Mac Geeks

Agile Web Solutions is giving me a free license of their password management tool 1Password to give away. So you are invited to apply for this free license.

Please just leave a comment on this posting and we will find a winner by Nov. 29th 2008. Don’t forget your email address to get notified.

I use 1Password for a while and don’t wanna miss it. It’s one central place to store passwords and web forms and these data are accessible in almost any browser on my Mac.

I used to send me eMails with Tasks when I’m on the run. OmniFocus is able to fetch these Mails automatically into it’s Inbox. But not so Things. I always missed this feature and looked around for a possible Solution.

Now I found one in the CulturedCode Wiki to Things. They provide an AppleScript to do exactly this. You just have to create a rule in Mail.app to filter the eMails you want to send to Things and execute the script. Things must be running to work.

The Crtl+Tab add-on for Firefox enables a CoverFlow like navigation between the tabs of your Firefox3. It also shows a grid overview of your tabs and lets you search for words in all tabs at once.

CoverFlow like navigation

grid overview

Last weekend I reinstalled MacOS X Leopard on my MacBook Pro for it had some strange errors I couldn’t get rid of. Of course I did a Time Machine backups ahead to have my data safe during reinstallation. I didn’t chose to restore my personal account from a Time Machine backup during the installation as I wanted a clean and fresh system with all programs and settings setup up new and manually. This time I selected to create FileVault user account. This means my home folder is actually an encrypted image file. This image file will be descrypted and mounted as my home directory during login and gets automatically closed and encrypted when I log out.

This worked very well for the first hours. But then during manual installation of some programs and copying my backed up files a kernel panic occured with the grey screen of death. That’s the last thing you wanna see when you have a mounted encrypted image.

After reboot I still was able to login and everything looked OK. But my keychain was damaged. This wasn’t a big problem for the moment as there where only a few apps which made entries there. I repaired the broken keychain and everything was OK.

Then, after finishing my restore I tried to delete the old Time Machine backups from my external disks. This isn’t as easy as it seems. Just dragging it into the Trash bin and empty the Trash will take hours as the Backup consists of million of files. I tried that before….

This time I tried to delete the Backups.backupdb folder from the disk with simple Unix commands (rm -rf ). But this doesn’t work firsthand. Even as superuser I wasn’t able to delete the files. Always got a “no permission” error message. I then checked the usual suspects mds (Spotlight Metadata Service) and hidden file attributes (xattribs). But that didn’t helped.

Finally I connected the disk to another MacBook with the old Tiger 10.4 MacOS X and tried to erase the files over there. This worked well. So Tiger doesn’t care about special settings of these files and did it’s job.

After that I tried to start a fresh and clean backup with Time Machine again. But Time Machine told me that it couldn’t do a backup of a FileVault secured home folder while the user is logged in. This is logical but sad. As this is a laptop computer and I’m the only user I’m almost always logged in when this machine is on. And to extra log off to have a backup done is not really practical. So I decided to kick FileVault for a convinient Time Machine backup. This took a lot of space on my hard disk during the unencryption and about 2 hours.

But now everything is fresh and clean and even PictureSync is working properly again.

I’m still using Quicksilver as universal control instance. It has some nice features I was missing in LaunchBar. So I can change my network location profile with Quicksilver easily. It’s accessible under it’s name. I also managed to tell Quicksilver to offer .jar files as applications so I can launch them via Quicksilver. I didn’t manage to get this with LaunchBar either.

I’m also sticking with Visor the Quake style Terminal. I had some problems starting Terminal in the beginning. A SIMBL error was raised but Visor worked properly after confirming this error message. Now I found out how to avoid this message by disabling Quartz background animations in the Visor preferences.

Today I switched from LaunchBar back to QuickSilver. While crawling the Blacktree website I found some other interesting stuff.

First thing is Visor – an extension for the Terminal.app which offers a so called Quake-style Terminal window. When installed, Visor offers a global keyboard shortcut which opens a Terminal window. The Terminal window will slide in from the top of the screen. Another hot key stroke will hide this Terminal window again.

The second application from Blacktree is Nocturne. This will change your screen colors to a black/white screen for simulating kind of night vision:

The switch from day to night mode can be done automatically by sense of the light sensors of the MacBook Pros.

If you need an temporary internet connection on the run and don’t have a special data rate on your mobile contract then maybe the Vodafone Websession is what you need.

This is a special mobile accesss point for session based internet connections. You will be charged on you normal telephon bill our via websession voucher. All you need is some special settings for the connection

You can choose to get 30 minutes, 1 hour our 24 hour session. For the 30 minutes session you’ll pay 1,95 EUR which isn’t quite cheap. But if you don’t have any data rate booked on your contract you’ll surely pay about 20 EUR per 1 MByte!!!

Normaly Vodafone is selling the Websession package with special UMTS/3G hardware like an USB-Stick or 3G ExpressCard. But if you got a mobile phone with an UMTS/3G modem which is recognized by your computer you’re all done. All you need is set up some special connection settings

Here are the “secret” settings:

APN: event.vodafone.de
username: my_username
password: mypassword
telephone number: *99***1#

I finally got the evidence that Apples Mail.app from Leopard is causing the exceeding traffic I see on my root server. I mentioned this before in the podcast that there is something strange since the upgrade to MacOS X 10.5.
Since the update I got more traffic warnings from my provider. I didn’t believe this was due to increasing popularity of this blog and Google Analytics proofed that (unfortunatly). I then installed ntop traffic monitoring on my server to further track down the source of the exceeding traffic.
I had Apple Mail under suspicion because the problems started when some people around me and myself upgraded to Leopard.

Now I got the proof that this is caused by Mail.app. The new Mail.app in Leopard isn’t that stable and so it hangs from time to time. Then I can’t even quit it with forcing it to quit. So was this morning. Some of the Mail.app plugins stopped working and I decided to quit and restart Mail.app. But Mail.app hang during shutdown and wasn’t responding for more than 10 minutes. So I force quitted it and restartet Mail.app.

Everythings seems fine after restart. All my mailboxes where there, messages too and all the plugins where working properly.
But a few minutes after the restart I got another traffic warning from my provider stating that something had transfered 1 GB of data. I checked ntop and saw that this was IMAP traffic from my server to our office. So it was clear that this was caused by my cold started Mail.app

I also checked the system log of Leopard but didn’t found any usefull information on this behaviour of Mail.app. It seems that Mail.app had rescanned or even retransfered my whole IMAP mailbox due to this hard restart. But I can explain why that must happen.

Technorati Tags: Leopard, Mail, MacOS X

With the updated Safari Browser in Version 3.1 it’s now possible to prevent links to open new browser windows. This settings is available in Firefox browser for a long time. But it’s still not easily available for Safari. Although you can explicitly open a link in a new tab, you can’t prevent opening a new window and instead send it to a tab by default.

But with a little help from the Terminal you can achieve this goal easily:

defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool true

found this a few days ago at fscklog

Technorati Tags: Firefox, Safari

The all new Safari in Leopard has some nice developer features one might now from the Firebug Addon for Firefox browser. I favor the network view here:

You can enable the developer mode in the Safari preferences pane under “advanced” settings.

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Technorati Tags: Firefox, Safari