After using a 500GB Time Capsule for Time Machine backups for awhile, I noticed increasing duration of the backups. Mainly the prepare and post-processing phases, and transfer of large number of small files, took a lot of time. For the transfer of large files, the slowdown was not so noticeable.I inspected the sparsebundle disk image on the Time Capsule, and inside the disk image bundle of about 150GB, I found nearly 20,000 band files of 8MB each in a single folder. These 20,000 data pieces contain the data of the backup image. When Time Machine reads, creates or deletes folder structures in the backup image, the operating system must randomly access data distributed over these 20,000 band files. And that causes a remarkable amount of additional administrative accesses to the AppleShare volume of the Time Capsule.I decided that a better size of the bands of the backup spa...

Periodically, and for no apparent reason, the left mouse button would quit working on my USB Mighty Mouse. Unplug and plug, still inoperative. So I tried another non-Apple mouse, still inoperative. When this happens, the right mouse button works and could activate menus, but I couldn't click on things (I used a right-click and the arrow keys as a workaround to activate menu items). If I restarted the machine, the left mouse button would work for a while. Eventually, though, the problem began to occur immediately on boot. AppleCare suggested things like resetting the PMU, PRAM, etc., but to no avail. Their next solution, on this relatively new and unadulterated Mac, was to reinstall the system software -- not something I was anxious to do, nor did it make sense on this new Mac!After some digging, I found the solution. It turns out that the Bluetooth mouse and keyboard were enabled, and a nearby Bluetooth mouse had a near-dead battery - I didn't even know there was a Bluetooth...

The other day I was checking my Contacts list inside Entourage 2008 and saw that a lot of the email addresses were labeled incorrectly. I primarily enter my contact information from within Address Book and I let it sync with my Exchange server.The problems:If you enter an email address in Address Book and label it as Work email, it will be resolved as "Other" type of email inside Entourage (Exchange).If you enter the email address from Entourage and label it as Work email, it will be resolved as "Home" type of email inside Address Book.The solution:Go into Address Book's Preferences and uncheck the check box next to Synchronize with Exchange. This will make Address Book to not upload the information into Exchange. Next, go into Entourage's Preferences » Sync Services, and check the box for Synchronize contacts with Address Book and .Mac. This will make Entourage do a pull of the data from either Address Book and .Mac.This solution ...

You may have known that holding the Option key down before activating the Advanced menu in iTunes yields the 'Convert to [format]...' (where [format] is the audio format you've chosen in iTunes' Preferences) menu item, which is useful for selecting a file on your computer to convert to your preferred audio format and adding it to iTunes.If in the Open dialog, however, you select your desired file(s) and then again hold Option before clicking the Open button, iTunes will immediately open another file dialog asking for the destination in which to place the converted file, regardless of music folder location preferences.Note: The converted file is still added to the iTunes library. This hint just gives you control as to where the file will be saved in the Finder.

I use SyncTogether to keep my iMac and MacBook (both Leopard) in sync. I usually sync iCal, Address Book, bookmarks, notes and Dock items. Several days ago, however, I started to notice a very annoying issue with my iMac's Dock: some items started to move around on the Dock, or completely disappeared from it. Even if I placed the vanished items back on the Dock and selected Keep in Dock, they vanished after a while.I can't remember what was I doing when it started, but yesterday, the problem replicated itself to the MacBook. Other accounts were working normally, but not mine. I deleted the com.apple.dock.* files, but nothing changed. After using fsevent for a while, I noted some recent activities in ~/Library » Application Support » SyncServices » Local.I decided to make a backup of that whole directory, and in a brute force way, I then deleted the content of the clientdata and DataRefer...

I had grown accustomed to using Command-Tab and the Right- or Left-Arrow keys to switch apps in 10.4, but that functionality changed a little in 10.5.In 10.4, holding the Command key, tapping Tab, then using the Left Arrow twice, one could get the end of a (potentially long) list of running apps -- the first Left Arrow press would select the 'previously used' application (the leftmost icon in the Command-Tab bar), and the next Left Arrow press would jump to the icon at the far right of the Command-Tab bar. Basically, if the leftmost app icon was highlighted, hitting the Left Arrow would highlight the app at the right end of the list, and vice versa. 10.5 doesn't allow this wraparound feature; pressing Left Arrow with the leftmost icon highighted does nothing at all.The solution? It was hidden in this...

The macosxhints Rating:[Score: 8 out of 10] Developer: Bartas Technologies/ Product page Price: FreeA quick Pick of the Week this week -- Ziplight is a free Spotlight plug-in that adds the ability to search for filenames within zip archives. Download the plug-in and add it to the Library » Spotlight folder (your user's Library folder if you'd like to make it available just for your use, or in the top-level Library folder for all users to use). Log out and back in, then let Spotlight update its index. Once the update is done, you can use Spotlight to search by filename within zip archives -- if a match is found, Spotlight will return (via Ziplight) the name of the archive containing the file...

I just posted a new poll on menu bar icons. More specifically, how many programs do you keep installed on the right side of the main menu, including Spotlight? Count only those things that provide separate functionality, not just a count of visible things. If you show the weekday and the time, for instance, that's one, not two. If you use MenuMeters to put your Quad core machine's CPU usage in the menu bar, those four bars are one function, not four. (But if you also show MenuMeters' disk, network, or memory features, each of those count as separate functions.)I was quite surprised by the total on my machine -- usually 19, sometimes 20 or 21 depending on what I'm doing. (Due to a 20-question poll limit, all answers above 18 are lumped together.)

After reading this hint on macosxhints about how to create an audio file from text, I figured the process could probably be streamlined a bit. So, I created a Service (that appears in the Services menu) that operates on selected text. Select the plain text in your source location (text file, web page, email, etc.) and then select Services » Speak to iTunes Audiobook to speak the text into a track that will appear in the Audiobooks section of iTunes. Just remember to set the encoder quality beforehand in iTunes, because it's not configurable through AppleScript (I recommend using 'Spoken podcast'). Package download [40KB] For those curious few, the AppleScript within the service is as follows: ...

I use a small utility called Witch to switch between open windows in applications via Option-Tab, instead of using the built-in Command-Tab, which just switches between applications. I recently realized that, when Dashboard is active (F12), you can use Witch (Option-Tab) to select a window, and then you can do some things in this window while still having Dashboard active and frontmost. For example, you can select a TextEdit window and write in it, jotting down some notes relative to something in a Dashboard widget. This will work as long as you don't click the mouse button. I've found this quite useful at times. [robg adds: This could also be useful for selecting text in a background window and copying it (hold down Shift and use the arrow keys to select text, then press Command-C), for pasting into a Dashboard widget, if you forgot to copy it before you invoked Dashboard.]

I'm using a D-Link DWL-G122 in versions C1 (and own a version B1, a D-Link DWL-122, a Linksys@Home 54g USB, and a Belkin F5D6050 USB -- insert sarcasm here), and have worked with (too) many similar Ralink or Prism-based USB wi-fi adapters on OS X over the last four years or so. One issue I experienced (with all of these adapters) was when the adapter was either under heavy load, or (especially) when using Internet Sharing in OS X, the adapter would randomly disconnect from its wireless network and lose all communication with the driver/config software. To fix things, it would require an unplug/replug to resume operation. With many people reporting this on the net, and having tried every suggestion I could find, I have finally found the answer that has since worked solid for over three weeks (and over 150gb of transfer) now without a single disconnection with any of my adapters! Just for good measure, I tried (and failed) with these solutions: A wide selection of Ma...

As part of my job, I edit large Word documents, usually created by Windows users. These documents include pictures, comments, tracked changes, and so on. Word 2008 seems to hate them -- it crashes more than a drunken toddler driving a Ferrari. Over time, however, I've developed a number of techniques to mitigate the disasters. If Word crashes and then restarts, don't accept its recovered document. Close it and then open the last version you saved. Also I only ever use Save As now, not File » Save, or Command-S. I think it's this form of saving that's causing the problems. Maybe the disastrous bug is part of a 'quick save' routine? Finally, if there's a document that Word crashes with, and continues to crash with, I had some luck opening it on a Windows version of Word using VMWare Fusion, and then saving it out again. This seems to iron out the bugs, but it didn't always work (and in fact, worked fewer times than it actually worked in the first place). ...

With family, friends, and coworkers scattered around the country and the world, iChat is one of my most-used applications. Given that a lot of important conversations flow through it, I've archived my iChat logs for years using the "Automatically save chat transcripts" feature in iChat. One annoyance, though, comes courtesy of the VPN we use to reach the Macworld servers. Every time I connect and disconnect from the VPN (many times a day), AOL generates a warning that shows up as a new iChat message:Your screen name is now signed into AOL(R) Instant Messenger (TM) in 2 locations. To sign off the other location(s), reply to this message with the number 1. Click here for more information.Of course, each and every one of these messages is logged, though I clearly don't need to save them. To make it simpler to get rid of these extraneous logged files, I created a Smart Folder with the following search criteria, with "Any of the following are true" at the top lev...

If you're developing a non-trivial bookmarklet you may be able to speed up your edit cycle by having an applescript which executes the javascript in your browser, like this:tell application "Safari" activate do JavaScript " // Of course your bookmarklet code goes here, for example... alert('hello world'); " in front documentend tellI just edited the Javascript in Script Editor and hit the run button to test. Just be careful of using double quotes, and you can postpone escaping the script and adding it to your bookmarks until the very end.

If you are like me and love using Safari as the default browser and also subscribe to Sprint's Family Locator service, you may have to switch to Firefox in order to access their website.Not the case anymore. You must first enable the Develop menu in Safari, which you can now do in the Advanced section of Safari's Preferences panel. (Older versions must use the solution in this hint). Then click on the Develop menu in Safari, choose User Agent, and select the latest version of Firefox for Mac from the list before you log into the Sprint Family Locator website.You will now be able to login and browse Sprint Family Locator website with Safari. So far, I have not noticed any features that don't work when using this workaround.

This sounds too simple for a hint, but I haven't heard of it before, and couldn't find a reference for it on the web (and I discovered this completely by accident). By Pressing Option-Tab in the Finder (in List or Icon view windows), you can jump alphabetically through the files, regardless of the displayed sort order. [robg adds: This also works in Cover Flow view in 10.5, though it's pretty strange watching the icons do a seemingly-random dance as you press Option-Tab.]

According to man cal, there's also an ncal command with extra options, such as displaying week numbers via the -w flag. But no ncal is installed in OS X. A little experiment reveals, however, that it's one and the same program -- it apparently behaves differently when named differently. If you create an ncal link to the cal utility, you get a fully functional ncal program; note the week numbers below the calendar: $ mkdir -p $HOME/bin $ ln `which cal` $HOME/bin/ncal $ $HOME/bin/ncal -w May 2008 Mo 5 12 19 26 Tu 6 13 20 27 We 7 14 21 28 Th 1 8 15 22 29 Fr 2 9 16 23 30 Sa 3 10 17 24 31 Su 4 11 18 25 18 19 20 21 22 [robg adds: This works as described; you can also now use ncal -e or ncal -o to see the date for Easter (Western and Orthodox, respectively), -J for the Julian calendar, and -p to see ...

As any Mac user who deals with Microsoft Exchange invites will tell you, Exchange screws up the time zone information. What this means is that you will likely miss your meetings. Not a good thing. I've adapted an AppleScript from an older hint to correct this problem. This script can either run from the System-wide Script menu from within Mail.app, or as a Mail.app rule. Here's my modified script. Save the script and either set it up to run from a Mail rule, or as I do, call it from the system-wide AppleScript menu. You will need to save the script in ~/Library » Scripts » Applications » Mail/ folder; create this folder if it doesn't exist. This solution has the advantage of being a single script with a simple user modification for customization. There is one property at the head of the ...

You can use Safari 3.x to open Text files (they must have .rtf or .txt extensions), and then use Safari's Find feature to locate what you're looking for in the file. The advantage is that you get Safari's wonderful new 'find' UI instead of just plain old search results or filtered text. In context, This is how I use it. There are periods of time when I do a lot of searching through log files. In doing so, I'm often looking for a particular phrase, and I also need to see the log data around that time period. Using Console just doesn't cut it for me, because when I put the search term in, Console blocks out all other data in the file. Opening the log file in TextEdit will allow me to highlight each hit individually, which is better, but still not perfect. When I use Safari, however, it highlights all of the hits, and grays-out the other text. This allows me to quickly find associations between the search phrase and other things happening at that time. Of course, as ...

In my job, I jump between browsers quite regularly, usually Firefox, Camino, and Safari. As we've covered here before in various hints, you can actually run a "future" version of Safari by downloading and installing WebKit, which is a special version of Safari using newer builds of the WebKit web browser engine. WebKit builds can be faster than the currently-released version, and have bug fixes and new features that you can take advantage of. As one example, the WebKit version of Safari currently passes the Acid3 browser test with a perfect score, while the released version of Safari scores a 75 out of 100. One minor issue with using WebKit, however, is that it sets the default 'new window' page to this page, which thanks you for helping test WebKit, and lets you know there's a new nightly build available. This constant reminder helps insure that the Web...

This is a hint to avoid a potential security issue caused by a standard system function (or feature). If you connect to a service on a remote server, you will be asked for your login and password. If you say No to the 'Remember this password in my keychain' dialog, you may wonder why you will not be asked for your login and password next time you connect to the service. In my case, I wanted show a remote service like VNC to a colleague while he was logged in on the local machine. I disconnected from the service and was able to connect to it again without being prompted for my login and password. This can be a security issue for many reasons, e.g. working on someone else's account etc. Solution: To prevent reconnecting without a password, you need to delete the Kerberos Ticket that was created while connecting to the service the first time. This ticket expires after a certain amount of time (10 hours by default), but I guess a ticket that grants access for 10 hours ...

If you are a user of Google docs (and other such Google apps) and you prefer Safari as your default browser, you will know that lots of features are lost because Safari is not a supported browser. Firefox, however, is fully supported. If you enable the Develop menu in Safari, as covered in this hint, however, you can fix the problem. After enabling the menu, just select Develop » User Agent , and select one of the Firefox entries (2.0.x Mac, for instance), you will find that all features are enabled. [robg adds: I'm not a huge user of Google's apps. I did, however, run a quick test with the Presentations module, and this trick certainly seemed to work. Before making the switch, I was warned that Safari wasn't fully supported, and that warning went away after changing the user agent. I also exchanged emails with the hint's author, and he states that he's not yet found an issue with ...

MacFUSE is a great addition to the OS X system. One common usage of a FUSE is to mount a remote directory as a local volume, for easy access, and with MacFUSE in conjunction with sshfs (available at the same link), this is really easy to do.In my situation, however, the remote directory that I wanted to access was on a firewalled server that only allowed access through other machines on the some local network. I had access to various gateway machines, so access as such was not a problem, but it was a pain to have to hop through the gateway each time I need to transfer files to the firewalled server. Also, I could not use local applications to work on directly on files on the server, even if they supported ssh- and sftp-based editing.I messed around with trying to set up an ssh tunnel, but got nowhere. When I finally turned to MacFUSE as an alterntive, I had everything set up and running within minutes. You will, of cour...

As discussed in this prior hint, I have hundreds of WordPerfect for Windows files that I periodically need to access. Unfortunately, the existing Spotlight importer for WordPerfect only imports WordPerfect for Mac files. Devon Technologies' free EasyFind can be easily configured to search WordPerfect documents (and for real Corel Office devotees, Quattro Pro spreadsheets and Paradox databases).It won't do so by default, but if you click the light switch icon in the lower left of the EasyFind panel, a drawer will open with lists of file extensions to search. Just add the appropriate file extensions (wpd, wp [WordPerfect], wb3, wb2 [Quattro Pro], and db [Paradox]) to the list.

You can directly drag an application from the Quicksilver pane onto the AppZapper window to uninstall the program. This is easier than opening the Applications folder and then dragging and dropping over to AppZapper (or any such similar program).

The macosxhints Rating:[Score: 8 out of 10] Developer: Pixelmator Team Ltd. Price: $59.00 [free demo available]Pixelmator is a layer-based image editing program that takes full advantage of OS X's features, opens tons of file formats (including Photoshop files), and has an interface that's easy to use, despite it not necessarily looking like a traditional Mac application. The program uses your Mac's graphics processing unit (GPU) and Core Image to render many effects in real time. James Dempsey covered Pixelmator 1.0.1 for Macworld last October, so I'll point you at his write-up for most the details about this program. You can also learn about many of its features just by reading compan...

Many web sites now have pages especially formatted for the iPhone, enabled by detecting the "user agent" for the iPhone Safari browser. You can easily visit these pages with your desktop or laptop version of Safari. First, enable the Develop menu (as indicated in the earlier hint; it used to be called the Debug menu). Then, from the new Develop menu, select User Agent » Mobile Safari x.x.x - iPhone. Try it on Google, for example, and you'll get the right-sized iPhone Google pages. Cool. [robg adds: Most browsers include some method of setting the user agent, so you can view iPhone-only sites in pretty much any browser you want to use.]

This might fall in the semi-obvious category, but I'd never thought to try it ... if you've got a machine with multiple CD burners that iTunes recognizes, you can burn multiple CDs at a time. Set up the playlists you'd like to burn on each drive, insert blank CDs into the drives, and start the first burn. Then go to iTunes Preferences » Advanced » Burning, and select your second (or third, etc.) burner from the CD Burner pop-up menu, click OK, and start your next playlist burning. I burned two CDs at once on my Mac Pro, and both worked fine, so it seems iTunes can handle at least two at once. I don't have any other burners to attach, though, so I can't test more than that. Theoretically, you might be able to AppleScript this using GUI scripting, but that's beyond my skill set.

I needed to find a quick and dirty way to put all of Mail.app's stored email addresses into my Address Book. It turns out that these are stored in a SQLitev3 database named MailRecents-v4.abcdmr in ~/Library » Application Support » AddressBook/. To import these into Address Book's contact list, all I needed to do was this: Install SQLitev3 (sudo port install sqlite3 if using MacPorts) Dump the contents of the recents table to a text file with this series of commands in Terminal: $ sqlite3 ~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/MailRecents-v4.abcdmr sqlite> .separator , sqlite> .output /path/to/outputput/file/Recents.csv sqlite> select * from ZABCDMAILRECENT; sqlite> .exit Now use Address Book's File » Import function to import the newly-created Recents.csv as a text file. You will be prompted to choose which fields to import as what, with the first/last names and email addresses from your recents avail...

I haven't noticed it before, but you can add an as_qdr parameter to the end of a URL in Google to get a drop-down menu (next to the search box) that lets you search by date. For example: http://www.google.com/search?&q=macosxhints&as_qdr=d So I wrote this bookmarklet that does that automatically: javascript:window.open(document.URL + "&as_qdr=d") You can customize it as you please: d[number]: past number of days (e.g.: d10) w[number]: past number of weeks y[number]: past number of years More info on this can be found in this post on the Google Operating System site.

I was recently trying to do some simple shell scripting with the command httpd -t, which runs a syntax check on the Apache configuration files. If everything is OK, it returns Syntax OK, otherwise, it will try to tell you what's wrong with the files. I wanted to grab the output of the syntax check and display it in my script, but wasn't having any luck -- any attempt to redirect the output, or assign it to a variable, resulted in nothing (empty variable, empty file, etc.). Unix wizards can stop reading this hint now, for I'm sure you know what the problem is...After much Googling, I discovered that some Unix commands create their output by writing to standard error (STDERR) instead of standard output (the Terminal window, typically). As a result, operations that capture standard output won't work for these types of messages, even though the message itself is displayed in the Terminal window. I found the solution in the ...

For several years now, I've been using mostly Mac OS X, both as at home and at work, and I'm quite satisfied with it. However, it's still quite far from perfect, and lots of features are missing or buggy. Buggy features are worse than missing ones, because they almost work, so they are even more frustrating. One of these very frustrating buggy features is Address Book's printing function, which is basically just unusable. It would be great if one could just print one's Address Book, for example to get a pocket phone book, or to get a paper backup, or whatever. But it doesn't work... After browsing maybe half of the web, I was right about to give up when I finally found HTMLize Address Book, a piece of AppleScript that turned out to do almost what I needed. So I tweaked it a little for my needs (view script ? ...

Sometimes it's annoying to have to use Mail on my iPhone to review a PDF, Word or Excel file I received a couple of days before. I wanted to have permanent access to some of my inportant files (roadmaps, notes, lists etc.) even when I can't go online. All you need is a jailbroken 1.1.3 (or newer) iPhone, an FTP client on your Mac, and the "Safari 1.1.3 Patch" for your iPhone (see the Big Boss' repository: "Adds file:// support for local files viewing to Safari.") For PDF: Use your FTP client to create a new folder on your iPhone in /var/mobile/Media/. Name it PDF and drag your PDF files into it. Some of them have to be renamed to meet the usual URL naming conventions. This means: no spaces, no umlauts, etc. I dragged a file named regex.pdf in there. Now I only have to type in the following URL in Safari on the iPhone: file:///var/mobile/Media/PDF/regex.pdf Safari can display PDF, Word, Excel, and any HTML file you put in the Media folder (...

If you can't get a PowerPC application to launch on an Intel Mac, try this odd-sounding workaround: hold down the Command, Shift, and Escape keys together as it's launching. In my case, I was not able to launch PowerPoint v.X successfully. I tried the solution documented in this article on Apple's site, but it didn't work for me. The odd keystroke combo, however, got PowerPoint up and running.[robg adds: I have no way of confirming this, as I've never had an issue launching Office v.X (and I do have Motion 2.1 and Final Cut Pro 5.1 installed, two apps listed in the Apple article). If anyone can confirm or refute this hint, please comment!]

PyeTV is a free (open source) Front Row plug-in which allows access to EyeTV from within Front Row on Leopard, adding an EyeTV item to Front Row's top level menu. The plug-in gives access to EyeTV's recordings (grouped by series), along with an image preview and recording metadata.PyeTV also integrates with ETVComskip, which allows users of EyeTV to enjoy commercial-free recorded television. PyeTV provides capabilities for turning commercial skipping on and off from within Front Row, as well as starting a commercial search for recordings which do not have commercial markers already.

I have recently undertaken some training in which I have to cover a massive amount of material. Being the natural procrastinator that I am, I immediately went on the prowl for better books, better methods, and all other sorts of periphery that doesn't actually count as studying.One of these projects was to convert the text versions of my study guides to audio, so that I could listen to the text in the car while I drive (an ideal time to study). The process was actually surprisingly simple. Start by opening the PDF in Preview, then press Command-A (select all) and Command-C (copy). Open a new document in TextEdit and press Command-V (paste), then convert the document to plain text (Format » Make Plain Text). Save the file to a .txt document; for this example, we'll name it rawfile.txt.At this stage, you might want to do some clean-up on the text. For instance, you might want to do some additional regular expression hacking to clean up the document for things...

This quick how-to deals with getting Address Book to work with LDAP (Microsoft Active Directory in our case).Step 1: Determine the default naming context (base dn) for the search. Fire up Terminal and issue an ldapsearch to determine the default naming context:$ ldapsearch -h your.exchange.server -x -b '' -s base '(objectclass=*)' 'namingContexts'Search for the lines beginning with namingContexts:namingContexts: DC=mycompany,DC=comnamingContexts: CN=Configuration,DC=mycompany,DC=comnamingContexts: CN=Schema,CN=Configuration,DC=mycompany,DC=comThe result you are looking for is the "base/root" and that is the shortest one in the case of Exchange (BTW, this will work on other LDAP servers, too). In this case, that's the first line, ie. DC=mycompany,DC=com.Step 2: Configure Address Book to query the server. Fire up Address Book and go to the Preferences (Command-,). Select the L...

My iMac is behind a satellite internet connection, which is very slow. Rather than using Screen Sharing or Finder's file sharing for Back to My Mac, I often find it easier to use ssh. Until today I didn't know how to connect to a Back To My Mac computer via ssh. It turns out that it's very easy: ssh -vvv -p 22 hostname.username.members.mac.com. Where hostname is the name you gave to the machine (i.e. the name that appears in Finder), and username is your .Mac username (i.e. if your email address is steve@mac.com, your .Mac username is steve). Note that there is a "." at the very end of the command -- I've had more consistent success using it that way. You can also try Terminal.app » Shell » New Remote Connection (or press Command-Shift-K) and then look under 'Secure Shell (ssh) for "Discovered Servers"'. As...

There have been discussions about sharing Address Book contacts through LDAP, and there have been many suggestions such as running OpenLDAP, using .Mac, or running dedicated apps on your Mac. In this day and age of Google Apps, I would think that someone (Google?) would have come up with a shared LDAP server that is free or low cost. Yes, there's Plaxo, but it's not LDAP -- standards exist for a reason, and Apple has included LDAP client capabilities in Address Book for a while. Then I stumbled on FreeLDAP.org. I think this is the only free LDAP server available on the Internet that could be used by multiple users accessing the same database. The setup instructions on the site do not work with the Mac's Address Book. However, while browsing through their forums, I found this setup which works for me on my 10.4 system. First you have to signup for a new free account at ...

I used to call Spotlight to open my apps, but since i have a slow hard drive, I started to look for faster options. I didn't want to install Quicksilver or Launchbar or any other program for that. I had two goals: I should rely only on what OS X could offer me. I wanted fast access using only the keyboard. So here's what I did: I dragged the Applications folder to the dock, creating a Stack. It was set to Display as folder and View contents as list. In System Preferences » Keyboard & Mouse » Keyboard Shortcuts, under the 'Keyboard Navigation' section, I checked the Move focus to the Dock box and used Control-Command-D as my shortcut. That's all it took. Here's how it works: Hitting the shortcut keys brings the Dock to the front (or shows it if it's hidden), so you can navigat...

I always found it annoying that when I start Huawei's MobileConnect application, I must first enter the PIN for accessing the SIM card of my USB 3G modem before I can connect to the provider. Luckily, the program is rather verbose with debug output. So it was quite easy to retrieve the essential part for entering the PIN. It simply consists of some good old Hayes AT modem-communication commands. I wrote a Perl script that fetches the PIN to your SIM card from a Keychain entry. In order to use this script, you have to create a Keychain entry under the account simpin. Here's how: Open Keychain Access (in Applications » Utilities) Menu: File » New Password Item Keychain Item Name: Enter something useful to you. Account Name: simpin Password: Enter the PIN to your SIM card (usually a number) Press Add Note: when the ...

Time Machine by default does not run when no user is logged in. But that doesn't mean it can't. In fact, Time Machine is perfectly capable of running without a user logged in, but Mac OS X un-mounts all external drives -- including your Time Machine drive -- at logout. If you want Time Machine to continue backing up after you've logged out, it's as simple as setting your system to leave FireWire drives mounted after logout. You can find the instructions on how to do this in this hint. I've also posted an installer package that will take care of it for you in my blog post on the matter. [robg adds: I haven't tested this one.]

When in iPhoto, you can quickly play a slideshow (presumably with the most recent settings) by hitting the Play key in the top row of the new, thin aluminum Apple keyboard.

Sometimes you want to do something like create a MP3 CD, but you need to do so with several iTunes playlists, in a particular play order. However, iTunes' MP3 CD burning support is rather limited. For example, it can burn a playlist in order -- but only one big playlist. On the other hand, it can burn a CD with the MP3s sorted into artist or album folders. It can't create multiple-directory CDs for CD players that support it, limiting it to one big list. You can burn an MP3 disc (with multiple folders/playlists) from the Finder or Toast, but they will both burn the files in alphabetical order. If you are trying to burn a CD with several directories of several playlists, in a certain play order, these limitations are very frustrating. The normal solution to this problem is to rename each file from each playlist in the finder -- such as adding a number before the track name -- so that songs are displayed in the correct order for burning. This is very slow to do manually. So,...

If anyone is looking for separate Mac Drivers for the Microsoft Internet Keyboard Pro and Intellimouse, try this link. On that screen set (1) to Desktop Set, (2) to Microsoft Wireless laser Desktop for Mac, (3) to Mac OS 10.2.x-10.5.x, and (4) to your preferred language. (This URL should take you to the US download page for both keyboard and mouse drivers.) I discovered the URL link for the separate keyboard and mouse software by accident when looking at the Microsoft 6000 Laser Mouse. My previous attempts at trying to find Microsoft input software only managed to find software for the combined keyboard/mouse, but this download page let me only install software for the mouse without the keyboard.

The macosxhints Rating:[Score: 9 out of 10] Developer: Helium Foot Software Price: $24.00 [30-day full-featured demo available]MercuryMover is a utility designed to help you keep your hands on the keyboard. Installed as a System Preferences panel, MercuryMover makes it possible to move and resize windows using just the keyboard. (In many ways, MercuryMover is basically the exact opposite of MondoMouse, a previous Pick of the Week selection. MondoMouse lets you move and resize windows easily using the mouse without having to drag them, and implements a "focus follows mouse" feature.)You use MercuryMover by pressing one of three defined hot keys -- Move, Resize Right/Down, and...

Here's a three-step process to create a Time Machine backup on a network-attached storage (NAS) unit.Create a sparsebundle image on your local system. I'm not sure of the reason why, but I haven't been able to kick Time Machine off just by specifying a network share. It "prepares" for a while, then says it was unable to create the disk image. The solution appears to be to create a sparsebundle image locally. Thankfully, you don't need multiple Macs like another post suggested; you can accomplish this using hdiutil like so:hdiutil create -library SPUD -size $SIZESPEC -fs Journaled HFS+ -type SPARSEBUNDLE -volname $MACHINENAME_$MAC_ADDRESS.sparsebundleWhere...

This is a little AppleScript that I wrote to check and ask if the machine should unmount peripheral disks, and optionally perform an iSync, before sleeping. I was motivated to write this after about the fifteenth time I woke my laptop up after taking it home from work only to be greeted with a warning that I did not properly disconnect my Time Machine Disk. Additionally, since I use iSync to sync my date book and address book with my Nokia cell phone, I thought it would be a good idea to have it auto-sync before I put the machine to sleep. If you are capable with AppleScript, you can go in and make modifications for your system (e.g. turn off iSync, or the options to unmount). One caveat: if your home disk is not the same as the startup disk (unlikely on a laptop), the script will ask if you would like to unmount that disk before sleeping.I packed the script as an application bundle (with a 10.5-sized icon) for optional placement directly into the dock -- download ...

I find it frustrating that there's no quick and easy way to sync my iPod and iPhone in iTunes without a degree of mouse movement and clicking (someone please correct me if I'm wrong!). Since I'm a keyboard navigation fan, I wrote some very simple AppleScripts to either sync or eject all iPods/iPhones currently connected to iTunes. The scripts are identical apart from the type of action:Sync iPod.scpt:tell application "iTunes" repeat with s in sources if (kind of s is iPod) then update s end repeatend tellEject iPod.scpt:tell application "iTunes" repeat with s in sources if (kind of s is iPod) then eject s end repeatend tellI personally have these scripts in my user's Library/Scripts folder, and use Quicksilver to quickly invoke them when I want to force a sync or eject of my iPod/iPhone.

I have been very frustrated by OS X's (Preview app) handling of image rotation. You can, of course, have Preview rewrite the EXIF tag and make the image appear rotated, but as soon as you go to put that image on the web or use it in Word, etc, that rotation simply doesn't exist. What's more, even after you apply new icons to a file (i.e. using CocoThumbX), the icons might not show up correctly.Until now, I used a combination of Preview (to modify the EXIF orientation value) and PhotoToolCM (to do lossless JPG rotations) to achieve images that look correct both in Preview and in non-EXIF/web apps. Well, I finally found a program that both rotates the image and the thumbnail consistently! Enter the freeware Cheese by Stuffware.co.uk. This is a bare-bones program that has two basic purposes: rotate pictures prop...