Entropy increases

2011-11-28T00:29:00.001+01:00

I support this to the fullness:

Copyright-restriction-free Christmas songs from the Musikpiraten e.V.:
http://cdn.musikpiraten-ev.de/singen-im-advent-2011.pdf

Create Booklet PDF service (Mac OS X)

2011-09-13T23:50:00.003+02:00

I used this tool to print an A5 document as booklet with staples and four pages per sheet on Mac:

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/21068/create-booklet-pdf-service

This worked for me from Word 2011 on Mac OS X Lion 10.7.1 and probably works for any other program as well as this is a universal PDF service (Create Booklet in the PDF menu button in every print dialog).

Mac OS X Lion Apple Mail: Search does not work

2011-09-03T15:16:00.002+02:00

After switching to Lion and importing all my old mails (actually all users) from the time machine backup I found that all old mails were there, but Mail would not find any of the old mails when searching.

This cured the problem for me:
Foe each individual mailbox (Inbox, Sent, all your own mailboxes) do:
Menu (not context menu): Mailbox -> Restore (in german: Postfach -> Wiederherstellen)

Juniper SSL VPN SAM does not work on Mac OS X Lion (10.7)

2011-09-03T15:07:00.000+02:00

The reoccurring pattern continues: With every individual new Mac OS X version Apple kills existing VPN solutions for Max OS. This is at least true for Cisco VPN and also for the Juniper SSL PVN.

For the Juniper SSL VPN on Mac OS X Lion (10.7) the symptom for me was that the host checker never was loaded and never came up. The browser would just sit there indefinitely.

To get the Juniper SSL VPN working on Lion I found this solution:

https://discussions.apple.com/message/15760121#15760121

(replicated on this webpage:)

http://superuser.com/questions/322690/how-do-i-access-juniper-networks-secure-access-web-vpn-from-os-x-lion

1) Download and install Pacifist from: http://www.charlessoft.com/Pacifist.dmg
2) Download and Mount JavaForMacOSX10.6Update5 from http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1360
3) Download and Mount JavaForMacOSX10.7 from http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1421
4) Launch Pacifist and select Open Package
5) Select the mounted JavaForMacOSX10.6Update5.pkg
6) Hit install, when it prompts always select "Replace"
7) After it is complete, select Open Package and select the JavaForMacOSX10.7.pkg
8) When it prompts select "Replace"
9) You can copy Safari 5.0.5 from SL or if you do not have access to a SL machine
10) Download and mount Safari 5.0.5 from http://appldnld.apple.com.edgesuite.net/content.info.apple.com/Safari5/041-0564.20110413.Fi9pb/Safari5.0.5SnowLeopard.dmg
11) In Pacifist select Open Package and select the Safari 5.0.5 pkg file
12) This time select Extract and place it onto your desktop
13) Go to the Safari5.0.5SnowLeopard folder on your desktop, inside of that you will see an Applications folder, open that and you will see Safari, you can rename this Safari, I named mine Safari 5.0.5 and copy it to your main Applications folder or whereever you want.
14) Launch this Safari and go to About and make sure it says 5.0.5
15) Try your Secure App Manager.

Essentially you need to install the 10.6 Java and the 10.7 Java and downgrade to Safari 5.0.5 (at least 5.1 does not work).

The above description worked for me. I got a couple of error messages saying that files cannot replace folders, but this seems to be harmless. Just continue with 'Replace'.

Converting Mac/LF encoding to Latin1/LF

2011-08-25T11:38:00.003+02:00

I'll never really get the concept behind the surfaces and default surfaces and no surfaces with recode. Anyway, this is how to convert a file with Mac encoding and LF linefeeds into Latin1 encoding and LF linefeeds:


recode mac/..l1 myfile.txt

Will we ever be able to get rid of the OS dependent behavior like 'Mac text files have CR lineendings' (which is even wrong since Mac OS X)?

Mac OS X Screen-Sharing: Cut-Copy-Paste

2011-08-22T11:56:00.003+02:00

You can cut/copy/paste across to/from your screen sharing session. It just does not share the copy buffer automatically. Instead you need to transfer the copy buffer into either direction explicitly by selecting Edit -> Send copy buffer or Receive copy buffer (the actual english text might be different, you will figure it out). Doing so will not copy or paste anything in itself. You then need to paste on the target side.

For example to transfer from your host to your remote machine:


* copy on host machine 

* Screen-Sharing: Edit->Send copy buffer

* paste on remote machine

Enabling Screen-Sharing on Mac OS X via ssh

2011-08-21T14:47:00.004+02:00

Recently the Nvidia graphics card in my MacBook Pro died (the well known Nvidia hardware failure problem) and I wanted to control the (otherwise running fine) machine remotely but screen sharing was not enabled on the damaged machine. Some digging with Google brought up a very easy solution. You need ssh access to the machine for this of course.


# for <= Mac OS X 10.6.2 do:

sudo sh -c "/bin/echo -n enabled > /Library/Preferences/com.apple.ScreenSharing.launchd"

# for >= Mac OS X 10.6.3 do:

sudo sh -c "/bin/echo -n enabled > /private/etc/ScreenSharing.launchd"

# for Mac OS X Lion do: (use unload to disable)

cd /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/

sudo launchctl load -w com.apple.screensharing.plist

This post contains all these hints:
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20080318190503111

I personally just tested the second variant for 10.6.8 so this is all I can confirm. The other variants were just taken from this post above to have it all in one place.

Set page margins with TextEdit

2011-08-21T14:40:00.002+02:00

I did not find any way to set the page margins with TextEdit itself in an RTD (RTFD) document. But actually this is quite easy to do by editing the RTF file (or RTFD/TXT.rtf file) directly as ASCII (for example with emacs etc).

On the fifth line you will find this:


\paperw11900\paperh16840\margl1440\margr1440\margb360\margt360\vieww27000\viewh21300\viewkind1\viewscale125

The margl and margr are for the left and right margin, respectively (1440 = 1.0 inch = 25.4 mm). I added margt and margb for the top and bottom margin in the example above to be 360 (= 0.25 inch). These two are usually not part of an RTF which you created with TextEdit.

2011-08-16T21:41:00.003+02:00

I just stumbled across this very true summary about technical depth and how to deal with it:

http://www.nomachetejuggling.com/2011/07/22/when-to-work-on-technical-debt

In my experience technical depth always happens. One must always try to avoid it but it can never totally be avoided (for multiple reasons). The main point is: You (the one who writes and maintains the software) must deal with it in your daily normal work every day immediately and you must organize to pay it off without asking for permission or telling other people.

The sentence 'We never have enough time to pay off our technical depth' does not make sense and is wrong. Nobody will provide you with time to do this and nobody will schedule it for the future. You need to deal with it yourself without any additional time.

The sentence 'This is so wrong, we should fix it. Let's add this to our defect database so it does not get lost.' usually means: 'I don't understand or care about technical depth so let's put this into a strange ever growing database and forget about it. It will never get done.

Defect databases most of the time help to create technical depth since they encourage people to file work items which really need to be done now for the future. They do not help to reduce technical depth. A 8x8cm piece of paper with the top issues on it you need to work is better. You usually will not be able to deal with more depth than what fits on this piece of paper.

I always compare technical depth with a snow-pusher which has a flat pushing front and by pushing harder can always get a bit further by pulling back and by ramming into the snow wall once more, but after some time it can only ever advance by a couple of centimeters per push. The only way is to get rid of the snow is to get rid of the snow. Pushing the snow forward for future processing is not going to work.

Brother MFC-7440N Toner empty end of life

2011-07-25T23:19:00.002+02:00

Today I got the 'toner empty' messages from my Brother MFC-7440N printer. I printed 850 pages total and this is a TN-2110 which came with the printer. About 10 pages before I got the 'toner almost empty' (all in german so these messages might not be accurate) message.

The MFC-7440N would stop printing any pages. The last pages before this came out 100% fine so I wanted just to continue to print with this toner cartridge. A lot of googling lead me to several 'solutions' which did not work for me. I am not yet 100% sure what helped, but taking out the toner cartridge with the black case, shaking the toner, and putting yellowish paper tape across both holes on the left and the right of the black toner cartridge housing solved the problem.

After putting the toner back I could print a page normally and I no longer see the 'toner empty' nor the toner almost empty messages. The page count is still at 851.

I also found these hints: Open the front cover, then press the Back (german:Storno) button (the left bottom one of the four round black buttons), then press * 0 0, or * 1 0. But both did not work for me. (Do not press 1 or 2 as indicated in the display. This is for the drum.)

Gimp does not start on Mac OS X

2011-06-19T13:35:00.002+02:00

I don't know what is going, but the high level symptom is 100% reproducible since my very first days on Max OS X: After not having used Gimp for about 1-2 months is will never ever start when I need it.

Today it even would not start when re-installing it. Not a big surprise since this was already the latest and greatest version.

What helped, however, was hard killing the X11 app: Twice.

After killing the X11 app it came back again and I killed that again. I assume the automatic starting of X11 by Gimp is broken or that some other X11 app leaves the X11 server in a state such that Gimp cannot deal with it.

Nokia mobile phone SMS backup/download

2011-06-05T12:56:00.004+02:00

Today I wanted to download all sent and received SMSes from my Nokia 6021 phone via Bluetooth. This utility worked for me on Mac OS X: Phone Director 1.4.2 available here: http://www.macmedia.sk/download.htm.

You need to create a COM port with the Nokia PC Suite service as described in the Bluetooth README which comes with Phone Director. Then select this new com port in the preferences.

When you save the SMSes as text it will save it with CR line endings and UFT-8 encoding. To convert this to Latin1 and LF line endings (which I prefer) use this:

recode utf8/cr..latin1 SMS.txt

You can get recode from: http://recode.progiciels-bpi.ca/

Keychain Access crashes (Schlüsselbundverwaltung Absturz)

2011-02-09T22:33:00.005+01:00

Today my Keychain Access (in german Schlüsselbundverwaltung crashed reproducibly on startup. The first symptom was actually that Safari did not remember some passwords. Starting keychain access resulted in 100% reproducible crashes.

I found part of the solution on this german page:

http://macokratie.blogspot.com/2010/08/schlusselbundverwaltung-fix-fur-absturz.html

Enable 'Start in 32-bit mode' on the Keychain Access program. This made it possible to start the Keychain Access and also the First Aid. The First Aid would however still crash and neither print a concrete problem nor repair it. It would just print 'crashed unexpectedly' (or so, in german).

iTunes would also still crash with the same error message (the same traceback) as Keychain Access.

So I rolled back the ~/Library/Keychains/login.keychain to a two weeks older version and this solved the problem. Apparently the keychain was corrupted. Now iTunes works again and I also can set Keychain Access back to 64 bit mode.

A bit frightening still.

Firefox/Mozilla Home/End (Pos1/Ende) keys do not work on Mac OS X

2010-12-22T09:18:00.001+01:00

Firefox does not honor the normal Mac OS X keybindings. Install this Firefox extension fo fix these keys:

http://mavaball.net/wiki/index.php/Keyfixer

Dashboard Widget on Desktop

2010-11-17T08:24:00.004+01:00

It is possible to move Dashboard widgets back a forth between the desktop and the dashboard:

To enable this feature: defaults write com.apple.dashboard devmode YES
To disable this feature: defaults write com.apple.dashboard devmode YES
To move a widget start to mode it so it is attached to your mouse and then press F12. This works it both ways.

In fact I just had the problem that a dashboard widget was on my desktop and I did not know how to remove it again (move it back to the dashboard) since I completely forgot about this feature. This blog entry is the reminder for next time.

:-)

Good collection of Apple Mac OS X tricks

2010-10-07T08:13:00.002+02:00

http://timotoivonen.fi/misc/apple.html
(keyboard shortcuts, iTunes)

No md5sum in Mac ports? Use md5sha1sum

2010-08-03T09:29:00.002+02:00

I recently installed snow leopard and got rid of all my old Mac ports. One of the things which I did not figure out immediately was how to install md5sum which I got used to from Linux. The answer is to install the package md5sha1sum instead:


sudo port install md5sha1sum

Macs come with md5 which solves the same problem but which has a different (worse) user interface.

Zoom/Maximize for Mac OS X Snow Leopard

2010-06-24T18:25:00.002+02:00

The Apple behavior of the Zoom/Maximize button is annoying. It behaves differently for *every* application and the intended 'use only as much space as you need' does not work at all because window contents are dynamic.

The application RightZoom fixes this. It took me ages until a friend of mine pointed me at it:

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/30591/right-zoom

How to manipulate (move/delete/ignore) time machine backups: fsaclctl

2010-06-24T09:39:00.004+02:00

When I tried to move some time machine backups out of the way (so that the Migration Assistant/Migrationsassistent) would not find them (and would use an older, more useful backup) I always got:

Operation not permitted

Changing the UNIX wrx permissions with chmod did not work (no effect). Some googling revealed that the permissions are controlled by ACLs (access control lists). With Leopard these can be disabled for the whole disk with

sudo fsactctl -p /Volume/MyVolumeName -d

Now Snow Leopard does not have fsaclctl. But apparently you can just use the one you have from Leopard. You can just copy /usr/sbin/fsaclctl from one of your Leopard time machine backups to /usr/sbin of your Snow Leopard machine.

This post gave the hint: http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=105879

iSight camera stops working in Skype or iChat after installing eyetv hybrid

2010-06-16T13:25:00.002+02:00

I just installed eyetv hybrid and after that I could not use my integrated iSight camera (in my Mac Book Pro) with Skype or iChat. They would simply say: No camera connected.

Fixing this:

However, starting Photo Booth once fixed this issue. After starting Photo Boot (which showed that the iSight camera works) and just closing it Skype and iChat video worked again. I assume that the eyetv installation just disabled the existing video devices and forgot to insert them again and that Photo Booth does a better initialization than Skype or iChat.

Of course I assume a reboot would fix this as well, but who likes rebooting all the time. After all why do I have a Mac. :-)

MacBook Pro SuperDrive fails to burn DVD

2010-03-15T10:45:00.002+01:00

Recently my MacBook Pro's SuperDrive would stop buring DVDs. It would try to 'open the session' and then fail with an error message which said that it cannot calibrate the laser for this medium. Putting in a different type of DVD did not help. A restart of the computer helped once, but that was just by chance. Burning CD still worked OK.

Apparently dust on the lens is the problem. This very good page describes how to remove the SuperDrive and disassemble it and clean the lens. But the procedure is quite involved and often there is just a bit of dust on the lens, just enough to make the burning fail.

I read through the comment on that page and looked at the pictures. Apparently a lot of people were able to clean the lens by using a thin credit card like thing and a dry soft cloth for cleaning glasses. I tried this as well and it worked after the first try! Burning DVDs works again. There is probably no control over the amount of dust removed by this procedure, but as long as one can remove enough dust to make DVD burning possible this is OK with me as the cleaning process just takes 1 minute. :-)

Obviously you should never do this if you are afraid of destroying your SuperDrive. There are delicate mechanics in there which could easily break.

Apple Mac Mini: Mini DVI adapter does not have VGA RGB signals

2009-06-20T02:27:00.003+02:00

The mini DVI to DVI adapter which is included in the Mac Minis with Mini DVI socket does not transport the VGA RGB signals which are necessary to connect a VGA monitor. This means it is not possible to use a DVI-I to VGA adapter to connect a VGA display. The included adapter is rather a mini DVI to DVI-D adapter instead of a mini DVI to DVI-I adaptr (which I would find intuitive). The mini itself emits the necessary signals, but the adapter does not carry these signals. Apple wants us to buy another adapter for 19 EUR.

Very nasty, but the worst is that I do not have the adapter for this weekend. Mini DVI is crap, completely.

LogiLink WL0038 WLAN Router review

2009-06-17T23:52:00.006+02:00

Today I received my LogiLink WL0038 WLAN Router, a low priced 54MBit device (about 25 EUR). Unfortunately mine had several shortcomings:

Internal HF shielding was rattling loosely in the housing (was not soldered to PCB) (broken)
Antenna plug was attached to housing using hot glue, but was still completely loose (broken)
Default IP of router was not 192.168.2.2 (as documented) but 192.168.16.1 (as if somebody already used the device)
Automatic channel selection selected a channel which was already taken (11) although channel 6 was still free (well, other devices do that too)
WLAN signal strength was at 80% (while set to maximum in settings) although the device was 1-2 meters away from the client. Even the networks of my neighbours were stronger! :-)
Network access through WLAN was extemely slow: I always had huge latencies of > 2000ms. Ping times through WLAN were about 2100ms. Ssh was completely unusable through this. Websurfing felt as if going through a 9600 baud modem. I tried for about one hour to figure out what misconfiguration could have caused this and eventually gave up.

It seems like my unit was already used by somebody else who did not like it and has sent it back. The packaging appeared to be untouched however.

Nevertheless I will send the device back to the dealer and claim my money back. I do not even want a replacement unit.

Can't sleep (xkcd)

2009-04-21T02:07:00.001+02:00

syslogd again

2009-03-27T00:02:00.002+01:00

Argh! I thought I solved the /var/log/* issue once and forever, but no, it did not work at all with the changes of the last post. I still see almost all logfiles being rotated. Nasty. Only /var/log/syslog seems to work OK.

Now I see that there is another file in


/etc/cron.weekly/syslogd

This needs to be removed without replacement. I want monthly logging, this is more than enough.

And apparently I need to add the -a option to syslogd-listfiles to get all files rotated in a useful way.

Keep /var/log logs longer

2009-02-26T00:46:00.003+01:00

I recently tried to increase the amount of log data which is kept in /var/log on my Ubuntu box. The log files are usually rotated using logrotate, or so I thought. The first thing I did was editing


/etc/logrotate.conf

I set the interval to monthly and rotate 24, but this did not help.

I seems like half of the log files are rotated by savelog which is triggered daily by cron. So I moved the file


/etc/cron.daily/sysklogd

to cron.monthly and edited the number of cycles to 120 (10 years, -c 120. This seems to do the trick. :-)

iPod touch MPN for first and second gen

2008-12-04T22:26:00.004+01:00

iPod touch MPN:

First generation (rectangular antenna on back)
- 8GB MA623LL/B
- 16GB MA627LL/B
- 32GB MB376LL/A

Second generation (oval black antenna on back)
- 8GB MB528LL/A
- 16GB MB531LL/A
- 32GB MB533LL/A

This lists all iPod models, but does not have the MPNs.

Funnier than Dilbert: xkcd.com

2008-11-13T20:28:00.002+01:00

http://xkcd.com

Re-enable X11 on Max OS X

2008-10-13T02:13:00.003+02:00

Every now and then Apple disables the TCP ports of the X server. I don't know why, but at least two updates from Apple disabled this now.

You know TCP is disabled if you do


netstat -na|grep 6000

and you see nothing. If X11 would be listening you should see something like:


tcp4       0      0  *.6000                 *.*                    LISTEN
tcp6       0      0  *.6000                 *.*                    LISTEN

Also when you try to start an X11 app (like xcalc) from the terminal and you have set the DISPLAY variable to localhost:0, then you will see this if the X server is not listening on TCP (after a few seconds):


Error: Can't open display: localhost:0

To enable TCP on the Xserver type this into a terminal:


defaults write org.x.X11 nolisten_tcp 0

and then restart you X server. Now xcalc should start immediately.

MacBook Pro eject key delay

2008-10-07T22:26:00.003+02:00

I just figured that I also need to install NoEjectDelay from the same website to get rid of the eject key delay, but the key repeat still does not work for the eject key (now forward delete key).

Remap small enter key to Alt (option) on MacBook Pro

2008-10-07T22:08:00.002+02:00

The small enter key on older MacBook Pros is completely useless. Newer MacBook Pros have an option (Alt) key there instead which makes more sense.

With KeyRemap4MacBook you can remap many keys. It has a static list of possible key remappings which you can choose from, but they seem to cover a lot of use cases, You can also remap the eject key (which si also useless) as 'Del' (forward delete), but this does not work well for me as this key still has the delay and no key repeat.

Anyway, having a second option key is great and reason enough to install this:

http://www.pqrs.org/tekezo/macosx/keyremap4macbook/index.html

Duplicates after import in iTunes

2008-10-07T22:03:00.002+02:00

I recently repeatedly experienced duplicates in iTunes after importing directories of mp3 files. Almost all files (but not all) would be visible twice in iTunes and they would also exist as two distinct files in the iTunes library, but the files would be identical. Some files even would be visible three times.

I now found what is the cause: An m3u playlist in the directory will cause all the file in that playlist to be impoted and in addition all mp3 files in that directory are also imported, hence all files in the m3u list will appear twice.

The solution is to erase all m3u files (or all non-mp3 files) before importing directory structures.

Ishkurs Guide to Eletronic Music ...

2008-10-07T01:06:00.001+02:00

... can be found here now:

http://techno.org/electronic-music-guide/music.swf

(The link in the older post does not work for me at least on my Mac using Safari.)

PacMan Statistics

2008-09-24T23:31:00.000+02:00

BTW: 75% of all statistics are useless! :-)

A Girl's Guide to Geek Guys

2008-06-27T18:40:00.002+02:00

Apparently there is still a chance:

http://ifaq.wap.org/sex/geekguide.html

:-)

HowTo: PC-Style keyboard mapping on Mac OS X (german keyboard)

2008-01-14T23:26:00.001+01:00

The keymap on a german keyboard attached to a Mac is rather different that what people expect from a standard Linux or Windows PC. This is very irritating for novices and geeks at the same time. Especially if you program a lot you miss the braces and the brackets, but most of all you miss the backslash, the pipe symbol, the tilde and the AT symbol. Apple! How dare you! The backslash on a german keyboard is Alt+Shift+7! Argh!

Anyway, these days are over. Here is how to get a pretty standard PC-Style keymap alongside the old Apple bindings if possible:

1. mkdir ~/Library/KeyBindings (if it does not exist)
2. put the following text into the file Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict
3. Log out and log in (some apps like TextEdit pick up the changes directly when you restart them)


{
"\UF729" = "moveToBeginningOfLine:"; /* pos1 */
"^\UF729" = "moveToBeginningOfDocument:"; /* crtl + pos1 */
"$\UF729"  = "moveToBeginningOfLineAndModifySelection:";
"\UF72b" = "moveToEndOfLine:"; /* end */
"^\UF72B" = "moveToEndOfDocument:"; /* ctrl + end */
"$\UF72B"  = "moveToEndOfLineAndModifySelection:";
"\UF72C"   = "pageUp:";
"\UF72D"   = "pageDown:";
"^~7" = ("insertText:", "|"); /* orig alt 7 */
"^~8" = ("insertText:", "{"); /* orig alt 8 */
"^~9" = ("insertText:", "}"); /* orig alt 9 */
"^\U00DF" = ("insertText:", "\U00BF"); 
"^+" = ("insertText:", "\U00B1"); 
"~<" = ("insertText:", "|");
"~7" = ("insertText:", "{");
"~0" = ("insertText:", "}");
"~8" = ("insertText:", "[");
"~9" = ("insertText:", "]");
"~+" = ("insertText:", "~");
"~\U00DF" = ("insertText:", "\U005C"); 
"~q" = ("insertText:", "@");
"^x" = "cut:";
"^c" = "copy:";
"^v" = "paste:";
}

This gives you the braces, the brackets, the backslash, the pipe symbol, the AT symbol, the tilde, Home/End on PC typical key combinations. It also gives Ctrl+X, C, V for cut/copy/paste in addition to Command+X, C, V. Most of the Apple key combinations still work after this change, so Mac users would still find their way in your system. The most noticeable change is Alt+7 for the pipe symbol which is now the opening brace.

I got all the info from this german page:

Tastaturbelegung unter Mac OS X

which provides a very useful example keymap (which I extended a bit above) and a link to this great page:

http://www.lsmason.com/articles/macosxkeybindings.html

The latter one provides virtually all the background information you need to do your own keymaps.

Happy keymapping!

Change keyboard type button missing in System Preferences

2008-01-14T22:46:00.000+01:00

After playing with the keyboard type (I don't remember exactly what I did) I had a nasty keyboard type/mapping problem on my MacBook Pro (Max OS X Leopard 10.5.1):

From some point on the two keys (<> and ^° in my case, german keyboard) where swapped. All other keys were normal, so it was not a keymap problem. The german keymap worked well except for these two keys which were swapped. Stangely enough the button to undo this change 'Change keyboard type ...' *vanished* from the System Preferences! I could not believe this until I verified that on other Macs this button is present. I don't understand why. Apple: Never do these configure once things!

Starting the KeyboardSetupAssistant did not help at all since it would say that all known keyboard were configured. Thanks.

I found the solution in some Apple forum thread but I am replicating it here since it took me quite some time to find it although it looks quite obvious to me now:

1) Delete the file: /Library/Preferences/com.apple.keyboardtype.plist
2) Restart

After removing the file and restarting:

1. I could set the keyboard type correctly using the assistant and
2. I can now change the keyboard type again using the System Preferences

I don't know why this button was missing before ...

Mac OS X 10.5.1 jnl: replay_journal: bad block list header

2008-01-03T17:23:00.000+01:00

After a cold boot I reproducibly got into an infinite loop of the gray start screen. The boot-up sound would be played every 3 minutes continuously.

I pressed Apple-V to see what is going on and I got several messages indicating that the journalling on my root disk was corrupted:

jnl: replay_journal: bad block list header @ ...
jnl: journal_open: Error replaying the journal!
hfs: early jnl init: failed to open/create the journal (retval 0)

Booting in single user mode (Apple+S), doing an fsck -fy and an exit solved the problem temporarily. It would boot up without problems. But after a day and another cold reboot the problem was there again. My MacBook Pro would not boot and was stuck in the endless gray boot screen loop.

I think I now solved the problem by making it boot once (see above), then disabling the journal by doing

sudo diskutil disableJournal /dev/disk0s2

(This cannot be done in single user mode, you need to boot Mac OS X for this.)

Then I rebooted. No problem. Then I activated journalling using the disk utility and it works again. Rebooting cold now works fine. Let's see what the future brings.

But: Apple: Please. How hard can it be. Please make your stupid fsck program deal with such a situation instead of continuously rebooting. This is a showstopper bug for a lot of users. Filesystem checks must never assume the filesystem including any journal is OK!!! This is sounds rather obvious to me.

Printing from Mac (Leopard) on a printer connected to Ubuntu Linux

2007-12-12T01:30:00.000+01:00

Here I found the solution how to print from my MacBook Pro on a shared printer which is connected to a Ubuntu (7.10) Linux box.

The printer on the Ubuntu box needs to be shared. The gnome printer administrations GUI tools are sufficient for this. Just enable the two network sharing and printer detection options.

Test from the Mac whether you can see the cups system on the Ubuntu machine: Open Safari at http://myubuntuhost:631. If you can see your printer. If not your Ubuntu printer is not working even on the Ubuntu system.

Since I upgraded to Leopard I could not see/access/configure the remote printer in any way, until I read the page linked above and made the following chnages:

On the Mac side, add/change these lines in the file /etc/cups/cupsd.conf:

Browsing On
BrowseOrder allow,deny
BrowseAllow all
BrowseRemoteProtocols all
BrowsePoll IP_OF_YOUR_SERVER:631
BrowsePort 631

Then reboot the Mac.

Now when you try to print something you may notice that all your printers are gone on the Mac. But when I tried to select a printer a new printer was automagically added after a few seconds. The new printer had the name MYPRINTER @ MYMACHINE so it is easy to recognize whether this worked or not.

Being brave ...

2007-10-24T01:52:00.000+02:00

... sometimes means you *are* looking for trouble.

Obey the sign!

2007-10-24T00:56:00.000+02:00

Germans like signs very much. Too bad this one is in english. :-)

USA

2007-10-24T00:43:00.000+02:00

Ignorance is bliss ...

2007-08-30T23:01:00.000+02:00

Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music:

http://www.di.fm/edmguide/edmguide.html

This page is great: Samples from all kinds of electronik music, really *all* kinds. And a map how they are related and where they originated from. And entertaining texts explaining objective and not so objective facts. :-)

Pendulum

2007-02-27T00:13:00.001+01:00

Two great music videos:

Pendulum: Slam

The Prodigy: Voodoo People (Pendulum Remix)

We're going to rock civilization! Yeah. :-)

Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.x: Color profile - fast user switching bug

2006-12-25T00:30:00.000+01:00

When using the fast user switching feature of Mac OS X 10.4.x (x == 1 to 8 at least) there is a nasty bug which screws up the color profile settings (if you use a custom color profile, which is very likely if you use a LCD screen).

The bug appears like this:
- you log in: color profile OK
- you switch to another user: color profile OK
- you switch back to the original user: color profile screwed up and can not be reset by the obvious means in the system settings

I found a workaround here which works pretty well:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20060103162354164

Thanks a lot for sharing this!

In short:
- to fix the problem temporarily (e.g. fix the color profile) start
/System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Versions/
A/Frameworks/CoreGraphics.framework/Versions/A/Resources/DMProxy
- to fix it permanently add this to the startup objects for all users

Have a colorful day!

Flash player screwed up on Mac OS X

2006-12-17T22:39:00.000+01:00

Today I tried to watch youtube.com on my Mac Mini running Mac OS X Tiger 1.4.8 but I was hearing no sound. The video is played using some flash plugin (which sucks). The sound setting on my machine seemed ok since all other apps were playing sound fine.

Google found some hints here:

http://fredericiana.com/2006/06/14/flash-video-and-no-sound-on-osx

But none of the hints would solve my problem exactly. The key seems to be the Audio MIDI Setting application. Open a shell and type:

open "/Applications/Utilities/Audio MIDI Setup"

Twiddling with the volumes at the bottom of the first pane and setting the output device correctly solved the problem for me. Others reported that they needed to (re-) set the sampling rate to 44100.

This is of course only a workaround. This Flash stuff is real crap as always. You always need the newest version to be able to do stuff you could easily do without it. And it prevents you from doing useful stuff which you could do without it, all for commercial reasons. It does not play fullsreen fluently on my 1.25 GHz iBook while this plays DVD with much higher bitrate and framerate fine, i.e. it does not use the hardware scaler. This crap sucks.

By the way: This is exactly the type of behavior I expect from Windows machines: Install something and something completely unrelated breaks. Apple: Please make this more robust!

So long ... happy youtubing! :-)

HP 2550 toner empty?

2006-11-11T23:16:00.005+01:00

The HP Color LaserJet (CLJ) 2550 / 2550L / 2550LN uses the toner cartridges Q3960A, Q3961A, Q3962A and Q3963A. The printer stops printing after some defined number of pages although the toner is not really empty. This is really annoying. The HP toner is very expensive and the toner cartridges which are supposed to last for 4000 (5000 black) pages only last for about 2000 pages in practice (at least for me).

To make use of the remaining toner there is a workaround. This requires tampering with the toner cartridges and you will loose the warranty for your device. You may also damage your device, so do not do the following if you do not know what you are doing!

Disclaimer: Do not follow any of the procedures below! They are unsafe. You have been warned!

When the LED is flashing for some toner cartridge: Take it out and swap the chip with the chip of some other toner cartridge of a different color. This can be from an empty toner cartridge. It's a good idea to mark the chip with the original color as it cannot be used for this color in the future. The printer will now claim that there is a non-HP toner in the printer, but it will print as normal. The LED of that cartridge will be off. When I did this for the black cartridge I always had to switch the printer off after each print job as it would recognize a fault on black. I also had to open and close the paper compartment every 50 pages or so. Btw, this also helps when one of the toners gets empty (blinking) during a long print job: When the printer stops open and close the paper compartment, then it will continue to print. You need to take care of the image quality yourself now of course. Destroying the chip with 12V did not work for me for the toner cartridges.

For the imaging drum swapping the chip did not work for me. But destroying the chip by applying a Voltage of 12-14V for 10 seconds to the two pads worked for me. The drum LED is now also off and recognized as non-HP. I also needed to get the old toner out of the imaging drum: It can be opened by removing the screws from one side and removing the white gears and the cover of the old toner compartment. This was very tricky to do and I had to almost break the platic parts. I took out a long threaded platic part, The old toner causes a big mess! Do this outside! Wear old clothes! Use an old or industry vaccum cleaner to remove all of the old toner. Don't use you home vaccum cleaner for this, the toner goes thorugh all the filters. Do this outside! This may seriously damage and break your imaging drum. But it does not work anyway if the drum LED is blinking. I made the mistake of touching the white platic sheet, so I had my fingerprints on the first 10 pages I printed. However, they fade out by themselves. Avoid touching the imaging drum itself by any means.

The original ideas came from this german forum post: here.

My imaging drum still works perfectly (but only after I removed the old toner from it). And the toner cartridges can print many pages after they initially stopped printing!

BTW, all the hold keys down while switching on did not work for me at all!

Update: 2011-01-16:

Second imaging drum was depleated today. The last color pages printed were absolutely flawless. The locking mechanism is annoying. I tried to burn the cjip with 12V like the previous one, I even used the burnt chip which worked on the previous drum, nothing worked. The drum LED would blink and the printer was not ready. Pressing cancel didn't help and also all the 'hold down buttuns which powering on' stuff did not work at all. No effect.

I finally (already prepared the throw the whole thing into the trash including 4 new toners) tried an old empty chip from a yellow toner. This worked! The drum LED was blinking and the attention light was on. Pressing cancel cleared both LEDs. Now the drum LED is off and the printer print again. (For the first page there is no ready light though. However this cured itself later as well, nit sure when.)

My conclusion is: Do not buy HP printers. You will get a big pile of trash for a lot of money. Looking back the years, HP2550: Expensive toner, expensive drums, lots annoyances, lots of paper jams from bottom compartment. Very slow printer. Crappy HP printer driver (always prints color pages, also for BW pages). Bad support for Mac OS X.

Apple security update breaks Mail and Safari

2006-08-08T22:49:00.000+02:00

Apple, what have you done. A black day in Apple history. :-)

After installing the Apple Security update 2006-004 I had problems starting Mail.app and Safari.app on my iBook. The problem report I sent to Apple said:


Symbol not found: __ZN3KJS9ObjectImpC2Eb
Referenced from: /System/Library/Frameworks/WebKit.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/
WebCore.framework/Versions/A/WebCore
Expected in: /System/Library/Frameworks/WebKit.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/
JavaScriptCore.framework/Versions/A/JavaScriptCore

The rest of the system seemed fine, and I was able to use Firefox to find this simple solution (after tons of useless problem reports without solution):

Just install the MacOS X Update 10.4.7 Combo PPC update again. This solved the problem for me. Of course I don't have the security update anymore, but quite frankly, I can live with that.

Btw, I found this solution on another blog.

On days like these I really like blogs.

Happy installing,

icode

Bombs

2006-07-26T22:55:00.000+02:00

Stop the bombing! Every bombing destroys lives unselectively. No bomb has ever lead to a better world. Never, ever. No matter which nation ever sends bombs under which condition. It's just horrible. It takes 3 generations at least to forget the violence. In the end, it's a lose-lose situation. Many deaths and the feeling of great injustice on both sides.

Please, stop now! Every damage not done makes the situation less complex and the future more worth living. The true solution is in peace, deescalation, passiveness, self-control, understanding, helping and in the end love.

Make love not war!

This had to be said. I feel a little better now.

Worldcup 2006

2006-07-09T23:06:00.000+02:00

Congratulations Italia. The final was not a very good game to remember, but italia deserved the thin win in the end in the penalties. I still have no idea what has bitten Zidane who saw the red card after a head assault. This did certainly not help the french team.

The game for the third place (the small final) between Portugal and Germany yesterday was much better. Usually these games tend to be boring. Congratulations go to both teams which gave everything in an interesting game with many goals.

Special thanks go to the german team for playing so well during the whole worldcup: You gave us back our national flag and a part of our national identity. Now let's hope we qualify for the Euro 2008.

;-)

Torsten Frings misses match against Italy

2006-07-03T23:58:00.000+02:00

Honestly, I can not believe it. The german football player - Torsten Frings - got suspended for one game in the worldcup after the FIFA committee reviewed video material broadcasted by the italian owned pay TV station Sky. He is accused of hitting the argentinian player Julio Cruz in the face. He has been found guilty, although 3 official referees did not see anything and even Julio Cruz himself claims that he felt nothing.

How can this be? Why was video analysis only for this game? How can somebody be found guilty if the alleged victim himself claims there was no harm done?

I get the strong feeling something is going on there ...

OK, I'd better stop before this gets ugly .. :-)

Lousberglauf Training

2006-06-28T19:57:00.000+02:00

Today 32 minutes door2door for the usual round without looping on the top but along the columns. That looks bad since the real Lousberglauf is even a bit longer. I guess I will not reach my ambitious goal to stay below 30 minutes for the first time.

The last two sundays I was running along the Pferderennbahn / Gut Leidenhausen(long round) and it took me 25:19 and then 24:25.

Medion MDPNA 510T

2006-06-27T23:53:00.000+02:00

I bought this toy yersterday for 299 at Aldi Süd and I am mostly satisfied (so far, not having tested this on a long trip).

What I like:

Cool SIRF III GPS receiver (if you have one of the pre 2006 Garmin GPS devices: This is like 1000 times better. I have full reception even in buildings (e.g. under a metal roof or under steel concrete, my Garmin would give up under the light shade of a tree). It seems to pick up all kinds of reflections and make use of them. Really amazing technology. It works perfectly even under metallized or heated windscreens.)
Early and precise voice messages. You don't need the display at all. (Even things like and early 'keep left' or 'keep right' on multilane streets.)
Bright display, high contrast colors for streets (the standard colors, yellow for motorways, red for Bundesstrassen and white for small streets).
Easy to use touchscreen: I never have to use the pen which comes with it.
TMC receiver helps to avoid traffic jams.
Fast responses to user input. Fast screen update. Feels very responsive.

What I dislike:

Navigation is limited to a 'map' (e.g. you have to manually change the maps when going from Cologne to Madrid).
Can not simply navigate to the next POI (e.g. gasstation) just by pointing at it.
Can not navigate to a point without having the address (e.g. by pointing at it or by entering the GPS coordinates).
Is lacking even basic GPS device functionality (waypoints, tracks, ...) although a GPS receiver is built in.
Can not move the map in 3D view (OK, the 3D view is not so important)

The only non-obvious feature I found so far:

You don't have to enter the complete addresses. Just a few letters are usually sufficient and you can select from a list if your information was not yet unique.

If all this is worth 299 EUR I don't know. But it's a nice toy.

It's like flying ...

2006-06-27T23:44:00.000+02:00

This is exactly what I feel like very often:

Flying is to throw yourself at the ground and miss.
Douglas Adams

Faroe Islands

2006-06-27T01:08:00.000+02:00

The italians winning over australia in the last few senconds of the game reminded me of an even more extreme football game which took place on Jue 11th 2003 in Tórshavn: Färöer against Germany. I will never forget this: A beautiful stadium inbetween green grassy hills. The game was not good, but the athomsphere alone was touching. Both teams were unable to score for the first 89 minutes! This was a big achievement of the Färöer team which played well. There was no justification at all for germany winning this game 0:2 in the end. Anyway, I took a few television snapshots back then showing the stadium in Tórshavn and Gerhard Delling and Günter Netzer analyzing the game (Günter excoriating the german team of course, as always).

I would love to go to the Faroes someday ...

Swiss: What a pity!

2006-06-27T00:41:00.000+02:00

The swiss team lost against the ukraine after overtime and penalty shootout. What a pity! The underdogs almost made it! However, the ukraine is no less and underdog and I wish them all the best for their next game(s). Hopefully we will se the swiss again in 4 years!

Australia: You had one chance and you blew it!

2006-06-27T00:28:00.000+02:00

Australia lost in the 1/8 final elimination round of the football world championship against a very weak italian team. They had a realistic chance of winning this thing. I'm not saying the austalians played better football, but they were the underdogs and they were not far from winning this game. This could have been the sensation of the event.

Anyway: Austalia, you have my deep sympathy. Hopefully we will see you again in 4 years in South Africa!

The rock

2006-06-25T21:02:00.000+02:00

Me holding a piece of rock in some tunisian desert. The rocks all looked black from the outside, so I split one to see that the color inisde is quite bright, like lime. Nothing of particular interest, except that it is one of the very few pictures in my archive where I am in front of the lens instead of behind the lens. It is just here to have a place for it in my blog profile.

Apple iCal without .mac account

2006-06-25T16:05:00.000+02:00

Today I tried out icalx.com and it seems to work perfectly with Apple iCal 2.0.3. You can publish your calendar from one computer and subscribe (read-only) from other computers and you can view your calendar in any webbrowser (read-only).

To overcome the read-only limitation in this setup I also subscribed to Google Calendar, but the interaction is tedious. (I can add calendar items to the google calendar and subscribe to the google calendar in iCal from the other computers, but they are still totally separate calendars. I can then manually cut-copy-paste each individual google calendar entry into my iCal calendar using Apple iCal, but this is rather inconvenient and error prone.)

Anyway, if you create new events on one machine most of the time and simply want to review them from other machines this is perfect (since all automatic).

However, I still think I have to set up my own server to get all the functionality I want. Year 2006, and we are still in the stone-age of the computer era. ;-)