SSWI — When in doubt, buff it out.

So, I wrote about my fledgling media center set up before, and I AppleTV, some random thoughts">ranted about the AppleTV

saying I would just get a Mac Mini and call it a day. Read the rest »

There were a couple of people who were close, but no one hit it on the nose, so here is what I did:

First you snag the firewire cable from the iSight and connect one end to the broken drive lappy, and the other end to the not-so-broken drive lappy.  Then you restart the broken drive lappy in firewire target disk mode; once the HD of broken lappy pops up on no-so-broken lappy you launch System Prefs and use the Startup Disk chooser to choose the HD loaded via firewire.  You then reboot the no-so-broken lappy and that’s it.

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So, this is going to be a Mac OS X tip in the form of a quiz… MacGyver style.

The Scenario

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For some people this will be a no-brainer, but for the new mac user, or non-power user this tip will be a life saver.

Have you ever needed to navigate to a hidden folder via the Finder, or worse yet from somewhere like System Preferences?  Lets say you are following along with my SVN tutorial, and you have gotten as far as to install SVN and scplugin, and now you are on the scplugin System Preference pane and need to ‘open’ your svn executable.

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Just a quick post to say that yes google is releasing an IM thingy today, and yes it is using Jabber, and yes you can get it to work in iChat.

Follow these easy steps:

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As evidenced by the comments below this is apparently a third party product.  What mystifies me is how it came to be on my machine, since I did not download and install it.  Who knows.  If you are a Safari user who would like this addition hop over to here and download it.

I updated my home machine to 10.4.2 tonight and after launching Safari I noticed something odd:

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If you are having problems with the finder recognizing blank media, a DVD or CD then this tip is for you.

The Finder has been giving me this error all day:

This disc could not be used because the disc drive is not supported (Error code 0x80020025)

I finally found a solution, albeit a very strange one.  It seems there is a bug in the Finder that is only seen the first time you try to insert blank media, it can be cured by restarting the Finder, either by logging out and back in, or by force restarting the Finder by executing an option-apple-esc and selecting the Finder from the Force Quit Applications window.

The finder will restart and all should be happy once more.

If you are running Mac OS 10.4 Tiger and you notice your fonts look like doo doo, open System Preferences > Appearance and set the font smoothing to Standard - Best for CRT.

Once you have rebooted your machine you should be back in the world of Beautiful Font Rendering.

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