Tag: Macintosh

Apple has released updated firmware for recent MacBooks, MacBook Pros and MacBook Airs, otherwise known as “Late 2008” machines. Sleep issues among others were corrected.

I’ve had a fair amount of instability since getting my new machine. One of the issues is that the entire machine will lock up, requiring a reboot. The last time this happened, I logged into my laptop with ssh from the Pro via terminal (MacCampers know how to do this now, too!) and killed the… Continue reading 10.5.5 Bug – Mail creates zombie processes

If you have been reading this blog for any amount of time or come to PMUG you know that we drum backing up into your heads. Some think people like Charles and myself are backup crazy, but let me walk you through a little story that happened recently. I bought a new MacBook Pro last… Continue reading Of service, expectations and backing up

I was trying to set up Web Sharing (apache) to try out Coda, Panic’s pretty cool editor. After enabling Web Sharing, I tried to access: http://localhost/~USER/ (where USER is my user name), however I was greeted with “You don’t have permission to access this page” I checked all of my permissions on /Users/USER/Sites/ etc, everything… Continue reading You don’t have permission to access….

In a somewhat ironic situation, Microsoft has done what Apple could not – Bring Netflix streaming to the Mac. Netflix has had unlimited streaming since January, even for the 1 DVD a month plan. Now, you can opt in into a beta for NetFlix. The quality seems ok. The movie I sampled this morning, Grindhouse,… Continue reading NetFlix streaming comes to the Mac, thanks to Microsoft

While teaching a class on debugging your Macintosh, we ran into an issue on Elizabeth’s machine we could not fix! Activity Monitor refused to run, due to permissions. We checked Activity Monitor and it had the proper permissions, except that the Finder claimed that there were two ‘everyone’ Access Control List Permissions. oh oh. With… Continue reading Permissions issue on Activity Monitor.app

Update: Apple has released a trackpad firmware update. It does appear that the missed clicks issue has been resolved after several days of use. While I find myself pinch/zooming email and web pages less, this remains an issue for when I am dragging/moving the mouse, typically a release the click but thumb still too close… Continue reading Track Pad issues with the new MacBook Pros (late 2008)

ok guys, want to know how fast Chrome is? Google’s Javascript benchmarks Higher numbers are better: Firefox 3 Mac 177 Safari 3 199 Chrome on Windows XP under VMWARE 1779 So Chrome in Windows running on top of OS X is ten times faster. Nice.

Google announced a new open-source browser, Chrome The introduction is done as a comic – Well worth anyone’s read, and understandable too. First off, I just switched to Firefox to try it out, and I am a Safari fan as well. The first “ah-ha!” with Chrome is that it is multi-processed. This means for each… Continue reading Google’s Chrome

As my friends know, I am a big Safari fan. Safari 3 is fine and 4 promises even faster performance. I like that Safari keeps all of my web passwords in the keychain, and those keychains and bookmarks can be synced by Mobile Me. However, the bookmark syncing sometimes fails, and Mobile Me costs $99… Continue reading Evaluating Firefox 3, thanks to 1passwd

Well Microsoft has finally caved in and realized they were wrong by not including Visual Basic Support in Office 2008. After some hand waving about Applescript blah blah, the reality is that some spreadsheets just won’t open on the Mac – So much for interoperability! Anyway, now they are adding VBA support back – but… Continue reading Squeaky Wheel gets the Visual Basic

While trying to fill out a voter registration form, I ran into this sad state of affairs: Preview works with the check boxes and radio buttons, but the text fields are only 2 characters wide. SmileOnMyMac’s PDFpen application doesn’t work at all. Radio buttons are displayed randomly on the page, the text fields are not… Continue reading Sad state of PDF Forms on the Mac

I’ve now found 5 spreadsheets for Excel, written in Excel, that won’t open in the 2008 Office for Mac. No VBA Macros Super slow performance (try 15 minutes to edit a cell) Are the two big issues. What a joke. Edit: I have tried the latest 12.0.1 version. http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t11882-roguegearspreadsheet/ is one of the spreadsheets that… Continue reading Thanks, Microsoft, for Excel 2008!

I have not tried this yet but looks interesting: Backup Bouncer Note: This is a geek tool at the moment – Requires XCode, etc.