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Live-Tweeting the WWDC Keynote

June 7, 2010 - 12:00pm

Head over to Twitter for some live coverage of the keynote today.

Is it possible to make external hard drives mounted on my Mac running Tiger available on my PC running XP via my network? Currently I can only see the one User home directory on each Mac.

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APPLE MAINBOARD MALFUNCTIONS AFTER ONE AND A HALF YEARS OF GENTLE USE. ATARI XE THAT HASN’T BEEN TURNED ON IN TEN YEARS WORKS FINE.

HERE’S THE DEAL
Plug a USB keyboard into a Mac laptop computer.
and bring up KEYBOARD VIEWER

Type one key on the laptop keyboard, then type one key on the USB keyboard
(the KEYBOARD VIEWER graphical interface will then change to match the USB
keyboard). Now click with a USB mouse or your trackpad on a key on the
KEYBOARD VIEWER, the graphical interface for the KEYBOARD VIEWER
will then revert back to the laptop keyboard.

What I want to do is make the laptop completly ignore the laptop keyboard.
(Or think that the only keyboard that exists is the USB keyboard)

Note: physically removing the physical keyboard does not work.

Any ideas anybody?

I guess what I want to to is something like you can do in the system preferences where you can get the laptop to ignore the trackpad when a USB mouse is attached.

EXTRA INFO:
My ibook types these keys by itself sometimes: F10 0 = p ] ; ‘ / RETURN.
I used Ukelele (Software) to delete these keys and reassign them to other keys to create a unique keyboard layout. Then I physically removed and switched around keys on a USB keyboard (the numpad gave me all the extra keys I need) to match my new keyboard layout.

My iBook is pretty much under control now, but when it malfunctions it always trys to revert to the iBook keyboard (it taps away on on the deleted keys).

If I run the Apple Hardware Test CD when the computer is malfunctioning then a VIDEO RAM ERROR will come up with the error code

2ATI/2/4: 113-xxxxx-142

If I run the Apple Hardware Test CD when the computer is NOT malfunctioning then no error code will come up.

The authorised Apple Repair Guy said “you need to replace your logic board, but a new logic board costs almost as much as a new Macbook, so you may as well by a Macbook”.

Please do not reply to this post with “ummm, you need to replace your logic board”.

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The address book and bookmarks from our iMac (Mac OS X 10.4.11) were deleted (young children). I have rescued the folders from the trash, however I cannot get our contacts to repopulate in Address Book or our bookmarks back into Safari. Please help.

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Securing Data on an External

May 18, 2010 - 2:47pm

I am using an iMac with Mac OS X 10.6. How can I prevent the files/folders in my external hard disk from being copied/modified without my permission? I have tried using the “Sharings & Permissions” setting in “Get Info” but I notice that the files/folders can still be copied even though I changed the settings to “Read Only”. Any suggestions? Thanks.

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Handbrake for DVD Ripping

May 18, 2010 - 2:21pm

Hi, i have recently purchased a new 2nd gen iPod Touch and i would like to copy a couple of dvd films to it ie madagascar 2. I am a complete novice at transferring files and therefore i’m looking for something that is easy to use. Many Thanks.

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I recently got a MacBook Pro, and the agreement when I got it was my parents could have an admin account on it so they could use parental controls. I was sick of always running out of time and started changing the password using the disc. (i have since learned different ways) my parents realized it and have made it clear if I do it again, my $1300 laptop won’t be with me anymore. Is there a way that u can find out there password without changing it? Thank you!!

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I was writing some shell scripts the other day and I had to find which OS X version I was running and based on the OS X version I was trying to install my application. So this is a small and easy tip as to how you can find out the OS X verison using the default command.


OS_VERSION=`/usr/bin/defaults read “$3/System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion” ProductVersion`
echo “$OS_VERSION”

You can also get more specific if you want only the major version or the minor version by piping the OS_VERSION to ‘cut’ command by specifing the fields.


OS_MAJOR_VERSION=`echo $osversion | cut -f2 -d’.’`
OS_MINOR_VERSION=`echo $osversion | cut -f3 -d’.’`

This has been floating around the Internet but I felt the need to say that:

  1. I tried it.
  1. It works.

The German site BenM posted a few days ago that it had written up some configurations for iPhone OS 3.0 that enable tethering on most carriers, whether they wanted it done or not. This is a pretty neat hack for several reasons:

  • It does not require a jailbreak or other real hacks.
  • It’s easily removed via the iPhone’s interface.
  • It’s just quite smart.

So, here’s how to do it:There's more »

  1. Go to the following site from your phone: help.BenM.at
  1. Find the page for your country and then the carrier you are using.

I have a need. I have to make latitude/longitude (LL) points more reasonable and usable by humans.

This is quite possibly one of the more difficult tasks out there right now, and also one of the most-outsourced as a result. The reason is simple: the dataset is huge and the calculations quite intensive.

In order to get information about an LL, like the city, state, county, zip code, or (most complicated) street and approximate address, you have to do some geometric math. Let’s start with counties, since that happened to be the first thing I had some success in. You get a list of counties and their borders as geometric shapes. You then take a range from the LL and find all polygons that touch that range. Then you further filter to the one that point is in.There's more »

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