Andrew's Blog

I managed to get my hands on an iPhone 3G a couple of days ago from Eurotel (O2) in the Czech Republic, its the 16GB Black model and I thought Id share a few impressions here after having had some time to use it. First of all, in terms of ease of use, its exactly what you would expect from an apple product and has been easier to set up than most of the other phones that I have owned for other things besides basic calling. When you first open the box and take the iphone out, you will need to put in a sim, if you are using a pre-existing sim of your own, then its a good idea on your old phone to switch off any PIN's that you have set and also copy across any numbers stored on your phone to the sim card or sync your phone with your computer to its address book. I did the second option and synced my Sony Ericsson with isync on my macbook pro to my address book and then afterwards sync the address book to the phone via itunes. I'm getting ahead of myself a bt though, once the sim is...

Simply open Terminal.app (Applications > Utilities) and type the following command exactly:  defaults write com.apple.Dock showhidden -bool YES Once you type the command and press enter, you need to restart the Dock by typing "killall Dock" and pressing enter. Once the Dock restarts and you hide applications, you will notice that hidden applications have a transparent look. If you want to reverse the command, just replace the "YES" with a "NO" and restart the Dock again. 

Yesterday I picked up an Apple Timecapsule 1TB, the plan being to have live backups of both my and my wifes computers (losing all of those baby/wedding/etc photos would be a disaster). I will also use it to put the colour printer on the network and my 500GB WD drive, which is where I will be keeping media for the time being. Initially I plan to set it up as a N only network and my other access point as B/G only (also on a totally different channel) so that essentially only our laptops will connect to the time capsule and supposedly at N speeds making the backups and streaming better. Eventually I will buy a Drobo and connect that to the time capsule and have the time capsule back itself up to the Drobo periodically, so I will have backups in two places. I also have copies of our photos stored in "The Cloud", so hopefully we're covered for a rainy day. After all as the quote goes, there are only two types of people, those whose disks have failed and those whose disks will ...

I recently picked up a new mouse as the title explains :) and I have to say that so far Im quite happy with it. Its a wireless notebook mouse with a rechargeable battery, it can be used as a standard notebook wireless mouse, i.e. with a USB dongle or you can switch it to bluetooth mode if your notebook supports it and fore go the dongle. There are some nice things with this mouse though compared to previous ones that I have owned or used, first of all, the dongle also doubles as a 1GB USB disk, which is nice as I always hated losing a port just for the mouse. Secondly it has magnets on the end, which you attach a cable to and the other end you connect to magnets on the underside of the mouse, this then enables your notebook to charge the mouse and in the meantime you can continue to use it as a standard tethered mouse. The first initial charge takes 8 hours or something but afterwards 15 minutes is supposed to be enough for a whole day. Another good thing with it is that the mouse is s...

So 10.5.4 came out and me being the sucker that I am I installed it to see if it would sort out some of those issues I was having. While it does appear to help with the slow shutdowns (no need to remove the sleepimage file every now and then anymore?), it does not fix the issues with Starcraft or Diablo II or any other application that requires 256 colour support for that matter. There are some solutions floating around on the net, that basically involve replacing the kexts from the 10.5.3/4 update(s) with those from 10.5.2 but this seems like a bit of a kludge to me, so hopefully this will be addressed officially at some point. Hopefully before Starcraft 2 comes out :)

So I managed to solve the problem albeit by a roundabout route. What I had to do in the end in order to make it work was to first install 10.5.2 and then update that to 10.5.3, so it would seem that the combo updater for 10.5.3 is missing something?

It seems that 10.5.3. is out to get me. Not that I believe I am being paranoid or anything but I have never had this much trouble with an OS X update before and I tend to be one of the "bleeding edge" crew in terms of installing these updates. I am having problems with it now because I finally decided to reinstall my system, my justification being that I have played around with my current system so much and that it has so much crud on there that it would be quicker and easier to reinstall rather than manually clean up. At the same point though I didnt want to be without my machine for any length of time, yet I didnt want to have to either rush the new installation or try to find the time to do it around the baby and work, so what I decided to do was to cheat a little. I installed OS X 10.5 onto an external USB drive that was connected to my mac and then afterwards booted from that. This worked like a charm and very soon I was running a clean version of OSX 10.5.1, all well an...

I found out today that 10.5.3 breaks StarCraft :( Basically, after installing 10.5.3 if you launch StarCraft it will show the initial configuration dialogue but then crash back to the desktop. Apparently the reason for this is that StarCraft tries to switch to 256 colour mode but this was disabled by Apple in the latest update, so the game simply crashes. So far neither Blizzard nor Apple has published a fix, what was disappointing though is that neither of the companies has published this information on their websites. For example I downloaded StarCraft from the Blizzard store and after a 2 hour download, it installed fine but obviously wouldnt launch. No where though on their site do they state it doesnt work with 10.5.3. This supposedly also impacts Diablo II as well but I havent had an opportunity to test this. Lets hope that they fix this soon and in the meantime, please consider letting Apple and Blizzard know that they should fix this!

So Ive been using Twitter for a couple of days now and although I believe that I finally "get it", I have to say that like anything these days the community is key and thats what has left me a little disappointed here. I was kind of hoping that it would allow you to find like-minded people and generate some discussions of sorts, whether it was about the latest movie or a plea for help but for me personally, it just seems like a lot of broadcasting with very little going on in terms of actual conversations. Now I freely admit that what Im saying could be boring (I have 28 followers so far), pointless or whatever but even when Ive replied to comments other people have made it doesnt seem to generate much in the way of discourse. Perhaps I need to use it longer or perhaps I dont get it after all but it does seem like being on an island at times. Lets see how it goes after a couple more days

So the new 3G iphone was released yesterday and it looks like this could be the one that would push me over the edge, GPS, Exchange support, push mail, contacts etc and if Apple manages to make the resellers stick to their "global price", it would be dirt cheap compared to its current price here in CZ. Not much I can do now though but watch and wait but for once Im quite hopeful.

Winclone has been updated, the latest version is available here. For those who dont know what it is, Winclone is an app, similar to SuperDuper or CarbonCopyCloner except that it backs up your windows bootcamp partition.

Im really quite tired today, our daughter had a bad night yesterday and so slept very little, which of course meant that we didnt get to sleep either. Its easy to say take it in turns but just lately she seems to have developed a cry that can penetrate brick walls, doors and the sound barrier, which makes it difficult for the other partner to pretend nothing is happening, at least until exhaustion kicks in. We're not sure why shes getting so upset just lately though, as we have kept to the same rhythm for a couple of weeks now, our best guess is teeth. Hopefully tonight will be better and she'll get some rest, hope so at least as Im not too sure how long I will last today. On the tech side I havent done too much today to be honest, Ive been working from home via Citrix, occasionally pitching in to help look after Ellie and trying not to fall asleep on the keyboard. I did update my MBP and my wife's MB to 10.5.3 in the wee hours of this morning though and at the moment all s...

http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/27/microsoft-shows-off-snippet-of-windows-7-at-d6-reveals-multi/  Seems that they ported the software they used in the table to desktops and laptops. Not a big surprise but still kind of nice to see where we could be in a couple of years time, though hopefully this will be a stepping stone to bigger and better things.

As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, I bought my wife a macbook for her birthday (2.2ghz, 2GB, 120GB HDD, DVD DL burner) that shes very happy with. Its already got her doing more things than Ive ever seen her even attempt to do on her old Dell. One thing that I wanted to mention though was that I decided to install Parallels for her so that she could continue to use her Windows only software (dictionaries etc). Parallels includes a tool for converting an existing windows installation into a virtual machine image, basically you install the tool on windows, pick a save location and let it run. Her Dell had a 40GB drive but the parallels tool converted it into a 12GB (!!) image, which included all three of her partitions, the total conversion time was probably about 6 hours (its hard for me to say as I started it in the morning and then we went out for most of the day). After starting up the image on her MB, it chugged a little as it was installing the tools it needed for the displa...

I photographed this with my mobile on my way to work yesterday - interesting name for a company but you would think that they would have paused to consider what it means in English right? :)

I recently bought my wife a 2.2ghz Macbook, which shes really happy with. I set up screen sharing the other day, tried it and it worked, great I thought. Later on though, when I wanted to copy some files over to her drop box, I couldnt connect to her machine and now even screen sharing doesnt work. Ive checked her security preferences and she has screen and file sharing enabled, I have rights as well... cant see whats wrong for the life of me at the moment.

Decided to give in and finally try twitter and see what all of the fuss is about - any of you on there? http://www.twitter.com/aproudlove

Tomato is firmware for Linksys routers (only certain models are supported, please check their site ). The firmware improves options and functionality of the router over the original linksys firmware, for example its possible to monitor bandwidth in real time, set up QOS and so on. Well worth looking at, though to be honest I cant seem to make QOS work but I think thats just me...

Im sure that some of you may have heard of OpenDNS but perhaps like me, you were just using them for their DNS service. (OpenDNS provides name servers that contain an index of sorts for sites on the internet so that your computer can find them when you try to access them - at least thats the over simplified version) I found out though that if you go and register with them for free, you gain access to a whole load of other options, reporting for example, content filtering (you can filter by categories, e.g. Pornorgraphy, Nudity, Religion and so on) or by domain. I think its great for anyone with kids who wants a bit more control over what they are up to online. As you are making these changes on the OpenDNS server, its quite easy to keep track of things and slightly more difficult (though not impossible) for someone to circumvent. It helps of course if you configure the DNS addresses on your home router and then distribute the IP address to the other computers via DHCP or static DHCP. A...

Just thought Id mention that Ive installed Crysis on my MBP (2.6ghz, 4GB ram and Geforce 8800 256MB Video card) and Im able to play with all of the settings on high, AA off and 1024 x 768 resolution. So far its not too bad and Im thinking of pumping up the resolution a notch or two to see how much I can get away with. Anyways, if youre thinking of trying Crysis, give it a go.

Hi, its been a while since I posted something here but thats mainly because I havent done too much techie stuff to post about. Instead just lately we have been trying to teach my daughter to go to bed at 8pm instead of midnight and to fall asleep by herself without needing us to rock her. The rocking started quite soon, when she was roughly a couple of weeks old but it was because she developed colic and the rocking was the only thing that seemed to help her relax and sleep, so although it was an evil of sorts, it was a necessary evil and we knew kind of what we were getting ourselves into. Anyway, a couple of weeks ago now we decided to try and tackle the bedtime issue first, so we didnt stress about the rocking, we just started setting up a system for her to get used to, starting with a bath, change of cloths, last feed and then some rocking. It took 2 or 3 days but seemed to work out ok and now around 7ish she starts rubbing her eyes and getting a little fussy, so we start the bath ...

I came across a couple of really useful Front Row plugins today totally by accident while browsing for something else. The first addresses something that I mentioned in a previous post which is the ability to show posters and movie info for files in your movies folder, just as the movie trailers do in Front Row. Its called Sapphire and can be downloaded from here , make sure to check out the screenshots and the manual. The next plugin(s) are for EyeTV and Front Row, it basically adds menu options in Front Row and EyeTV to allow you to switch between the two gracefully, its called PyeTV and is available from here . The final plugin allows ads to be skipped in EyeTV recordings but I havent had opportunity to try this yet but it can be found here.

As promised heres how to uninstall games from Crossover games and then uninstall the application itself for those of you interested. On the Crossover games menu, select Configure and Manage Bottles Select the bottle on the left hand side On the right hand pane, click the applications tab Under the applications tab, select the application to uninstall, in my case Starcraft Click Repair or Remove The games uninstaller should appear (it did for SC)  Click uninstall and after a couple of seconds the installer should finish Now the bottle will remain there so that you can install into it again if you wish, if you dont, then on the left hand side make sure that the correct bottle is selected again and click the minus symbol in the bottom left hand corner to delete it. Confirm the delete and that should be it. I tried this for BF2 and everything worked as described as above except that after the uninstallation had successfully completed, Crossover games quit unexpectedly. I relaunched it and ...

As I mentioned in one of my previous posts, I enjoy gaming, though the days where I could game through the night or during weekends are long behind me, I do still enjoy a game of something here or there, time, work and life allowing. My mac is a physical symbol of this dual personality of mine, Ive got my OS X partition where I do my work and general tinkering and my Windows bootcamp partition for the gaming. So far this setup hasnt worked out too badly, though recently when I have had time, I sometimes cant be bothered to reboot into Windows and for how often I get around to playing games, having a chunk of windows real estate taking up a good few gigs of my hdd made me think if there wasnt an alternative solution to get my gaming fix.  Ideally I would prefer to be able to play all of my games under OS X, I prefer it and should opportunity present itself, then a game is just a click away. Unfortunately due to directx and other associated windows technologies, some games that Id like t...

As I mentioned in the comments to one of the posts, my slow shutdown problem resurfaced again two days ago. I tried the same trick as before, disabling hibernatemode and then deleting the sleepimage before re-enabling hibernatemode again. Guess what? Problem gone... At least until next time ;)

I just realised why it didnt run when I tried it - I hadnt installed the patch to update it to a carbon app - d'oh.

Does anyone know how to run Warcraft 3 in windowed mode? Cheers UPDATE : Its easy - COMMAND (Apple) + M :)

Like a lot of you out there I suspect, I enjoy gaming, though these days if I have time to play its more the exception than the rule. Nevertheless if opportunity arises I like to get in a frag or some world domination here and there. At the moment I do a lot of my gaming on my XP bootcamp partition, purely because for newer games it better if they run on windows directly. I have some older games, Diablo II, StarCraft, Warcraft 3 and so on, that recently I have been having a craving or an urge to play again. As they were old though (and also because space on my windows partition is low) I thought I would try to get them to run under OS X, as it should easily handle it and also its easier just to fire up a game there, than to have to reboot the whole system. Now most blizzard games are hybrid CD's, that is to say the installation discs includes Mac and Windows installers. Which sounded really promising at the start, so I popped the Diablo II disc into the drive, opened it and saw ju...

Just for kicks yesterday, I reset my hibernatemode to 3 as I had previously set it to 0 as outlined in one of my posts below. Interestingly enough, my MBP now shuts down just as quickly as it did when I had hibernatemode set to 0 and thats also without having to eject my windows bootcamp partition.  At the moment I have no idea why this is the case, I still have to check my log files but I thought I would share the info at least.

Nothing new today Im afraid, Ive been too busy at work the past couple of days to even contemplate messing around with anything on the MBP. I also just finished watching Ashes to Ashes series 1, which wasnt bad but Life on Mars was much more... profound or at least it had a bigger impact on me than ashes to ashes. Still I enjoyed it and Im looking forward to series 2 when it comes out next year. Today is also the day that BSG series 4 starts finally, so Im looking forward to that. Anyway in the world of computers Ive downloaded the Bento demo but havent managed to install it yet, though Im curious to see what it can do. You know, theres one application that I would like to see on the Mac and Im not sure if it exists or not, perhaps it does but I would like to see an app that would scan my movies folder for any films in there and then would just display that movies poster as a big thumbnail (as opposed to the 1st frame of the movie), clicking on the movie would "zoom" the post...

I thought it might be useful for me to summarise what has happened so far and what steps Ive taken, mainly for anyone new coming across this via Google and also just to attempt to make sense of the jumble of posts that I have so far. So here goes :) The issue My new MBP (2.6GHz Merom / 320GB HDD / 4GB RAM) started to take a while to shutdown, roughly from 50 seconds to a minute, which is a big difference from the 7 seconds a new install takes. During the shutdown process I would see the "progress cog" appear on my desktop and spin around for a bit until the computer shutdown. Sleep also took a long time, regardless of whether I had 2GB or 4GB of RAM. I initially had this problem on my original core due MBP and first noticed it when I was testing my new 2.6ghz MBP with a fresh install of Leopard. The reason that the issue got passed onto my new MBP was because I wanted to keep the bigger drive, so I unplugged it from the original MBP and swapped it with the drive in the new MB...

Hi, I thought I would share with you all something that Bob posted in the comments that has also resulted in an improvement in the shutdown times of our macs, this is something that he mentioned finding over at macosxhints.com but I thought I would share it here as well as its useful information. For this solution, you will need to use the terminal but its quite easy, open the terminal and enter the following commands pressing enter after each one (NB: After the first command you will be prompted for you password, enter it and after that you should not be prompted again). sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0 sudo nvram "use-nvramrc?"=false sudo rm /private/var/vm/sleepimage After entering these commands my MBP shuts down in seconds, mainly because its not creating a 4GB sleepimage or trying to page the contents of RAM there. Im trying to understand now though what the correlation between the windows drive and sleep is, as unmounting windows also has the same effect...

I have been trying to see if I can get to the bottom of what is going on with the computer during the shutdown process. At the moment, theres not really too much new to add as the situation is still the same, eject the Bootcamp disk and the computer shutdowns quickly, dont eject it and it doesnt. I have tried uninstalling MacFUSE and NTFS-3G (instructions for uninstalling MacFUSE here and NTFS-3G here, download the dmg, mount and inside follow the uninstall readme ). This doesnt seem to have made any difference however, so its back to the drawing board for now.

I was just playing around with this again and remembered that in the past, having external drives connected could cause the computer to shutdown slowly, one of the things that didnt occur to me until now though, was that my Windows Bootcamp partition may be an external drive of sorts, or at the least, may be affecting the shutdown cycle. So I ejected it and then tried shutting down. The computer now shuts off in 15 seconds or less as opposed to almost a minute before, it still doesnt seem as fast as a new install of Leopard but its definitely a big improvement. The question now though is why or what is it doing with the Windows partition before it shuts down? It also possibly invalidates the earlier line of research I was following with the menu applets, so clearly I need to look into this some more but its the first definite improvement I have seen. If you try this and it improves your shutdown speed please let me know, it will be interesting to compare.

So as I mentioned yesterday, I managed to find time to partition an external drive and install Leopard on it, plus all of the updates currently available. Afterwards, I did a couple of restart and shutdown tests and it was fast, in fact it surprised me how fast it was having been used to the time my current install of Leopard takes to slowdown. The shutdown speed wasnt the only improvement though as the startup time was also noticeably faster. Admittedly this is a new installation of the OS, which as most of us know, tends to be faster than a "used" install as a general rule of thumb, so Ive now set about trying to determine what is causing the issue on my current installation by trying to break the new one. So far in the limited amount of testing that I have had time to do, I have installed some of the menubar applications that I use often (I say some because I have not yet installed QuickSilver, Slim Battery Monitor and SMCFanControl). I have installed the following program...

I just found out that simply clicking inside the window on the video itself as opposed to the window brings the focus back to the window correctly after switching from fullscreen. So just to make it clear after returning from fullscreen using command+f, I have to click directly on the video thats playing (twice) in order for the focus to come back correctly so that keyboard control will work. Clicking once brings the focus back to the window but not keyboard control.

So I managed to find some time to look at the slow shutdown issue again, well at least a couple of minutes anyway. I created a new account on the mbp and started in that, making sure that none of my startup items from my present account were loading (I left the ones in the /library/preferencepanes on purpose. Sure enough it took a while to shutdown as well, which suggests that its a system wide issue as opposed to being limited to my user account. During the weekend I also prepared and partition an external hdd ready to install leopard onto for further testing but I still want to see if I cant get to the bottom of this. The thing thats been holding me back though is "Life on Mars", which is a BBC TV series, so far its been great and if Ive managed to find some time somewhere I have been watching that instead... bad bad but its definitely worth checking out if you havent done so already. Maybe when I finish watching it I will finally sort this problem out? ;)

One issue that Ive came across with Quicktime (and judging by the number of posts about it that Ive came across on the internet Im not the only one), is the issue where Quicktime stops responding to keyboard commands, for example the spacebar no longer plays or pauses and so on. It mainly seems to occur if you put a video into fullscreen and then for whatever reason, close fullscreen but still live the window with the video open on the desktop. Afterwards it will not respond to any keyboard commands unless you put it back into fullscreen. Tabbing between applications until you get back to Quicktime does not resolve the problem, neither does moving it to a different workspace. Other posts on the internet suggest reinstalling Quicktime by downloading the standalone file from Apple. Although I havent tried this yet, I have found a workaround that seems to fix the issue temporarily. It appears though, that minimising Quicktime to the dock and then restoring it, is enough to put the focus b...

Every time I opened mail.app (under Leopard 10.5.2), I got a dialogue that syncserver had quit unexpectedly. I couldnt find anything wrong though and a quick search on google also didnt turn up anything that seemed to relate to me. I did see a post about someone getting the error while using .mac though and this caused me to check my .mac syncing. Funnily enough it had been disabled which was weird, so I reenabled it and then had to tell it to rewrite the items on .mac with what was on my computer but afterwards it synced ok and also took away my mail.app problem.

If you take any photos in higher isos - say 400 upwards or just in dim light, you should really check out Noise Ninja , it does an amazing job of removing noise from the photos. I bought a license for it today as it really impressed me with what it did for our photos.

Unfortunately this post wont be as interesting as I hoped it would be, in the sense that my father-in-law didnt want me to try converting his laptop into a vmware image, so in the end I just did a basic vmware/windows xp/ms office install for him. Hes quite happy now that windows is working as he uses ms money a lot but for some reason outlook is really slow. Or is now after he imported his calendar into it. If I start it in safe mode though (outlook /safe) it starts up and works instantly. Hes planning to reinstall it when he gets back home though, so its not really that big a deal...

I havent done too much with my computer for the past couple of days, including looking some more into the slow shutdown problem, simply because Ive just been too tired to do anything after getting home from work. Mostly once we've got our daughter to sleep, we've just been relaxing (or sleeping) ourselves. Tonight (or tomorrow), Im planning to try to convert my father-in-laws windows laptop into a vmware image that I can then port into vmware fusion on the mac for him. Hopefully it will work but if not then I'll just install windows and ms office for him. Im still stumped with the slow shutdown thing too, so if any of you would happen to have any ideas, I really would appreciate it.

I just found a comment in an earlier posting on this subject from Tyler (thanks Tyler!) that raised a good point. He was commenting on the difference he noticed in the shutdown speed after upgrading from 2GB of RAM to 4GB. Now by default the "new" (all intel MBP's I believe) MBP's create a sleepimage file by default as they are set to hibernate instead of sleep, so you could draw a conclusion from this that a 4GB file would take longer to create than that of a 2GB file but this would only make sense if you were sleeping the MBP, not I would have thought, shutting it down. It also doesnt explain why, on a fresh install of Leopard, that my MBP shuts down just as quickly with 4GB as with 2GB of RAM, which can only mean that its something I have done in terms of a program I have installed. Tylers point made me think though if the "quality" of the RAM could factor into this equation as well? Then again, am I just over complicating this?

This os really driving me nuts, the only thing that Ive managed to find when digging in the console is an error with the EyeTV Helper not quitting but even if I manually quit this and then try to shutdown there is no change. Im seriously thinking about installing OSX on an external drive and then migrating things over to it one by one until I find the culprit but it seems a bit excessive for this. Ive posted a log file here in the hope that one of you can see something that Im missing. If you do and if you could let me know I would really appreciate it. Thanks in advance... UPDATE Further adventures in my slow shutdown saga can be found using the links below. http://badwolfsblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/slow-shutdown-console-strikes-back.html http://badwolfsblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/short-update-slow-shutdown.html http://badwolfsblog.blogspot.com/2008/04/slow-shutdown-with-leopard-update.html 3/19/08 6:13:38 AM com.apple.launchctl.System[2] launchctl: Please convert the ...