Category: Tech. Support

Looking up Mac specs..

David Rostenne

Did I mention I love TextExpander? Yeah.. so, to make a long story short: clients ask me questions about their computers, upgrades, lifespans, etc. I don’t normally remember all the details of their Macs so I get them to send me the Serial Number (Open the Apple menu, click About This Mac and it should be right there.)

Once you have it you can go by Apple’s support site and look it up… but that takes too long.

Make a new TextExpander snippet with Applescript as the content type:
property theURL : ""
set theURL to "http://support.apple.com/specs/#" & (the clipboard)
do shell script "open " & theURL

Then you just copy the serial number, and anywhere you can type use !specs to invoke it and up pops open Apple spec page a few seconds later.

1Password4 URL trick

David Rostenne

There was a trick mentioned at our last ByMUG meeting to make using 1Password 4 on your iOS device a little easier.

There are several ways you can modify a URL to make it open directly in 1Password:

onepassword4://search/<search term> will open the app in the search mode searching for the <search term>. For example: onepassword4://search/icloud will bring up all your saved items with iCloud in them.

Add ‘op’ to any URL in your mobile browser before the http:// or https:// to have the link open in the 1Password browser. Makes it easy to switch over and login…

If you are a developer and want to add 1P support to your app the details, and code, are available in an AgileBits Blog post.

Using Adobe Acrobat to view PDF’s in Safari 5.1.x and Mac OS X 10.6.8

David Rostenne

Safari no longer displays PDF files.. and hasn’t done so on my machine for months. It does not bother me much, as I prefer to download them anyway, by clicking in the URL bar and then holding option and then hitting return, which downloads them.

But a client called and complained that they needed to be able to fill in online pdf forms, and when they clicked the link all they got was a black screen, so I went and figured it out:

On Mac OS X 10.6.8 with up to date versions of Safari, you need to make sure that Safari is running in 64 bit mode for the Acrobat reader plugin to work.

To get it to do so, quit Safari, go to it in your applications folder, right click on Safari and Get Info. Empty the checkbox that says “Open in 32 bit mode”. Launch Safari, and viewing PDF’s in Safari with Acrobat Reader will now work.

You can also run into problems if you have Acrobat Reader and Acrobat Pro installed, any updates to the Pro version may mess up your browser plugins. To fix this you need to delete the plugins and reinstall Acrobat Reader.

The AdobePDFViewer plug-in is used to display PDF files in Safari using Acrobat and Reader. This plug-in is installed as part of the Acrobat X or Reader X installation. The location of this plug-in is:

Macintosh HD/Library/Internet Plug-ins/AdobePDFViewer.plugin

Details are from Adobe’s Help page: Troubleshoot Safari Plug-in

To remove the plugin: Quit Safari, then go and delete the plugin. Yes there’s a second one, called AdobePDFViewerNPAPI.plugin, you can ignore it.

Then reinstall the latest version of Acrobat reader. You can find various installers on Adobe’s Acrobat Reader Download Page.

I should also mention: if you have need to use Acrobat Reader to view PDF’s in Safari and would prefer to use the built in viewer, just go and delete both the plugins mentioned above and then restart Safari.

How to mount the Windows partition of a hybrid DVD

David Rostenne

A client of mine has an older Lenovo laptop with a defective DVD drive. He’s saving for a MacBook Air rather than spend money fixing it! I downloaded the installer for his new Fujitsu ScanSnap so he could get up and running right away. But the DVD has goodies that you can not download, so I offered to bring it back home and copy the installers to a USB stick. When I put the DVD in I only get the Mac partition. So here’s how I worked around it:

You need to have a mount point for the Windows partition, on the Mac one gets created in /Volumes when you mount something, we need to make one, so pop open your Terminal and do:

mkdir /Volumes/windows

This creates a directory named “windows”. You can name it whatever you want.

Now you need to find the device name of the DVD:

diskutil list

and, since the DVD is in the drive, you’ll see it come up as a device, and some partitions. In my case it was:

/dev/disk1
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: Apple_partition_scheme *3.3 GB disk1
1: Apple_partition_map 17.9 KB disk1s1
2: Apple_HFS ScanSnap 943.7 MB disk1s2

To mount the Windows side of the CD:

sudo mount -t cd9660 -r /dev/disk1 /Volumes/windows

sudo to prove we are an admin (SuperUser DO), and the mount command with options to mount 9660 format, the device and the path to mount it at.

It showed up as expected, and then I copied the installers I needed. You can try dismounting it in the Finder, but that will not work, you need to unmount it like this:

sudo umount /Volumes/windows

Note that it is umount not un-mount.

Then go and delete the directory, in the Finder or on the command line:

rmdir /Volumes/windows

After that, you can eject the CD normally, or if you tried from the Finder and can no longer see it, do it from the command line:

diskutil eject /dev/disk1

No I did not figure this all out on my own, I used an article from the codeweavers support wiki. Thanks!

The perils of VOIP and cluelessness!

David Rostenne

OK, so it’s really not VOIP’s fault.. here’s my clueless CSR story of the day:

My mom called to let me know that everything was fine, and that they would be offline until they come back from their home-away-from-home in Florida. What happened? Well, it turns out that when your phone is VOIP and you call Comcast (their local cableco) and tell them to disable the internet in a week, they just hear “disconnect”. The call dropped about 15 seconds later.

After a day of calling on their cell phone and trying to get the service reinstated *for just one week*, and not getting anywhere they gave up.

fun, eh?

Merging Keychains?

David Rostenne 1 Comment

Does anyone know how to merge multiple Keychains in Mac OS X?

I know I can copy items from one keychain to another, but that involves authenticating twice.

I tried going in and adding those other keychains to be part of my list, but they don’t stay. Frustrating.

Why am I doing this? I replaced my computer, and was not able to transfer my account at setup time, so I ended up with some old keychains that got copied over.

Suggestions, comments, rants?

All are welcome!

Dave

Can you Help? Emailing pictures with iPhoto is broken!

David Rostenne 1 Comment

I have iPhoto 5.0.4, latest version before iLife 2006. I’m still running 10.4.3 though.

The problem is simple: I choose a series of pictures, click the strangely-icon-less email button and select my options, and watch as the Mac does it’s thing. Once the progress bar is done… nothing happens.

Picture 3.png

When I go to the prefs I have a blank pop-up menu in which to choose an email program.

Picture 4.png

So far I have:

– repaired permissions
– moved the old iPhoto prefs out of the way
– cleared the ByHost cache

When I checked the result of ‘defaults read com.apple.iPhoto’ I got:

MailApp = Mail;

I checked on a friend’s machine and defaults gives the same results.

Which leads me to believe Mail.app is selected, so why does it not work?

Console has the following:

2006-02-08 18:46:24.773 iPhoto[2189] *** -[NSTextField setAllowsMultipleSelection:]: selector not recognized [self = 0x72d2560]
2006-02-08 18:47:27.047 iPhoto[2189] *** -[NSURL initFileURLWithPath:]: nil string parameter

Suggestions welcome! … or a copy of iLife 2006. 😉

MacInTouch: updating then resetting a Mac for an Out of the Box experience

David Rostenne 6 Comments

I have done exactly what Barry would like to do, and it is worth it for the OOB experience!

In my case all I did was install all the Apple updates and the software they had bought.

Once you are ready to reset the Mac; open the Terminal and delete the AppleSetupDone file, which will cause the Apple Setup Assistant to run on the next boot.

Here’s the detailed version:

loki:~$ cd /private/var/db/
loki:/private/var/db$ ls -la .AppleSetupDone 
--w----r--   1 root  wheel  0 Jul 16  2004 .AppleSetupDone
loki:/private/var/db$sudo rm .AppleSetupDone
Password:

Translation to English for those of you still learning UNIX:
‘change directory’ to /private/var/db/
‘list in long format and show files and folders whose name starts with a dot or double dot’
‘superuser do’ ‘remove’ .AppleSetupDone
then put in your password to approve the action.

All done!

MacInTouch: timely news and tips about the Apple Macintosh
[Barry Brown]
I am thinking of getting a Mac mini for a friend as a gift. I’d like to to install and configure some third-party apps and the latest updates before giving it away. That’s easy enough. But I also want the out-of-box experience for the recipient to be the same as if the mini was new: it goes through the Welcome movie, account setup, and network setup. How can I “reset” the Mac so it removes all the accounts and walks the new user through the setup process when it’s turned on again?