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 :)