I have just upgraded my 3g iPod to a 5g iPod. I found that it would only play one podcast at a time. This happened even if I had a podcast playlist that I had made. My 1g Nano did the same thing and it was very annoying. If I was running I would have to stop to pick another podcast every time one ended. Strangely my 3g iPod would work fine. I couldn't believe Apple had taken this ability out and it turns out they haven't.

The issue is caused by the fact I had shuffle songs set to on. Once that is turned off it works fine. Each podcast has a tick box that says skip on shuffle. I didn't want to go through each one and change it. I just turned shuffle off on the iPod and all is well.

Tags: ipod

Recently I had to play some mpeg2 files on my Mac and they just wouldn't play. This was odd as under Tiger they would play fine. I had Final Cut Studio v2 installed and this comes with the mpeg2 codec, so all should have been fine. I tried it on my machine at the office and that did the exact same thing. As one final test I went to a machine that had just had Final Cut Studio v2 installed on a new Leopard install. Amazingly the mpeg2 played. What was the difference?

The difference is. The other two machines had been upgraded to Leopard. After some investigation I found that the machines not playing mpeg2 had the codec in library/quicktime, whereas the machine that did work had the codec in system/library/quicktime. The screenshot below shows how it should be. I simply copies the codec from the working machine to the broken one and removed the old codec from library/quicktime.

Tags: video, Work, macintosh, Leopard

Last night I my VPN client wouldn't load. It was complaining it could not connect to the subsystem. It returned an error 51. After doing some research around the web, I found this command. It is very handy. It means I don't have to reboot. Just go to the terminal and type in the following.

sudo /System/Library/StartupItems/CiscoVPN/CiscoVPN restart

Tags: Leopard, Cisco VPN

This has been playing on my mind for awhile. The iPhone has been released in the UK and the Mac Macs have bought it. How is Apple going to compete going forward? I have to admit, I don't know how the American phone market works, but here in the UK, it seems based on price. I have never heard anyone say, I am saving up for my new phone. The contract they have will come up for renewal, they will look at the phones that are free and pick the best free one.

In the past, I have seen phones that I like, but by the time my contract was up, they were no longer available. I picked the best free one I could get at the time of contract renewal. The Nokia N95 would seem to me, to be the best phone around. It is free on all networks. These are some of the deals I could find.

Three has it for £35/month with 300 free minutes and 150 free video minutes.

o2 has it for £30/month with 400 free minutes.

Vodafone has the latest 8gb, N95 model for free on some tariffs and £100 on a £35/month tariff with 500 free minutes.

So, how is Apple going to compete with this? They aren't going to give away free phones, this would just kill iPod sales. Can Apple prove that if you buy an iPhone they will come up with such great ideas in software updates that you can keep this phone for years? You would basically be getting a new phone and features every few months.

I have a brave idea and I wonder if Apple would consider it. They already have a business model in this space that others weren't brave enough to try. The iPod Touch is £199, the Nano is £99. What if all iPod Touches were iPhones, but the functionality was turned off? When you were ready for your new phone, you could sync it with iTunes and pay to have your iPod Touch be an iPhone.

As prices come down, the iPod Touch might come down to £150, or even less. Could it come with Nano functions and you pay to turn on the wireless functions and then the phone? Of course this would give the hackers a real target: Unlock the phone feature without paying Apple anything.

I wonder how many people have iPod Touches and now wish they had the phone, but aren't going to pay twice. With this model, Apple don't have to give away free phones, they encourage you to buy cheap iPod's and the phone is there when you want it.
.

Tags: phone, mobile

I upgrade my Mac to Leopard yesterday and I couldn't logon on to my Windows 2003 server that was running SFM. I could log on to the server running Extremez-ip. I had a feeling it was due to the way Leopard was sending the password, and indeed it was.

I went to Computer Management, right clicked on Shared Folders, and chose, Configure Service for Macintosh.

Set the Enable authentication box to, Apple Encrypted or Microsoft and it will work fine.

Tags: Leopard, 10.5

So, Leopard is finally here. I started my upgrade yesterday. First of all I made sure I had a good backup. Superduper did that for me. I had a complete clone and a user files backup as well. I then made sure as many applications as possible were the latest versions. Some have had patches made available even since I did that. 1Password has had two updates since yesterday morning.

All went well during the process of upgrading. My machine rebooted fine. All in all I have to say, a very smooth upgrade.

I have been working through my applications and all seems to be working fine for the most part. Below are a list of my findings so far :-

* Repairing disk permissions just gave me the stripped progress bar. It didn't seem to do anything.

* Quicktime went back to standard version.

* Final Cut Studio 2 had lost its serial number. When I tried to put it back in, it would accept it, but as I wasn't an admin it would not right the file to the disk. I had to log out and do it again as an admin.

* Growl Mail doesn't work. They are working on an upgrade

* Built in VPN doesn't work with the office Cisco VPN and Crypocard, but the Cisco Client works fine.

* Spaces works great, but I think it will take some getting used to. The preference pane could do with being bigger. Once you add a lot of applications, it is hard to see which Space they are in.

I will post more information as I work more in Leopard.

Tags: Leopard, Computers, os x, upgrade

Today on my way home, just as I got to Baker Street tube, around 6pm, I looked at my Blackberry 8800 to check for tube news. I noticed my GPRS connection had changed to EDGE. I had never seen this before. I had a second look and it definitely said EDGE. The next minute it had gone.

My Blackberry runs on the o2 network. With all the speculation around o2 and the iPhone, was o2 doing some sort of test? I have never heard o2 talk about having an EDGE network before. Time will tell, but it seemed odd to me.

Tags: o2, edge, gadgets, iphone

Last week we had a guest speaker come to the office to talk about virtual worlds and Second Life in particular. He mentioned he had an iPhone. He was very kind, and let me add it to our Wi-Fi network and have a play. It joined easier than some of our laptops do. It worked just as well as promised. Safari was amazing. I didn't get a chance to play with it for long, but flicking through pictures with my finder was great fun.

Whatever the success of the iPhone might be, I think we will all be grateful to Apple. The iPhone will force other phone makers to think about what they are making and we will all get better phones because of it. Hopefully Apple can break the networks control over the phones, and we can have the devices that we want and the manufactures would want us to have.

Tags: iphone, phone, gadgets, mobile

Every other blog had something on the iPhone, so I thought I had better not be left out!

Tags: phone, gadgets, iphone, mobile

Adobe have a manual showing how to do this and it can be found at http://www.adobe.com/support/deployment/cs3_deployment.pdf. It does have a typo in it. I have noted it further down.

They also have a flash movie and it can be found here https://admin.adobe.acrobat.com/_a295153/ard

It actually seems to be pretty simple. These are the steps I took for a successful installation.

I copied the Photoshop DVD to a folder in my shared directory called CS3.

In the folder I made a xml file called, application.xml.override file. This contains your serial number.

Mine looks like this. You have to take the dashes out of the serial number.




serial number no dashes here
Suppress
Suppress
Suppress


All I then had to do was copy the CS3 folder I made to the client via ARD, and then send the following Unix command as root to the target machine.

"/Users/Shared/CS3/Adobe Photoshop CS3/Adobe Photoshop CS3/Setup.app/Contents/MacOS/"Setup --mode=silent --deploymentFile="/Users/Shared/CS3/Adobe Photoshop CS3/Adobe Photoshop CS3/deployment.xml"

This is the line in the manual has wrong. It says --deploymentFiles and it should be --deploymentFile

After that, as long as all applications are closed Photoshop will install silently. I also have Illustrator working as well. It is basically the same steps as above, but where you see "Photoshop" in the Unix command replace with "Illustrator"

I am now trying to get all these steps into an Automator script. At the moment the individual parts work, but they time out, and so won't run one after the other.

Tags: Work, Computers, CS3, Apple Remote Desktop

I had a machine this week that would quit Final Cut Pro as soon as it opened. I had seen this before and deleting the Final Cut Pro prefs was enough, but this time, no joy. FCP would open, work, but on the next launch it would just fail again, even after removing the preference file.

I really didn't want to have to reinstall it all again, as Final Cut Studio is a massive install. I decided I would clear out what I could and try that. I again removed the preference file. This can be found in ~\Library\Preferences\Final Cut Pro User Data. I then decided to make sure that all the caches and render files were removed. These are found in ~\Documents\Final Cut Pro Documents. In this folder you should find another set of folders that hold, caches, render files for video and audio, along with autosave files. In these folder their will be more folders and these will be named the same as the projects you have saved in the past.

I really should have cleared each of these project folders out in turn to see which one was the problem, but I went for the whole lot in one go and bingo, it all worked again. Projects that have already been rendered will now need rerendering, but at least Final Cut Pro isn't quitting anymore.

Note: ~ means your home directory. This is your logon name folder that appears within the Users folder at the root of your hard drive.

The great Your Mac Life radio show has moved to a new domain it is now at www.yourmaclifeshow.com. If you have never listened to the show then give it a try. It is very informative and light hearted. Shawn is a great host along with Lesa and Sly. Every week they cover the latest Mac news and have interesting guest. They range from home user to the head of the Mac BU.

I had to setup our Quicktime Streaming server this week. It had been working a few years ago, but when I tried to use it this week it failed to stream. I was getting 404 errors. I checked everything. I turned off the web service to make sure it wasn't clashing. I unbound and rebound the ip address. I moved the movies to a different folder and change the movie home location. Nothing would make it work. It wouldn't even stream from Safari or the Quicktime player on the server.

After a bit of research I found that I had to hint the film. This is very easy.

Open the movie in Quicktime. Select Export. Make sure that, Movie to Hinted Movie is selected in the export option.



Click options and set as below.



I also then found out that if you have the web service turned on, Quicktime will stream over port 554. Your url should look something like this.

rtsp://x.x.x.x:554/mymovie2.mov - this will open Quicktime and play the movie

http://x.x.x.x:554/mymovie2.mov - this will play in the browser

It was a relief to get it working again

Following on from my last blog entry, that was close. I said gmail, but it turned out to be Yahoo.

The iPhone looks superb. Here in Europe, we even have the advantage of the Americans ironing out all the bugs as the phone won't be here until December. The question is, which network will it be available on? I believe it isn't 3g so it won't be on 3 here in the UK. From what I hear the US market is different to the UK market so it will be interesting to see which network gets it. Apple will hold all the aces and they can pick.

Free push email sounds great, but is that the account or is the data charge free too? I doubt it. Data charges are always high, so how many people will be dragged into the wow factor and then realise they have a big phone bill. Who will get the phone in the UK? I am on 3, but it won't be them, no 3g. Hopefully Orange. I am not a fan of o2 or Vodafone. I have never used T-Mobile, but they have US connections so it maybe them.

Will the phones now drive the market rather than the networks? Are we going to have to get used to paying the proper price for a phone? What other technology do you buy that gets a subsidy like a phone? The TV license doesn't get you a discount off your TV.

It is a shame in January to know what you want for Christmas in December. I want one!!!!

While listening to Your Mac Life last week, Shawn mentioned that Apple might find it a show stopper to offer email on their mobile phone as .Mac won't work on a pc. Here are my thoughts on this. I was wondering how many people actually use a real mail client anymore? Forget the syncing part of .Mac for this argument. Webmail would allow a pc user to use .Mac. Does Apple have the bandwidth if this was to be tried and was a success? Maybe not. Google does and they are on Apple's board. Does Apple make much money from .Mac? Not as much as it would from a phone. Ship .Mac over to Google and let them cope. I know lots of people who want email on their phone, but it is too hard to setup. Data charges are another issue, but if Apple are a virtual provider, I am sure they can make that attractive. I still believe deep down, people only want a simple phone, but with add on services (i.e. a subscription model, email, video calls, iChat etc.)

All Unix commands have a manual. For example, typing man top in the Terminal will display the manual for the top command. This is really handy, but I hate reading manuals off the screen. I have found this useful application that will open man pages in a GUI. It is called ManOpen and can be found here.

It makes reading and printing these helpful man pages much easier.

I have a problem at work regarding Final Cut Pro opening very slowly. I know that it is caused by the Sophos anti virus software, but their is no way of seeing which files it is scanning. I was researching this and found this Unix command.

lsof (List Open Files)

Typing this into the Terminal It will list all your open files and I mean all of them! It will be a long list. You can filter by using the -c command. For example lsof -c Final will list all the open files that are running under Command column that begins Final. It is case sensitive so final will return nothing.

COMMAND PID USER FD TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME
Final\x20 9088 xxxxxx cwd DIR 14,9 1088 2 /
Final\x20 9088 xxxxxx txt REG 14,9 17093696 1978666 /Applications/Final Cut Pro.app/Contents/MacOS/Final Cut Pro
Final\x20 9088 xxxxxx txt REG 14,9 111908 1978660 /Applications/Final Cut Pro.app/Contents/Frameworks/ProTimecode.framework/Versions/A/ProTimecode

You can also list open files by their pid. For example, lsof -p 9088,9110,9912 will list all the open files for these PIDs 9088,9110 and 9912. You can find the pid your application is running under via Activity Monitor which can be found in the Applications/Utilities folder.

Last week my wife was saying her Aperture was slow and she was getting the spinning beach ball far too often. I reinstalled it for her and patched to the latest version, 1.5.1, but it was still far too slow. She has a 20" Dual Core Intel iMac with 2gb of ram and the best video card you can get for an iMac. I knew it wasn't going to fly, but it should have been quicker than it was.

It suddenly dawned on me. I opened the Activity Monitor, from the Utilities folder and saw that Intercheck was running as the highest process. Intercheck is the process used by my anti virus software made by Sophos. I added her Aperture Library as an exception and Aperture is now much quicker. By default the Aperture Library is in your Pictures folder.

If your Aperture is running slowly make sure your anti virus software isn't scanning your library.

I can't take any credit for this tip as I found it on macOSXhints. If you want to get better reception with your FM transmitter like an iTrip, then remove the external aerial from your car. It will now only pickup the signal from your iTrip. I tried it today and it was brilliant. My iPod is now great to listen to. Luckily I don't listen to FM radio stations so I don't miss the aerial.

I love my .mac account, but my idisk has never been the most reliable. It often fails and sometimes I have lost the odd file as it has managed to get out of sync. I have always been able to get it back from backup, but still not a good situation.

I started to think about better ways and then it came to me. SFTP. Since I made the sftp server at work, I realised I could do the same at home.

It all fell into place when macZOT were offering yummyFTP as one of their daily specials. Yummy allows you to mirror a server and a client. The only drawback is, it won't delete files, but that might not be a bad thing

Before I go through how I set this up, I have to point out that you will need to make sure your machines can send and receive sftp on port 22. This may require some firewall changes which are beyond the scope of this article.

Here is what you have to do.

Go to the machine that will act as the server.

Go to your system preferences.

Click on sharing.

Tick the remote login box. This turns on ssh and sftp.

Once that is done, click ok and close all the windows.

You might want to make a folder that you want to sync. I made a folder in my documents folder and copied my idisk files into it.

Now go to the machine you want to sync to the server. Again I made a sync folder in the documents folder.

Download and install yummyftp onto the machine you want to sync with the server.

Open yummy and select sftp.

Log in to the server with your normal os x login credentials.



You will be taken to the home folder of the account you just used. The right hand side is the remote machine and the left hand side is your local machine.



Browse to the folder you want to sync with on the server. I used the sync folder I made earlier.

Now browse to the sync folder you want to sync from.

One folder should have files and one will not.

Now click on the silver sync icon at the top of the window.



Then choose mirror from the pull down menu.



Now click preview.

Depending on how many files you have to sync, this may take sometime, but yummy will show you which files will be synced.



Click sync and off you go.

Once you are happy that it is working, bookmark this server.

Close yummy.

Reopen yummy and open the bookmarked server. Make sure you are within the folders you want to sync. In our case, the folders are called sync.

Now untick preview, click schedule, set the schedule you require.

Click ok and then run schedule.

As long as yummy is open it will sync those two folders at the given time.



If you open the bookmarks windows, you can tell the schedule is set because their is a green dot by the server name.

It works really well and I have had no problems. The traffic is encrypted as you sync so you have security too.

If you want to see what the traffic looks like use this command.

sudo tcpdump -i en0 -A -s 0 port 22 and then upload some files.

The 22 at the end is the port number for sftp. As a side note, if you want to watch other traffic, then try ports, 80 (http), 25 (smtp), 110 (pop), 21 (ftp). Watch your usernames and password go clear text over the internet. en0 is the interfave you want to watch.

Hope this was useful. Not only have you found a nice way to replace idisk, but you are in control and you have no space limitations.

Because I work in an advertising agency, it is vitally important that our files go out to the printers 100% correct. We preflight all our work before we send it out. We use a tool called Flightcheck Pro from Markzware to do this.

This product has really struggled since the move to OS X. We have stuck with this product mainly as their are few, if not no other products to use. Markzware has beaten off all the competition. The last few releases of Flightcheck Pro have actually failed to collect the fonts correctly and their forums are full of this fault. We have waited and waited for this to be fixed.

On the 2nd June 2007, Quark released Quark 7. We obviously needed Flightcheck Pro to work with Quark 7. As of the writing of this article, Flightcheck Pro still doesn't work with Quark 7. Of course software like Flightcheck Pro can't be written overnight, but we were a private beta test for Quark long before it even became a public beta. Quark had two public beta releases. I would have thought the Markzware would have been ready shortly after the official launch of Quark 7 with a product that they know a lot of users of Quark will require.

Back in August on their forums a public beta was promised. I am sure a public beta for a product such as Flightcheck Pro would help the users and the Markzware get a better product to market quicker. There is no better way to test it than let users put proper jobs through the checking engine. More users, more jobs, more testing, more bugs found.

Hopefully now some good news. I spoke to David, the Managing Director, from Markzware at the London Mac Expo last week and he promised that I would have a beta this week. Not sure if this is going to be a public beta, but at least we now know there is a light at the end of the tunnel and it is switched on. To be fair to David, he was very apologetic as I expressed our concerns about the way this situation has been handled. He asked for just a little more patience.

I did point out that with some better communication from Markzware some of this could have been avoided. Public betas seem all the rage at the moment. Adobe has Photoshop Lightroom and Soundbooth. Parallels used a public beta very well to iron out issues in their first release of Desktop For Mac, and then later, with Mac Pro issues. Quark, the company who never used to communicate, had Quark 7 as a public beta.

I do hope Markzware has now turned the corner. We might know this week.

Last Thursday, I was at the opening day of the London Mac Expo at Olympia. I have never been a great fan of the London Expo, as it seemed so small and meaningless. Back in the days when it was held at the Business Design Centre in Islington, it was hardly worth the bother. Paris used to get all the attention as they normally had the advantage of Apple delivering a Keynote at that show. This didn't happen this year and it seems London has taken advantage.

Quark decided to use this event to launch their new Interactive Design plugin and held a keynote. A good example of the show gaining prestige was the presence of Google. HP, Apple, Adobe, Sony and other big names were also present. Only Microsoft was missing. They had nothing new to show so that makes some sense.

It was nice to see some smaller developers there. Realmac Software, the makers of Rapidweaver had a stand along with a company I hadn't heard of, Accountz. They make cross platform accounting packages. The owner, Quentin, showed me the Personal Accountz version. It looks really nice. This software sector has very little Mac software available and even less made for the UK. In fact, Accountz software doesn't show any currency, just numbers. So it can be used anywhere. I use Quicken at the moment, but I am paying a lot of money for a package, 80% of features, I can't use.

I also met up with the Your Mac Life team. Thanks to their sponsors, Griffin Technology and iStockphoto, they had come over from the States to cover the show. It was good to meet Shawn again. The amount of work he puts into the show should never be underestimated.

I was surprised by the number of stands that concentrated on photography. Sony were showing off their first ever digital SLR. Screen calibration was covered as was colour output, small and large.

Overall, I think this year's show was excellent. It had a good mix of large and small vendors as well as companies actually selling you the software and hardware that was on display. Some good deals were also available. I look forward to next year and the continuing growth of the London Mac Expo.

After looking into this further I found out what was really happening.

If you go to the connect to server dialog box you will see a little cog in the lower left hand corner.



Click on options and you will see the following screen.



If you now untick, allow sending password in clear text, and try and logon to a Window Server you will get the -35 error. Deleting the preferences as I suggested before only resets the tick box back on. I am sure their is a setting on the server to allow non clear text passwords. When I find it, I will post it here.

I have only seen this error on Intel Macs. Sometimes you can successfully login, but other times you get a -35 error. Once you get this error it never seems to go away. Even a restart doesn't fix it. I have only seen this when I tried to login to a Windows 2003 server that was running Services for Macintosh (SFM). I could login to a server that was running Windows 2003, but was using Extremez-IP.

I can't take credit for this fix as I found it via the Apple Discussion boards, but it does work.

Open terminal and navigate to

~/Library/Preferences

then type rm .GlobalPreferences.plist

then navigate to

/Library/Preferences

then type rm .GlobalPreferences.plist

be very careful with rm it can remove a lot of files if you get it wrong. After doing this I was able to login into a server no problem. You can't do this from the finder as the files are invisible.

As it turns out this does fix it, but I had to redo it again after installing 10.4.8. I am as yet unsure if it was the update or the reboot that messed it up. Hopefully I will be able to update this later and let you know.

Following on from my post below, I can confirm that the latest Apple update to OS X, 10.4.8, fixes the issues I was having with my Mac Pro and the Cisco VPN client.

I wanted to make sure the machine would restart after I installed 10.4.8 so I removed the the CiscoVPN folder from system/library/startupitems folder. To delete this folder you will need your admin password. I then did a permissions check via Disk Utility. Installed 10.4.8 restarted and the re-installed the Cisco VPN client and now it works fine and I can restart and shutdown as normal.

When I update my OS I always use the combo updater.

After installing Macintosh Office 2004 and patching it on my new Mac Pro I got the following error. Microsoft Visual Basic Class not registered. Looking for object with
CLSID: {AC9F2F90-E877-11CE-9F68-00A00574A4F}

After trying different things I found that deleting the folder ~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft fixed the issue. ~ is your home folder. Everything in the folder will be remade. I checked Excel, Word and Entourage and all had kept their preferences. Only Remote Desktop had reset back to default.

So we are all told to backup and some actually do it. As someone who used to look after clients whose livelihood depended on their files I had to preach backup.

Their used to be only one solution for Mac users, Dantz Retrospect. I have used it since verion 2 and it was a wonderful product. It was so simple to use that I was hoping that they would bring out a PC server version. I was even involved in the beta. The PC version was equally easy to use and has grown over the years quickly supporting sql and Exchange.

It is now on version 7.5 which was release in February 2006. So where is the Mac version? It is way back on version 6.1. It has had the odd driver update, but nothing else has changed since January 2004.

Actually one thing changed. EMC bought Dantz in October 2004. Have they forgotten they bought a Mac version?

Dare we ask that they make it a universal binary when the next release comes out, if it comes out. They have forgotten their roots to such an extent that is not a given.

They told me it works fine under Rosetta. Well it doesn't work for me. It crashes when it tries to backup my idisk.

Where does this leave Mac users? Their is a great shareware product called Superduper. It works very simply and you can make your scripts pretty complicated if that is what you want. Compared to Retrospect it is very cheap. Only $27.95.

I would still like to use Retrospect. It has some features that I would still like to use. The ability to go back to previous versions of a file with a snapshot is great. That will be replaced by Timemachine when Apple's 10.5 comes out in early 2007. Between Superduper and Timemachine maybe I will be covered and EMC will have lost a customer. Perhaps they don't care. Perhaps the home user no longer matters.

It has been sad to see Macintosh Retrospect dying. I hope for corporate clients sake it gets a second wind, but I think its days in the home are gone. Shame on you EMC. You let a loyal customer base down.

After recently getting 3 Mac Pro's in the office I realised that we had a problem. Two of them would not shutdown, they would immediately restart. If I tried to restart them they would kernel panic. These two machines were cloned from the first one and I could work out what was different between them. I then realised that these 2 machines had the Cisco VPN client (4.9) installed.

I had to install it on the machine that was working. Low and behold it then did the same thing. I uninstalled the client when I was done and the problem went away. Hopefully Apple with 10.4.8 or Cisco will fix this soon.