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?