Solving technology problems, one at a time
Ever since I got the new iMac, the FKeys never seemed to work as expected. The special functions on each, like brightness, volume, dashboard, etc. would take precedence over whatever function my applications had assigned
Continue readingThere are many iPhone applications available, but so far, no one has come out with an official application that does video recording. To get that functionality, you must jailbreak the iPhone and install one of the unofficial video recorder apps, and some type of networking so you can transfer the video files back to your computer.
The main problem with jailbreaking the iphone is that it is no longer in a standard, supportable condition afterward, and so things may not work as expected. I found that my syncing setup was all messed up, and I was basically starting from square one in terms of settings. There are some things it still does not do well, like syncing to iPhoto. However, there are enough benefits to a jailbroken phone to try it out, and hopefully (haven’t tried it yet!) it can be restored if it no longer seems worth all the effort.
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I just noticed that iPhoto was no longer syncing new photos off the iPhone. As you can see in the image above, when the iPhone was plugged in, nothing shows in the import window, although there really are photos there!
From the number of pictures left on the phone this has probably been going on for about a week or so. I tried downloading them using Image Capture and it appeared to see them and looked like it was downloading them, but ever nothing arrived in the download folder.
Continue readingI’ve been having a lot of authorization issues with iTunes since a recent upgrade, so when this morning, iTunes started garbling playback on ALL my music, I panicked thinking it was another bug. It sounded
Continue readingIf you are trying to edit .htaccess files or other invisible files through the GUI, or using Fetch’s automatic linkage with BBedit, you will need to show hidden files. Open the terminal and type: defaults
Continue readingI came back from a trip, turned on my iMac, only to see a black screen with a DOS-like prompt: “No bootable device — insert boot disk and press any key.” It did not seem
Continue readingOne Powerpoint feature that Keynote does not yet have is animation triggers. In Powerpoint, you can set an animation to be triggered when a particular object elsewhere on the slide is clicked. This can be used to create interactivity for web-based elearning, or perhaps for presentations where there is some interaction from the audience and the exact sequence of clicks is not figured out in advance.
A workaround to create a trigger effect is to make the triggers into hyperlinks that link to slides that look identical to the slide containing the trigger, but which contain the response animation. For each trigger, there will be a corresponding animation slide. The animations are set to begin “after transition” or in other words, right after the slide loads.
Continue readingAt work I use DAVE by Thursby Software to improve my Mac’s compatibility with the Windows network. Without it, I can connect to the network, but things are never quite right, and Dave just seems
Continue readingMy ipod classic died again the other day, after being alternately frozen and baked in my car for several months. I don’t believe in coddling my appliances. I tried the frozen ipod reset trick, and
Continue readingThe other day I pulled my iphone out and nearly dropped it! It was burning hot and there was a big red low battery indicator in the middle of the screen! I had charged it only a couple of hours earlier so it was not likely that normal use had caused this condition.
I was in a wireless area, and had been checking my gmail earlier. The little activity indicator at top left was twirling.
A search through Apple support and discussions led me to this article. It seems that the iphone can get stuck in a checking-mail loop, particularly on certain IMAP accounts like gMail.
An Apple support article also says that a flaw in the Mail application in v. 1.1.3 causes it to persistently generate server activity even when it is not checking mail per user settings. Persistent mail checking can quickly drain the battery.
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