Stoney's Zone » Macintosh

Safari 3.1 in, Pith Helmet Out

stoney — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 14:38:54 +0000

I realized too late (again) that updating Safari causes Pith Helmet to refuse to load. I wonder if there’s a surge in ad impressions between the time that Safari updates and Pith Helmet updates to match?

Fortunately, bumping Pith Helmet’s MaxBundleVersion to 5525 lets it load, and so far I haven’t seen any problems.

I hate flash ads.

The Ghost in the Remote

stoney — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 16:19:26 +0000

I’ve been puzzled lately about why my iPod is already playing when I plug it into my car stereo. Yesterday, it dawned on me that I’ve started using my Apple Remote to run iTunes on my new iMac.

I had purchased IOSPIRIT‘s Remote Buddy to let me run iTunes via my iPhone, but only recently realized that it also let me use an Apple Remote to run iTunes too. This has been very handy, since it’s often a problem to quickly pause the music when the phone rings.

What I’d forgotten was that the iPod charging stand has a remote receiver in it. Clearly, I was pausing and playing the iPod simultaneously with the iMac.

The solution was a little piece of black gaffer tape. I tried some colored sticky dots, but they didn’t block the signal. Powerful little bugger!

Switching to Tiger

stoney — Tue, 03 May 2005 02:50:04 +0000

Friday night and over the weekend, I switched most of my Macs to Tiger. All but one computer upgraded nicely. My main Mac (2GHz DP G5) had a corrupt drive. I had to backup everything off the drive, wipe it, then restore.

I installed Tiger on a small partition that I’d been using for beta-testing, and booted from that. First, I tried copying everything back, but Carbon Copy Cloner fails under Tiger, and there were some bad blocks on the backup firewire drive that kept Disk Utility from copying it. I used “cp”, now that it copies resource forks, but the result had damaged permissions and owners. Installing Tiger on top of that produced an obviously messed-up system.

So, I wiped the drive again, installed Tiger from scratch, and then Finder-copied the files back to the main drive. This took the better part of two days, since I was carefully merging directories, trying to avoid overwriting anything that might have changed under Tiger.

Fortunately, the result works! I’m pretty much back to where I was. I needed to reinstall some apps that didn’t work, like Virtual PC, the Wacom tablet driver, and Filemaker Pro 6 (the damaged app).

The result was worth it. Tiger feels significantly faster than Panther, particularly in Finder operations. I’m elated that Apple fixed my biggest annoyance with the Finder in OS X – files changed over AppleShare didn’t update on the remote machine until you clicked in their window (or on the desktop). Now, if I delete a file on a remote machine, the file disappears immediately. No more clicking on non-existent files! This also affects existing files re-saved to the desktop, which used to move to the upper-right corner, but now stay where they were. It’s these little things that I’ve missed from OS 9 that count. I’m still waiting for my spring-loaded folder drawers to return.