screwed up dates

My friend called the other day, and had this weird problem in his email app. The apple mail, to be precisely.

For some reason, all emails had the same date on them. And not only that, they also had the same exact time stamped on them. Weird. First I thought it was a setting, or some specifics with the mail app. Maybe a preference setting, or something underlying in the setup. But no.

Then I tried to reinstall his email, and do it again. But to no avail. The same problem popped up, even though the email app, was in an entirely virgin state. I logged in to his gmail account, and saw that the dates there, was right and cool. So finally I narrowed it down to being a system wide setting.

If you ever HAVE this problem.

1. Go to system preferences.

2. Click "international".

3. Click "formats"

4. Make sure that the Region is not set to "custom" but to the specific country, where you reside.

That's it. Email back to normal :) Juhu!

screenshots out of place

One of the cool things in Leopard, is the new dock that lets you keep items out of sight, but within reach. For instance it is really a relief that all downloads from Safari, and whatever winds up in a stack that you can easily extend to see the contents of. And by that token, you don't clutter your desktop if you download stuff excessively.

But what about screenshots?

For some reason, they still end up on the desktop. If you envoke cmd-shift-3 / 4, depending on your mood, the result just lands on an otherwise clean desktop. Sits there, and mocks your otherwise tidy and organised way of working.

But fear no more, a simple trick with the terminal, and all is bliss and joy again.

1. Open the terminal

2. Copy and paste this into the terminal window:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location

3. Drag the folder "downloads" from your home folder, onto the terminal window.
It will now look something like this:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location /Users/YOURUSERNAME/Downloads

4. Press enter.

Then log out and back in. Then when you take a screenshot, all of them will wind up in your dock, for easy access.
Nice huh?

internal non working drives?

Recently I had the pleasure of not having the slightest idea about what was going on. That is a rare thing for me, but I was dotting along, and had a chore of installing a new hard drive into a MacBook Pro. I had told my client that a 250 GB would be a good idea, since the prices at that point in time served the best deal. I went for a Samsung 250GB 2.5 inch drive, and everything was dandy after I installed it. Then I wanted to erase it, and the trouble began. The initialization didn't complete. It hung, and nothing would make it initialize right. So I took the drive out of the mac again, and erased by hooking it up externally. Then it worked fine. Back into the mac, to install leopard. No dice.

Apparently the drive only worked externally. I tried putting into another mac to see if there was something wrong with the MacBook. No. Same deal. It would hang, stop, not respond and just be plain old annoying. I couldn't grasp this, so I thought the drive was faulty somehow. Went for a replacement. Same deal! WHAT GIVES!?

Well... the drive needed a firmware upgrade. I have never in my past 15 years of doctoring, ever known of such a stupid cause of a problem. A firmware upgrade, for a hard-drive? Well. For anybody with the same issues, the files can be found here.

http://www.samsung.com/global/business/hdd/faqView.do?b2b_bbs_msg_id=131.0

Download the zip file, unzip, burn the .iso image. Put in the drive, start from the cd by holding down c key. It updates by itself in DOS!!!! Freaky.

After that, it works great!

Screen Sharing no more?

Another of the many great features, especially for me as a mac doc, is the ability to share ones screen with other users over iChat. This means that a client in Hong Kong can get my assistance, even if I'm in New York. I simply take over their screen, and poke around with their computer. Over the internet. But all is not bright and jolly. Sometimes it just doesn't work!

The reasons herefore took me a few tries to figure out. And I actually had to look this one up. Thank god for google and inquisitor.

Seemingly QuickTime settings is to blame. SOMETIMES the settings to stream has to be altered for screen sharing to work.

Go to System Preferences from the Apple Menu, click QuickTime and choose "streaming". Set it to 1.5 Mbit and NOT automatic.

Thaaaat should do it! :)