Toluu

MacOSXHints.com

Macosxhints.com RSS feed

10.5: Safer sleep during networked Time Machine backupsToday

The problem: You have Time Machine set up using a sparsebundle on a network drive, such as a Time Capsule or an AirPort Extreme-connected hard drive. Most of the time, everything works great. Consider this reproducible scenario, however:

1. You are working away at home and a hourly backup starts. Time machine automagically mounts the sparsebundle.
2. You need to leave and put your laptop to sleep, not paying attention to the fact that time machine is working.
3. You move your laptop to work/school and wake it up.
4. The sparsebundle is still mounted, but obviously does not work. Finder and Spotlight grow increasing stuck until you have to reboot your machine. It occurs to you that the image back home was not closed properly and that eventually, this will corrupt your backups!

Solution:

1. Install SleepWatcher (I ...
   
   

Disable Skype's auto-changing of microphone volumeToday

Skype always irritated me with its automatic microphone volume changes. The Windows version has the ability to disable this option in the preferences pane, but the Mac version does not. Today, I spent some time trying to solve this problem. After some searching on net, I found a solution for the Windows version which also works on the Mac.

Quit Skype and open the folloving file with TextEdit: ~/Library » Application Support » Skype » shared.xml. At the end of the document, you'll see this section:<VoiceEng> <MicVolume>77</MicVolume></VoiceEng>Simply change this section to look like this (adding one new line):<VoiceEng> <AGC>0</AGC> <MicVolume>100</MicVolume></VoiceEng>AGC means Automatic Gain Control, and setting it to 0 disables this feature. Set it to 1 if you want to enable it again. The MicVolume can range from 0 (mute) to ...

Create arbitrary keyboard shortcuts for bookmarkletsToday

One of the things that makes Delicious (formerly del.icio.us) so useful it that it can integrate, to varying degrees, with all broswers via its JavaScript bookmarklets. Many other sites also use these -- for example, I have bookmarklets for Digg, FaceBook, and more. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to activate these from a keyboard shortcut? You can!

1. Add a bookmarklet to your Bookmarks menu, not to your favorites bar.
2. In System Preferences, go to the Keyboard Shortcuts tab of the Keyboard & Mouse System Preferences panel, and add a keyboard shortcut with the exact name of your bookmarklet. You can specify the application as either your chosen browser, or for All Applications if you use multiple browsers. If you choose All Applications, just make sure the bookmarklet has the same name in all browsers.

Now I can post to Delicious by pressing the same keyboard shortcut everywhere. Yay!

[robg adds: This work...

10.5: Edit multiple events at once in iCalYesterday

In 10.5, the iCal user interface is quite limiting. For instance, you can edit only a single event at a time. But there is something of a workaround to that problem: open multiple iCal windows at a time. Here's how. Quit iCal, then paste the following line into Terminal:defaults write com.apple.iCal IncludeDebugMenu 1Now launch iCal and select Debug » New Calendar Window, or just press Command-L. You can now edit an event in one window, and another event in the other window. iCal keeps the windows in sync, so that a change in one appears in the other.

[robg adds: The iCal debug menu was covered in this hint, but I thought this workaround for editing multiple events was worth sharing.]

Use Quicksilver for Finder cut and pasteYesterday

For those of us who miss being able to cut and paste in the Finder, I just found a pretty functional way to do it through Quicksilver triggers. Here's how:

1. Invoke Quicksilver (probably by pressing Control-Space)
2. Press Command-, to open its preferences
3. Go to Preferences » Application, and make sure 'Enable advanced features' is checked
4. Go to Catalog » Quicksilver and make sure 'Proxy objects' is checked
5. Go to Triggers and click the plus sign to add a new trigger and select Hotkey
6. Start typing Current Selection, and when the item pops up, press Tab
7. Start typing Move to... and then press Tab
8. In the last box, press Command-X clear the field. It must be completely empty for this to work -- no text, nothing
9. Click Save
10. Click the 'i' at the bottom right of the screen to show the trigger options
11. Under hot key, choose your preferred ke...