Mac Geeks

Yesterday Apple released the MacOS X Update to Leopard 10.5.6. You can read about the changes at the Apple Support Website.

One change I noticed was the newly introduced “Trackpad” preference icon in the global preferences.

I think this is mostly usefull for the brand new unibody MacBooks and MacBook Pros with the glass trackpad. I can not see any settings on my old MBP that where newly introduced.

You may wonder about all the other Preferences in the custom section above. These are (from left to right):

• Backblaze Online Backup Client
• Logitech Control Center
• Flip4Mac WMV Plugin for Quicktime
• Growl
• iStat Menus
• MySQL
• Perian (additional Codecs for Quicktime)
• Secrets (gives access to hidden System/Application Preferences)
• SmartSleep
• Wacom Bamboo Preferences
• TextExpander

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

I have used PictureSync intensively to upload my photos to Ipernity and to my personal Gallery2 installation. It’s fast and has a lot of usefull features like rules for automatic tagging.

But since a week or so it completly stopped working. It will take about an minute to start and then only welcomes me with an AppleScript error message. After confirming this I have to wait again several seconds just to see the next error message.

I tried to reinstall it with prior cleaning up all files I could find. But this doesn’t seem to help. I suspect the last MacOS X Leopard update to have changed something to stop PictureSync. But I have no proof of this. I wrote a mail to the developers but didn’t got an answer since 3 days.

I hope they will answer and get this fixed. I really love PictureSync for it’s flexibility.

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#

If your Time Maschine backup volumes filles up you may get a warning message from Time Maschine. It tells you that Time Maschine has deleted the oldest backup set to gain enough space for the actual backup. You can acknowledge the message and even opt to not see it in the future. Time Maschine will then automatically remove oldest backups when needed.

But the deletion of old backups will take some extra time on almost every backup. So maybe you wanna get rid of some old backups manually. This can easily be achieved by starting Time Maschine, navigating to the backup you want to delete and selecting the little gear icon in the Finder. There is an option “Delete Backup”. This will remove this point in time of your backup after asking for your authorization.


If you removed a couple of backup sets to be removed Time Maschine will need some time to wipe all the files. You will see a progress window like when flushing the trash can.
After the clean up you should have enough space for your next couple of backups. You should not delete any files or folders from the backup volume by your self. Time Maschine is doing an intelligent sparse backup. If you delete files or folders manually you may destroy the consistency of your backup and thus make it useless.

Technorati Tags: Time Maschine, Backup, MacOS X, Leopard

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

This podcast is about the applications I use the most on my Mac. It starts with browsers like Firefox, OmniWeb and Safari, the goes to gtd applications like OmniFocus and Things, drawing with OmniGraffle, chattings with AdiumX and Skype, mailing with Mail.app and Thunderbird and finally menu extensions like Jumpcut, iStatMenu, LittleSnitch, Shimo and Launchbar.

You can subscribe to the podcast from this url:

http://www.mac-geeks.de/wp-content/podcasts/podcast.xml

Simply subscribe to this URL in your iTunes and you’ll get the new episodes automatically.

Technorati Tags: Apple, eMail, MacGeeks, MacOS X, Podcast, Software

Some guys asked me how to subscribe to the new MacGeeks Podcast. I think it’s time for a little explanation how Podcasting works.

In fact Podcasts are normal RSS feeds as the text entries in a blog. The RSS feed is provided by a XML file which lists all postings in a structured manner. The only things special on Podcasts is that the entries (called episodes in Podcasts) are not of type text but instead are audio entries. The content is not directly embedded inside the XML file (as text entries are) but is linked from the XML file to an URI.

Because of that special content you don’t subscribe to Podcasts with your normal feed reader (like NetNewsWire, Vienna or Google Reader). You MacOS X has the right software for podcasts already preinstalled: iTunes.

You can simply subscribe to Podcasts with iTunes by clicking “Advanced -> Subscribe to podcast…” in the menu bar.

A new Window will open to let you type in the URL of the Podcasts RSS-XML-File. For our new MacGeeks Podcast this is: http://www.mac-geeks.de/wp-content/podcasts/podcast.xml .

The newly subscribed Podcast will appear in the list of available Podcasts.

iTunes will fetch the RSS-Feed-File and instantly try to load all not already fetched Episodes. It will also regularly reload the Podcast URL to look for new episodes.

Technorati Tags: iTunes, MacGeeks, MacOS X, podcast