.mac is dead. long live mobile me!

Been seeing a few comments about the new .mac replacement, 'MobileMe' site being up intermittently today.

Just tried to get into www.mac.com (the old .mac website), but it's down for maintainence right now, and my iDisk just went offline also (not that I've ever really used my iDisk ever, so it's not a problem!). I guess the switch over to MobileMe is kicking in so I'm hoping to wake up tomorrow and have a bunch of new software to install:

• MobileMe app/prefs/etc (whatever sync software they need)
• The iPhone 2.0 software (this is the 'biggie' for me!)
  
• All the apps I've already downloaded (free ones only! Twitteriffic, Exposure, Facebook and the Apple Remote control software) from the iTunes App Store - already upgraded my iTunes today. Weirdly, doing a 'Check for Update' from iTunes didn't find the update, but going through Mac Software Update found it. Strange...
  

Big day for Apple tomorrow - lots of new stuff coming out on the same day all over the world. Don't think I can be bothered hanging about outside an O2 shop in the early hours of the morning to fight for an iPhone 3G upgrade, I'll just grab the 2.0 software, and wait until the 3G furor dies down a bit. There goes my early adopter status!

OS X Aqua apps - update?

I've just skimmed through the Apple Human Interface Guidelines, but I can't spot where the 'Check for Updates' option is supposed to go in a desktop app under Aqua. I really like this feature, esp. when the app goes off, downloads the update, and unpackages and deals with any migration of existing versions/data etc without having to mess about with it. But it's never in the same place in every app!

Sometimes it's under the Application menu, sometimes under the Help menu, and sometimes hiding in a preferences panel for the app somewhere. Personally, it logically should be under the Application menu, as it's an application action (not a 'help' action really).

Weird that it's not documented in the guidelines. Hint, hint Apple!

BBC iplayer on the telly

BBC iplayer on the telly
Originally uploaded by rachaelr

Via the Macbook through a dvi --> hdmi cable. sweet! Just plug in the cable, drag firefox over to the TV display and hit the full screen button on iPlayer. Not the best quality, but then the feed is really fast, so I'll sacrafice a bit of quality for 'instant' streaming.

night night macbook

in the last two days, I've had two occasions where my macbook won't wake up from sleep. both times, just have a black screen with a cursor, and no amount of hitting buttons/moving the mouse/shutting and reopening the lid seem to help. naughty macbook!

so it's a hard shutdown and restart, which I really hate doing on any laptop. Both times the macbook was plugged into AC power.

If anyone has any ideas (I've googled around, but nobody really knows why safe sleep is causing this), please drop me a line!

speedin up the macbook

Over the last few months, I've been having a continual slow down on my mac book. Everything has been getting more and more sluggish, and slower to log in/shut down and even resolve dns addresses.

Over the last day or so, I've run a few things that seem to have it back to almost full speed again (yay!)

• Ran Leopard Cache cleaner, and did a few things including running most of the maintainence tasks - repairing
  
  
  permissions, the mac maintainence scripts, rebuilt prebindings, optimised system files (not sure if that helped or not), and did a medium level clean of local, system and user caches
• Repaired all my duplicate fonts, and removed a dodgy font (oh creampuff, I miss you!) - details on cleaning up fonts are down the end of this apple support discussion. No idea why that font was causing a problem, but it showed up as errored, so in the bin it went :(
• The usual hard drive cleanups - move off anything that can go to the network drive, ruthlessly kill junk from the downloads folder etc
• Got rid of a whole lot of stuff from my Quicksilver catalogs - probably doesn't affect startup/shutdown/login etc, but should help quicksilver in the future

Hope that helps anyone else that's suffering from a bit of a slowdown! Now to work out which of those tasks actually helped, and run it a bit more often.

(I'm running a Macbook 2nd(?) generation, Core 2 Duo 2GHz, OSX 10.5.3, 2GB Ram)

Mighty mouse weirdness

Every now and then, my mac bluetooth mighty mouse refuses to scroll up the page. Scolling down, left and right works fine, just won't go up.

After a while it just starts working again. Slighty weird, huh. Maybe I have a flakey scroll button.

Mac OS X background tutorials

Found a nice tutorial on creating backgrounds that look a bit Mac OS X ish.


I made this one after following it. Not too bad for 5 mins photoshoppin, thanks Veerle!

(feel free to grab the full size version - can't remember what size I made it, think it's a 6x4 crop ratio tho - might need to recrop or resize to get it to fit your desktop - pls note the cc license)


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

blogging from the iPhone

coming at ya from my new iPhone. Initial thoughts are that its great - activation and moving networks to o2 was easier than I expected, will take 5 days or so for my old number to be ported over. Doesn't like the blogger rich text editor but thats a tiny complaint :)
Will post more impressions as I go.

stuck in a loop!

oh no! the developers who build quicksilver have managed to get themselves in a bit of a pickle...
the latest version has a "feature" which causes the app to ping their site looking for updates a bit too often, with the consequence of bringing down their download site as it's such a popular app.

yikes! time to go download the fixed version from macupdate or whatever your fav mac software tracker is and help them out :)


(via lifehacker)

more automounting samba drives in os x

I promised someone I'd post on this, and finally I have!

I've given up on the original method of mounting samba/cfs shares that I used to use, as it didn't really handle it well when those drives weren't available... Had to reboot to get them to remount etc, and we renamed some shares on different devices (server, NAS etc) to all be unique, so no more hassle with confusion over what is mounted at any one time.

So... I've gone with a two-prong approach:
- written a simple applescript to mount my drives where I want them
- using an app called MarcoPolo to automatically fire the script when it decides I'm at 'home'

Part 1: The script

1. Fire up ScriptEditor
2. Drop in the following for each drive (this example is for SMB shares):
   
   try
   tell application "Finder"
   mount volume "smb://username:password@server/share"
   end tell
   end try
   
   


3. Put in username/password/server/share as needed
4. Repeat for each drive (if you want them to mount under the same MarcoPolo 'location')
   
5. Save as an application somewhere out of the way (ie your home dir) - I used the settings in this image:


6. Try it out - double click the new app and check it mounts everything correctly. Your system.log (available in the console app) should tell you if there's anything wrong.
7. Add a nice icon if you want, as it will flash in your dock until the script completes.
   

Part 2: MarcoPolo

1. Download MarcoPolo from the developers website, or your fav tracker site
2. Install
3. Set up a 'home' context - Set up whatever rules define your 'home' - for me, I've got set the IP rule (as I have a reserved IP on the router, so it's always the same when I'm connected to the home router), and also the WiFi rule, so it triggers when I connect to our home router
4. Set up an action against your home rule to run the mount script

Note - can sometimes take a bit of experimenting with MarcoPolo to get it set up right - depends on how much info you can give it and the setup on your Mac. I've not figured out if it can rescan and decide your location on a wake from sleep, tho I've not really read a lot up on it yet.

Also, it doesn't matter if the drives are already mounted, and you try to re-mount them - smbmount doesn't mind at all :)

tail-less mouse

Got myself a wireless mighty mouse to go with the macbook yesterday. Am really liking it so far - my old logitech usb mouse didn't play too well with the macbook - was way too slow and I couldn't speed it up.

anyhooo, the mighty mouse is really nice. very responsive, and the scroll ball is really nice - feels easier than a scroll wheel to use. took about 2 secs to set up. Bluetooth is great - means no cables or extra sensors to plug in, and batteries were included :). A little expensive at £49, but then most apple hardware is a little expensive - still, 'it just works', so I'm happy with that!

[image poached from the apple store]

holy iphone, batman!

Apple has sold 525,000 iPhones since the product's US launch last Friday, Reuters reports.
via macworld

that's gotta be a record... and where's mine huh?! can't wait till they come out in the UK.

[image from nicholasjon's flickr stream under creative commons licence]

Automounting samba drives in Mac OS X

Almost impossible to find out how to do this! Finally with a mash up of a few articles, I found out how to automount samba drives. Yeeeah haa. Means i can mount //calculus/data and //nestor/data with different names (to stop confusing front row :-))

(NetInfo app --> found in ya utilities folder under applications)

The important bit is the path the mount is created under -- '/Network/calculus' will mount it with the name 'calculus' (if I had /Network/joebloggs, the drive would be called 'joeblogs'), ja?. This is doing a 'static' mount, which means it's mounted all the time (dynamic mounts unsuprisingly get turned on/off depending if they are in use). The drive is then in the finder under 'Network' --> drop an alias wherever ya want and bob's your uncle :-)

Not sure what will happen when someone else logs onto this box... do they still get mounted? And using my username/pass? hmm will have to try it out and see.

Edit: Found a post on macosxhints that may be even easier -- using an applescript and automator. Not sure if it will handle 'remounting' when an automount fails (as the netInfo way above only runs at boot - I haven't found a way of 'remounting' the netInfo mounts if it fails at boot). But one bonus is it's user specific, so doesn't set up those mounts for everyone.
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20070202190047133

Edit: I've done a followup on another method here: http://rachmobile.blogspot.com/2007/10/more-automounting-samba-drives-in-os-x.html

Win XP on Parallels

Running Win XP on Parallels (virtualisation software, similar to VMWare) in mac os x is pretty sweet. Windows seems to run pretty quick tho that may be the core duo cpus :-) Only giving it 256MB ram but it's still pretty speedy.

Tried to run counterstrike - mouse movements are a bit strange, mouse pointer doesnt 'hide', and will only run software video acceleration - guess the Parallels video driver doesnt support any 3d rendering. Might be worth giving boot camp a go instead for gaming I guess.

Handy hint --> second (or right) mouse button is shift+ctrl+click in Win XP/Parallels. Or cheat and use a 2 button USB mouse which works fine in both Mac OS X and Parallels/Win XP.

Joined the ranks of the mac users!

Got myself a faaaaantastic new MacBook on the weekend... totally stoked with it, apart from a coupla niggly things...

Bought a mini-dvi (the video output) to video connector from the Apple shop tonight, sped home and plugged it into the TV (using both s-video and then composite video connectors --> the connector has both outputs). Sadly, the MB will only detect the TV as a generic 'display' - so I can't set the PAL settings or the right res/frame rate... end result is a black and white flicker on the TV :-( Looked everywhere on google with no success booo hoo.. have posted a question in the Apple support forum - fingers crossed someone has an answer, or I'll be tromping back to the Apple store to rant at the 'genius' (cough cough) bar, or return the cable for some ££ back.

If anyone can point me in the right direction, just scream. We've had other windows laptops (nvidia/s-video out) running fine on this TV with the same video cables.

Oh and the stupid problem where frontrow refuses to play sound using AC3 audio codec! Weird, as it's just quicktime running in a nice interface, and Quicktime running outside of frontrow is playing the AC3 codec stuff fine. Don't think anyone's solved this one yet.. c'mon Apple sort it out!

[Edit] mmm still lovin it! Forgot to burn a disk this morning for a work colleague, so dropped the MB in my backpack and walked to work... barely noticed it was in there! such an improvement over the HP.

[Edit] Sorted the AC3 sound prob in frontrow -- app called 'Perian' (thanks Lifehacker!) that contains nearly every video/audio codec ya could ever want. sweeeeet!