So I upgraded to Thunderbird 3 some time ago. It has nice new features, like the grouped folders. Anyway, there are a few things that annoyed me too; one of them being the fact that whenever someone sends a mail to me and some other people, only the first recipient was displayed, with a “more…” button next to it. The settings unfortunately do not allow to turn this behaviour off, but there’s a hack to do this (maybe in the future, they’ll include a setting…)  Read the rest of this entry »

The problem

Did you ever want to install a font on your Mac that’s on a SMB share, for example on a Windows/Unix server? Did you experience the font was broken somehow, being displayed in the finder as “unix executable file” with 0kb size?

We had this issue here often, finally I figured out why this happens.
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The most common solution is pressing the eject key on the keyboard.

If that fails for some reason (in my case the key was not working properly) you could always drag the DVD icon to the trash or right-click (ctrl-click) it and click “eject” – as long as there is a CD or DVD in the drive. But what if it’s empty and you want to insert a disc?

Open a terminal window (Terminal.app) and type drutil tray eject. To close type drutil tray close accordingly.

Have you ever tried to embed video files in PowerPoint? If you managed to do that, have you ever tried to play that presentation on other PCs or even on a mac? It’s a pain in the ass. I haven’t yet reached the point to say it’s impossible, but at least I can say it’s far from being easy.

The background: If you want the presentation to work out of the box, on every machine, you need to choose a video format that every OS can play by default. This means:

• you can’t use MP4 or any other QuickTime format because QuickTime might not be installed on Windows PCs
• you can’t use WMV formats for the same reason, just on the mac side this time
• you can embed SWF files and flash can be played back on Windows and Mac OS, but because it relies on third party software as well, PowerPoint can only embed SWFs in the Windows version, using ActiveX controls. These are not available on PowerPoint Mac which means the embedded SWF in a PPT created on Windows won’t play when you open the PPT on a Mac
• Of course you can’t use Matroska/DivX/Xvid/other special codecs because that would require a codec pack, otherwise the video won’t play
• You can’t even use MPEG2 because at least Windows PCs can’t play it by default

So I think the only way to do it is to use MPEG1. This means big file sizes and low quality – which clearly sucks.

Do you know a better solution? I don’t…

Now this was a weird one. The user said he was unable to work because every 20 seconds, his programs in which he was working were hidden and the desktop would show up. He told me he already rebooted the machine. So I opened the End Tasks dialog with Cmd-Alt-Esc and forced a finder restart. Still the same behavior.

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I use a little tool to manage my MP3s called “MP3 tag tools“. It’s quite powerful, it allows you to mass edit some or all ID3 tag fields, fill them from a file name scheme and vice versa (create folder structures and/or file names from the ID3 tag fields). Now when I recently cleaned up my collection using that tool, I noticed that I had about 400 double entries. I just didn’t notice before because the file names were different. Now as this tool tried to rename the files and put them in the appropiate subfolders, it threw error messages that existing files can’t be overwritten.

So I had 400 files that I could safely delete, which I did. Now I had 400 dead entries in the iTunes library (marked with a !) which I wanted to get rid of easily. Apparently, iTunes does not have a function to remove dead/broken entries, I’d have to try to play every song from my playlist so iTunes would mark all missing entries and then… then what? iTunes doesn’t even let me sort by the ! column. That’s really stupid.

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Recently, I had a support query where a colleague had three “Flash Player” items in the open with menu when he right clicked onto a .swf file and I was asked to remove them. I learnt that it’s not as easy as it often is with Windows, where every file extension has an entry in the registry which you could edit. Mac OS X uses the so called LaunchServices database to assign applications to file types.
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Today I experienced one of these problems: My colleague in Berlin had that external hard disk drive. It was connected to a Buffalo TeraStation (that’s a NAS, sort of, with a super small linux). It was used as a backup drive there.

Now the TeraStation was horribly, almost hilariously damaged. It couldn’t be accessed from Windows machines anymore because the smb.conf was completely empty. I could edit it with vi (you don’t have vim on that minilinux) and save, nothing would happen. I could also echo stuff > smb.conf – it would always stay 0 bytes in size. Yes, I was root, I was owner, smb.conf had 777, everything. Whatever, that’s not my point here. Just as advice: NEVER EVER BUY SUCH CRAP!

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If you ever need to change the user name or the serial number of your Mac Office…

remove these two files:

Office 2001:

HD/System Folder/Preferences/Microsoft/Microsoft Office Settings (9)
HD/Applications (Mac OS 9)/Microsoft Office 2001/Office/OfficePID

Office v.X:

~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Microsoft Office Settings (10)
HD/Applications/Microsoft Office X/Office/OfficePID

Office 2004 (SP1):

~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Microsoft Office Settings (11)
HD/Applications/Microsoft Office 2004/Office/OfficePID

(~ is your home directory)

The OfficePID file is hidden, so the best thing is to delete it via terminal.
The next time you start a Mac Office application, you’ll be prompted to re-enter user info and serial number, just like after the installation.

Oh and if anyone knows how to retrieve the used serial number, let me know.