning my main HDD, so I thought I'd use the time to document the procedure I used to install Leopard on my external HDD, as Ive noticed on the net that a few people seem to be having problems with this. So lets get started; Stage 1 - Prepare the disk Connect your external disk to your mac while running OS X (You should be able to do this via disk utility when booted from the DVD but I didnt try this myself). Start Disk Utility Select the physical disk in Disk Utility, make sure to select the disk and not the volume. Next click on the Partition tab Under Volume Scheme select "One partition" (or however many you need just keep about 12GB for Leopard). Next click the options button and for the partition type, select GUID. In the name field, enter a name for your disk Now click Apply, after a couple of minutes the disk should be prepared for installing Leopard. Stage 2 - Installation of Leopard Insert the Leopard DVD and click the Inst...

So I installed Leopard over a week ago now via the upgrade method, which by all appearances worked out quite well. At first everything seemed to be working fine and I didnt seem to have any of the issues that have been mentioned by others performing the upgrade, such as the "blue screen of death". During the week though, I did notice a few things. For example whenever I started the OS, I received a cryptic message stating "The application crashed" and asking me if I would like to notify Apple. For the life of me though, I havent been able to find out what the application was, I looked in the console, I disabled the various login items under my user account, I removed files from the startup directories (e.g. menumeters, wifind etc) and still I got the error message. Secondly I had a problem with the finder/applications folder. Whenever I clicked on it for the first time after starting the computer, I would get the SBOD (Spinning Beachball of Death) for a few minutes,...

Heres a nice simple app for changing your dock - all you need to do is click a button to switch it between 2 or 3D and some various popular mods. Well worth checking out, available from here.

This thread contains instructions on how to mod the 3D dock to change its colours, appearance and so on. There are some really great new docks in here.

If you run Speed Download now and check for updates version 4.1.17 is available and contains Leopard compatibility fixes, including the fix I mentioned earlier.

In the Finder search box, simply type the following, without the speech marks ".doc OR .xls OR .pdf OR .pages OR .key" and press save and add to sidebar. This will display just the documents without the .mp3 files and so on.

I found the solution for the issue with Speed Download on the developers site . The fix for it is quite simple, download this file and follow the instructions.

Speed download seems to have lost its integration with safari and firefox after the upgrade. Im trying to find a solution now.

Anyone know how to do a smart folder that displays just documents and not mp3 files? Or say displays all documents from all folders except this folder where I have my private receipts that I dont want to have easily accessible?

I seem to be having some issues with Quicklook, one of which at least Ive managed to solve and the other Im not sure that there is a fix for. First of all, some of the quicklook effects as demonstrated in the Apple videos were not working. For example when I had a Keynote presentation visible in coverflow, if I moused over it, I did not get the icons to page forward and/or back, the same for powerpoint and so on. I found out that for Keynote at least, I need to open the presentation, tick the box in the save dialogue that says "save preview with file" and then resave it. Afterwards in coverflow, this provides the aforementioned page arrows. I just hate the thought that this is something that needs to be done for all documents, surely its more simple than that and Ive overlooked something? The other thing that I dont think works, is full screen mode as when I view the presentation fulscreen in quicklook, its formated like a giant page that you scroll down, not individual slide...

Ok, so as I mentioned in an earlier post, I decided to experiment a little and just perform an upgrade as opposed to erasing and clean installing Leopard. I made a full backup of my system earlier in the week using Superduper and also made sure that I had backups of my important files on a separate hard disk too, so I was quite comfortable that I was covered in this respect. So today before attempting the upgrade, I performed the following actions; Checked that I had the latest versions of, or compatible versions of what I call "non-apps", i.e. Saft, logmein, Citrix ICA client and various other preference pane items that I have and use. Btw there are new versions of Saft for Leopard and a beta of the Citrix client (v10) although v7 should be working, at least on intel macs. After that I ran Onyx and repaired permissions, ran the cron jobs (daily, weekly, monthly) and cleaned out all of the various cache and log files. One reboot later and I was ready to try the upgrade. The u...

My family sent my Leopard DVD a little later than I expected, so as a result it took a week for me to get it from the time Apple sent it to my UK address. I have to admit it was quite a long week , especially as I couldnt really use my notebook as I spent a lot of time preparing it for the upgrade and I wasnt sure if I would have the time to do it again (due to the fact that my daughter could be born any minute). Its been frustrating reading about it every where though and not able to try anything etc, still it arrived via post this morning, which is good news :)

I just got a message from my brother that my Leopard DVD has arrived, or at least arrived at his house in the UK (I ordered it from the UK Apple store on Monday). So now Im quite happy that its there but also hoping that it survives the journey in the post to the Czech Republic and that I survive the next couple of days waiting to get my hands on it :) Its a shame as with the weekend I would have had some time to play with it. Either way, once I get it I'll post some updates and thoughts here. Has anyone got theirs already?

So today Apple officially confirmed that Leopard will be release on October 26th ( link : TUAW ). I have to admit that Im quite looking forward to it but Im still debating how to go about the installation. What I mean by this is that Im debating doing a total clean install of OSX plus apps, plus windows plus apps, or just trying to upgrade my existing Tiger installation. Usually with a new OS I tend to do a complete clean install but as we have a baby on the way, due in a 5 weeks, Im not sure I'll have the time (or energy) to do this. I know that some of you are probably reminding me of the migration assistant right now but I had a "bad" experience using it in the past when migrating data from my powerbook to my MBP. Basically it copied all of the crud over that I'd so carefully avoided installing on my MBP from the system folders - grrr. Still I have backups of both of my OS'es so it might not be a bad idea to experiment in the interests of science and try an upg...

Hi, sorry for the lack of posts here for a while but Ive been home sick :( I somehow managed to pick up an infection of the upper respiratory tract - which resulted in a course of antibiotics and me being out of commission for a while. Im alive again now, so time to post again :)

CDProjekt is a firm here in the Czech Republic that localises games into Czech. Ive found a way to revert these games back into English, or at least I have managed to do this with two titles so far, Company of Heroes and Supreme Commander, though I suspect that it may also be the case in other CDProjekt games. To revert Supreme Commander back into English do the following; Navigate to "C:\Program Files\ \gamedata" Locate the file loc_CZ.scd Rename this to something like loc_CZ.scd.old Now when you next start the game, the menu's /text will be in English. For Company of Heroes its a little more involved as the file required to convert the game into English isnt included with the game itself but can be obtained by downloading and installing the English demo (which is complicated but what I did). I might post a link to the file here later on if I find out that its ok to do so. The specific file thats needed is called RelicCOH.English.ucs. To convert the Company of Heroes CZ ...

So I installed Bioshock via steam and its working well on my MBP. Im able to play with everything on full, I just had to take the resolution down two notches from the 1440x900. Not to bad so far. :)

Hi, just thought Id let you all know that Bioshock runs fine on a Macbook Pro Core Duo (2ghz) with 2GB of RAM and an ATI Radeon X1600 256MB RAM. So far the game is running with the textures on high in 1024x768 without any problems and a good framerate in my quick tests. I played around 15-20 minutes in the game without any problems. Unfortunately its getting late here so I didnt want to play around with it for too long today but tomorrow hopefully I will find time to try it in higher resolutions and will post back here to let you know how I get a long.

So like many of you I installed the Bioshock demo today to give the game a try to see what all of the fuss was about :) The installation went smoothly but when I tried to run the game, I got an error something along the lines of; Error: The Side-by-Side configuration information in "c:\games\Bioshock" contains errors. This application has failed to start because the application configuration is incorrect. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem Reinstalling the game didnt fix my problem and neither did alternative drivers for my graphics card. I did some research and the issue seems to be derived from a problem with VC++ files either not matching or being included in the program. The solution that worked for me was to run windows update and install the latest windows updates and .NET updates, then reboot. After the reboot Bioshock started and ran fine, no issues with videos or game play. Hope this helps someone else. UPDATE: Sorry neglected to mention that this is o...

So I've been playing with iPhoto a bit more over the past couple of days but the one thing that I'd like to do I haven't been able to and thats manually sort photos within an event. The problem is that when you double-click the event to access the photos it contains and then go to the view -> arrange by -> menu option, the option to sort manually is greyed out. I've tried this on various events and libraries with the same results on them all. A quick search on the internet revealed that I'm not the only person having this problem and although a workaround exists on the Apple discussion forums, its just that a workaround, so lets hope that Apple fixes it soon. One good point that I have came across though and perhaps this is something that was generally known and only I missed it, is that keywords seem to be unique to the library, which is great news for me as I tend to break our photos into libraries such as holidays, family events and so on. Which means that...

Just thought Id post something I just found out when playing with iPhoto 08 just now. If you drag your mouse cursor slowly across the icons displayed in event you (or events as iPhoto calls them) the icon changes from the first picture in the event to show you the next and so on, so basically by dragging slowly across the entirety of the icon you can see all of the pictures that the event is comprised of. Quite useful :)

I received my iLife 08 and iWork 08 discs today and thought I'd post up a few comments here about the installation. iLife 08 First of all I installed iLife 08, this doesnt require a serial number and once you start the installation will automatically replace the previous version of iLife on your computer. Therefore there is no need to manually uninstall it and this way all of your settings, iphoto library and so on are carried across into the new applications. The one exception is the old version of iMovie which is copied into a separate folder. Also be aware that your iphoto library will be updated to be compatible with the new version so if you plan to go back at some stage you may want to make a backup of your current library before installing the new version of iLife. So far I've only launched the individual apps to make sure that they work but otherwise havent really played with them. After installation I ran software update and there was an update for iphoto already avail...

I was bitten by the Desktop Tower Defense bug, if you dont know what it is, its a flash game where the purpose is to prevent critters getting from one side of your desktop to the other by building a maze or series of defenses composed of different types of cannons. Every time you kill critters you get gold which can be used to upgrade the existing defenses or build new ones. It might sound a little strange but its well worth checking out and giving it a try for yourselves. Try it first on the easy level just to get the hang of it and then switch up to medium for a bit more of a challenge. Ive managed to get through medium without losing a life and around 6000 points, so Ive decided to give hard a try but Im not having much luck so far :) Anyone already playing this?

Dockables are some small single purpose apps that you can drag into your dock. They perform actions such as putting your computer to sleep, activating the screensaver, shutting the computer down and so on, all with one click. Definitely worth checking out, so click here :)

I just recently caught onto the Soprano's - talk about coming late to the party :) But for anyone else who hasnt seen it yet its definitely worth watching.

So the latest versions of the iApps are out, namely iLife 08 and iWork 08. I have to say that so far they dont look too bad based on what Ive read so far on the net. Ive already ordered my copies from the Apple store in the UK. This brings to mind something that doesnt quite make sense for me though, Ive never understood why the Apple store here in the Czech Republic takes 3-5 weeks to get new software after release. It would be nice if Apple arranged for shipments to be made in advance of announcements but even so, I wouldnt expect it to take more than a week if they shipped after the announcement. A minor gripe at the end of the day but still frustrating. Hopefully my copies will arrive on Monday, although most of the torrent sites have links up already. Actually Apple is officially offering a downloadable demo from its site www.apple.com/iwork thats good for 30 days, though Ive seen some posts on the net stating that if you remove a certain .pref file the 30 day count resets itself....

My father-in-law has a small problem with his Powerbook, it doesn't run Microsoft Money and as a lot of people in the Mac community will tell you, most people coming over from Windows use Money. Anyway I thought I would help him out by installing an emulator for him, so I looked around (unfortunately being on a powerpc it immediately ruled out Parallels or VMWare) and came across iemulator, which I thought used to be free but is now commercial and Q (Quemu) , which is freeware. I bet you can guess which one I went for right? :) Installing Q wasn't a problem, it was a simple case of drag and drop and presents a control panel a little similar to VMWare. I set up a new virtual machine, chose Win2K as the operating system, purely so it wouldnt need as many resources as XP does and would hopefully be useable and started the installation with a Win2k SP3 disc that I have. The installation was slow - it took around 2.5 hours which surprised me, of course I expected it to be slow but i...

I was looking for a way to download multiple files over night and came across a few program while I was searching but Speed Download was the one I finally settled on that suited me the best. Its not free, which initially gave me reservations but after trying out the demo for a day I ended up buying it. It basically does what it says on the tin and adds downloads to a list that you can set up to download in whatever order you like, when you like and so on. The links can be captured when you click on them in a browser or from a text file or you can had them yourself either by typing or cut and paste. Its also got growl support so youll know when something has finished or started. I'm still playing with it but so far Im quite happy with it. After I've used it for a few more days I'll post an update here.

Earlier today I needed to grab a couple of shots from a DVD for work, from a presentation we were sent by a client, although there are some software packages for this, you can also easily do this from the terminal. Open the terminal and type:- screencapture -i ~/Desktop/dvd.png You should have some crosshairs, now press the spacebar and they change to a camera. Position the camera over the DVD window and click and you should have a file on your desktop called DVD.png which is a grab of whatever was currently running in the DVD player. If you plan on making multiple grabs, dont forget to rename the files as you save them or change the name in the terminal prompt to something else each time, e.g. dvd1, dvd2 etc. Source for this and credit goes to Random Tech and this article http://highschoolblows.blogspot.com/2005/11/take-screenshot-of-dvd-player-in-os-x.html

(icons and link courtesy of MacUpdate) I got hold of a WD My book yesterday, basically for making backups of my MB Pro and my wifes machine. So far my first impressions of the drive are good, its quite compact and fairly elegant looking when compared to my other external drive cases and although there is some fan noise when switching on, afterwards it is quiet and runs quite well. The fans in my MB Pro were louder than the My Book when they came on, just to provide some perspective. When I received the drive it was formatted for Windows, so I connected it to my mac via firewire , split it into two partitions, one to make a clone of my macs hard drive that I could boot from, the other to store a backup of the bootcamp partition and an image of my wifes notebook. I then realised that in formatting I had of course erased the software that came with the drive (backup program and the button manager) - a quick trip to support.wdc.com fixed that error on my part (but have the serial number of...

Cool - I got a slight mention on Technorati. because of this post :)

I found a nice program the other night but it seems Im late to the party based on some of the comments over at places like TUAW . As you may have guess from the title, the program is called Remote Buddy , its a fantastic program that enhances the functionality of the Apple Remote. When you install it, it will ask to install a kernal extension to enable full functionality but there is an option to undo this in the program itself if you chose to go back or youre nervous. After installation the functionality of the remote is improved a thousandfold at least, you're suddenly able to open pretty much any application on your mac or access any file. For example I can navigate to my movies folder, select a file, choose whether to open it in VLC or Quicktime and then switch to fullscreen to play it. While there I can also do things like adjust the brightness if I need to (if watching at night), volume as well as the usual controls such as pause, play, fast forward. The program also includes...

Sorry for the update drought yesterday but when we went to town my wife bought me the latest Harry Potter book as a surprise present so I spent yesterday reading it. I dont think that it was a bad close to the series but Rowling left doors open at the end... One question I have though - and this is a slight spoiler, if the goblin ran of with the sword in the bank vault, then how could Neville put it out of the sorting hat to kill Nagini?

I installed a few games onto the Vista partition the other night, in particular, Splinter Cell Double Agent, Supreme Commander and Company of Heroes. Both Supreme Commander and Company of Heroes worked right out of the box without any trouble, I loaded both of them and tried the tutorial missions and they were both working out ok. I didnt play around too much with the graphics settings yet - I'll mess with those on the weekend. In COH I did try turning everything up to full just to see and the game was still quite playable, a bit sluggish now and then but playable. Splinter Cell was a bit more interesting in terms of installation and setup. The initial install went fine but took a while, once complete though it asked me to install directx9c which being on Vista I refused. IT them promptly popped up the hardware detection utility and informed me that I didnt have the correct version of directx, graphics drivers and something else which unfortunately my tired brain can't remember...

Lots of places on the net deal with methods on how to back up your main OS X partition using a variety of utilities such as Superduper and Carboncopycloner. Not to knock any of these articles but when I want to back up my computer, I'd typically like to back up everything, which means if youre using bootcamp even the windows partition. I searched high and low for a while and the only option that I found to do it was this CopyCatX. While this looks like an excellent option at the time it was beyond my finances, so I found other ways around the problem. A couple of weeks ago though I came across this - Winclone which is purpose built utility to backup and restore your bootcamp partition from OS X, for free . So far it has been working for me flawlessly, Ive had no issues backing up and restoring Windows partitions on my Macbook Pro. I found out though, purely by chance how flexible this utility is, as an example let me share a story with you, I had a user come into my office with...

I was playing around with the installation of Vista on my Macbook a little yesterday and decided to try installing some anti-virus and firewall software. For the anti-virus I installed AVGFree, primarily because its free :) and also because Ive been using it for years now without any issues. Thankfully it held true to its reputation and is working quite happily under vista. Zonealarm unfortunately didnt... I downloaded and installed the latest free version from their site, which states that it supports Vista. I had no problems downloading it but halfway through the install it froze and then after a couple of minutes the whole computer locked up and became totally unresponsive. I left it alone for around 20 minutes to see if it would sort itself out but unfortunately no joy, so I performed a hard reset by holding down the power button. After rebooting, Vista obviously complained and grumbled about being shutdown so rudely and went through a disk check, got to the logon screen and then b...

I installed Vista onto the bootcamp partition as mentioned in an earlier post and the Macbook seems to get quite hot as soon as you start doing anything with it. To be honest Im mainly using it to keep my windows knowledge current (for work) and to play games, so its not really that big a deal as Im using it on a desk in those situations but it still worries me a little bit. From the research I've done though it seems that we are stuck until either Apple or Microsoft release appropriate drivers for the power management. Or do any of you out there know otherwise and have any tips that you wouldnt mind sharing? In the meantime I'm using these... Cool Feet... They actually work quite well, Ive been using them for around 5 months now, the only problem I have with them is that sometimes the suction isn't as strong as it could be, so if you pick your laptop up to move it, they fall off. Its not all the time though and in general for just providing airflow beneath the computer th...

Ive finally finished the last (for now) of the upgrades to my first gen core duo Macbook Pro and I have to admit that I'm quite happy at the moment. The first upgrade was a few weeks ago, when I exchanged the superdrive that came with the laptop for another one, specifically an 8x speed, dual-layer burner (a step up from the 4x burner that came with the Macbook). The model is a HL-DT-ST DVD +- RW GWA4080M, which I found on eBay and is supposedly an authentic Apple replacement part (the sticker on the drive has the Apple logo on it). So far the drive has been working fine, Im playing with the idea of upgrading the firmware on it but on the other hand I'm thinking, if its not broken... I guess I need to do some more research first. My second upgrade was a new hard drive - I installed the Western Digital Scorpio 250GB WD2500BEVS-11UST0, it formats to around 232GB which is still a big jump from the standard 100GB drive that came pre-installed. I performed both upgrades following th...

This is my first ever blog and first ever post - so will be just playing for a while to get the feel of things