Andrew's Blog

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...