a very useful guide on how to use OpenGL Profiler to launch games, like World of Warcraft, with older video drivers (if you crash with the current drivers)

Safari uses the first phone number listed in your Address Book card. There is no direction UI manipulation gesture for controlling this order, but there is a preference.

Address Book -> Preferences -> Template

Make the number type you wish to be used by Safari (Home, Work, etc) be the first number type in the template. Set others as needed.

By default, Address Book only has Work and Mobile on the template, so Safari will always choose Mobile over Home. If you make the first entry in the template “Home” and then add a new entry for “Mobile,” your home number will always be used for Safari Autofill.

For some time I have been a big fan of Path Finder as a Finder replacement. One of the things I missed tho was changing desktop photos.

It turns out, I could have had this all along, but the convoluted preferences are well, convoluted!

You see Path Finder has a much nicer display of desktop icons. They can have info below them, they layout on the desktop better, etc.

Path Finder can also hide the Finder’s desktop. But this is where it gets confusing - The Finder is not in charge of the desktop picture, the Dock is! The Finder’s “Desktop” refers to the icons on the desktop.

So if you use Path Finder and would like to get your changing desktop photos back (via System Preferences->Desktop) here is what you need to set:

• First, click on the Desktop

  • From the View menu, choose Show View Options
  • Next click the “Set Background…” button
  • Uncheck “Show Desktop Background”
  • Close the Desktop Options palette

• Secondly, open Path Finder’s Preferences

  • Path Finder -> Preferences
  • Click General
  • Check “Hide Finder’s Desktop”

This will hide the Finder’s desktop icons but not occlude the images being shown by the dock with Path Finder’s desktop image.

Whew! I told you it was confusing.

At PMUG last night, someone asked what to do about their fans running non-stop on a MacBook.

Aside from bad sensor, or a runaway application, we told the person to update their SMC firmware. But where do you get that?

Well luckily Apple just redesigned the Apple Support page and I really like it.

From there, you can choose MacBook from the popup on the left, and end up here

Wow, right on the main page, every bit of information we needed. Nice!

Took me awhile to track down, but there is a conflict between Intuit Quicken 2006 Quicken Scheduler and TextExpander 1.4.2. When the scheduler is running, textexpander snippets cannot be triggered via the keyboard, rather only via the menu.

I often want to password lock my screen, but not log out. OK, I can set the security preferences to lock the screen when the screen saver kicks in, but I don’t want to do that every time the screen saver kicks in.

Thanks to FourOhFour on #macintosh, I have a solution.

Open Keychain Access, open Preferences and check “Show Status in Menu”

You’ll now have a little lock icon in the menu which you can select “Lock Screen” from!

Perfect.

Updated: I have added a screencast to show how to set this up. Watch

Here is a tip to easily double, if not triple your Mail.app speed!

Read

Along with this security issue, Font Book ran into corrupted fonts which I removed as noted earlier. I had also tossed my Caches and byHost folder to see if that would help.

As a side effect, Mail.app was drawing its from field on top of the subject field. Safari and OmniWeb had the wrong display font. Even though Times, a system font, showed in User A’s font book, it did not show in mine.

So on a lark I tried selecting all fonts in /System/Library/Fonts/ and did File->Open. Then I quit font book and now Mail, Safari and Omniweb are happy.

For awhile I would get issues about certificate errors, etc. Today, I could not go to my webmail, check mail nor go to say godaddy.com in Safari, Omniweb nor Mail.app.

After 90 mins of mucking around, deleting corrupted Fonts (now my TextMate font is all messed up, later issue) I found this thread on apple discussions

In short, deleting com.apple.security.revocation.plist from ~/Library/Preferences/ and relaunching Omniweb/Mail cured the problem!

As noted in the linked Ars Technica article, Apple messed up and left the IPv6 firewall off. Oops.

Read

Out of the box, the router will connect you to the IPv6 Internet using an automatically configured tunnel. This means putting IPv6 packets put inside regular IPv4 packets. Those of you who really want to test IPv6 (you know who you are) are better off manually configuring a tunnel to your ISP or a tunnel broker, this is faster. If you don’t want IPv6 and don’t want to turn it off on all MacOS X and Windows Vista systems connected to the AirPort Extreme, you can select “Link-local only” as the IPv6 mode. If you leave IPv6 turned on, you may want to select “Block incoming IPv6 connections” to turn on the IPv6 firewall or your network is wide open over IPv6, even if it’s firewalled over IPv4.

I ran my usual performance test to UC Santa Cruz and was only getting 10 of the 15 MB/s I should be getting on FIOS. So I installed the Apple Broadband Tuner and whoopee, immediately up to 15MB/s.

I guess I never ran this while using Ethernet, or installing OS X Updates negates these settings. I’ll be sure to check my speeds after the next update!

This is a cool tip: How to Add a key mapping file

When the file is installed, quit and relaunch Mail and type control-m, control-a to get the apple/command symbol! (a caret (^) means control)

So for example control-m control-a control-m control-o P gives:

⌘⌥P

As you can tell from my mystic posts, I’ve been trying to solve this can’t iChat AV in Tiger issue even though I’m talking to people with PhDs and what not. Or not talking to them should I say.

I had Vonage switch to SIP port 5061, but then eliminated the Vonage router altogether and still had issues.

I then upgraded my Linksys WRT54GS v1.1 to Talisman/Basic 1.2.RC2 and wow, with just uPNP I could talk to John, or Tim, or Patrick, but not more than one of them at once. Grrr.

Oh anf then, my wireless in WPA mode is dead. Known issue, rc3 coming soon.

So I got the offer to buy a refurbed Apple Airport Extreme Basestation for like $20 off list. I’m going to try it but my gut tells me I won’t be happy. I already lose a port, which means some other piece of hardware is needed (I was using 1 2 ports on my linksys in conjunction with a Netgear 4 port gigabit switch). I’ll test the wifi speeds, the lan to wan speeds and see if it actually works for iChat and Vonage. Report later tonight.

Apple, if anyone is listening. Come on, please. At least make a cool wizard that says “Hey, we noticed you actually connected to two people, mind if we snag your router info, ISP so we can let people know what works?” Anything would help other than this religious voodoo we’re going through.

In these days of “Get a Mac” ads, its sad my ichat experiences are reminiscent of why we’d giggle at Windows users.

According to Daily Tech, Apple has now released 3 revisions of the MacBook Pro hardware. The latter having no known issues.

I am glad my order took so long and was BTO as I have W8612, the latest known version. I still think there are wifi issues with speed, reconnecting and very hot temperature issues however, but no whine.

You can check your serial # by choosing About This Mac and clicking on the “10.4.x” area twice (once to show the build of OS X, then the serial #)

Thanks to info at Ralph John’s iChat Page, I finally got iChat AV working, we think. It still depends on the remote end being configured properly, so if you have problems, see the linked image.

Basically I turned off uPNP and used port triggering instead. I have a Linksys WRT54GS v1.1 with Firmware Version: v3.37.6 - HyperWRT 2.1b1.

I found John’s information a little confusing so I set it up like this:

Picture of Linksys Port Triggering Settings

iChat3 and iChat4 are for Jabber I think. I didn’t know the trigger port so I left them zero and disabled. Don’t enable them, it breaks other stuff.

The only thing I cannot do is video chat with myself between two machines here and a third person hosted from the G5. The laptop comes back with insufficient bandwidth. I have 1,500kbps upstream, so it should not be an issue, but maybe I am missing a port that is used the bandwidth negotiation process?

I can video chat myself between the G5 and laptop. Wow, a first.

A flaw has been found in Safari if you have open “safe” files after downloading checked. Any site can use this flaw to attack you, just by visiting it.

To secure yourself, go to Safari Menu, Choose Preferences, click General, and uncheck “open “safe” files after downloading”

You’ll now have to double click widgets, sit files etc to open them, which is no big deal compared to losing every file in your documents folder.

iTunes rocks for podcasts but I had my settings set up to delete podcasts after I had listened to them.

This was fine, except for some podcasts, like Tikibar TV, I wanted to keep them all, even if I had listened to them.

When now in iTunes 6.0.2 you can control-click on a podcast and select “Do no auto delete”

Sweet!

I heard about this tip from Rob Griffiths at PMUG the other night.

Put your cursor over a word in any cocoa app, like Safari or mail, and press COMMAND-CONTROl-D.

A popup window will show with the definition of that word!

Whew! What a mouthful.

Alright I had already posted on how to get the Express talking to Sveasoft’s firmware using WDS and WEP. This allows the Express to connect wirelessly to the Linksys and let me play my music, etc.

Since then I had upgraded my WRT to the Linksys 4.70.6 firmware which supports WPA2 and Apple had released Airport 4.2 (Express 6.2) which supports WPA2 so I decided to try and get this all working.

Short story: it works! Here are the steps to save you a bunch of time.

• First off, forget “WDS” with the express. Don’t need it. They hide it from you now. So you are best off using the reset button on the express to totally clear it’s settings. I had to do this to get this working.
• On the Linksys go to the Wireless tab, then click the Wireless Security sub-tab. Set the security mode to WPA2 personal and the algorithm to TKIP+AES. Enter your password. Update the linksys.
• If you have any laptops, re-connect them to the network with the new WPA2 password and make sure all of that is working.
• Now plug the Express into your Mac using Ethernet (or into your Linksys via Ethernet). Open Airport Admin Utility found in /Applications/Utilities/
• Your Express will have default settings. Double click it in the list to open it up.
• Set the name to something like My Express
• Click “Change Passeword…” and set your express password. This is NOT the WPA2 password
• Now comes the new, easy part. For Wireless Mode, choose “Join an Existing Wireless Network(Wireless Client)
• In the Wireless Network section click the popup and choose your Linksys Wireless network (or type in the exact SSID if you have it hidden)
• Click on Security Options and set the Security to WPA2 Personal and enter the same WPA password as you did on your linksys.
• Click Update in the bottom right corner.
• Click OK and you’re done!

I did find one interesting bug. After the Express has rebooted and you open the Express up again with Airport Admin Utility, clicking Security Options will show that it has connected via WEP. Now maybe it has fallen back to WEP and WPA2 allows this, I don’t know, but all I do know is the Linksys and Express were orginally set to WPA2 and they connected. The summary page lists WPA2 though.

Also notice that once you choose “Join an Existing Network…” most of your option tabs go away (as they should) and you are left with just Airport, Internet and Music.

It appears that in this non-WDS mode printer sharing is not an option, or maybe it “just works” if you plug a printer in. I don’t know.

This also might not be using the Express as an extension to the network, just a simple client. But it was easy to set up and allows me to use the better WPA2 security so I’m not complaining yet.

Update:

I found a solution over at vafer.org My LinkSys WRT54GS just happens to run Sveasoft’s Talisman firmware (1.0.5) and it worked! Sveasoft has come under fire for their GPL practices which I don’t like either, but their firmware is good.

For the record, the steps this fellow suggests work fine. I had to ditch WPA security unfortunately for WEP 128bit. To do this properly, set WEP on the Aiport Express first, then click the Password icon at the top of the Administration window to get the hex key. Copy this hex key into the Linksys’s key field for it’s WEP settings.

This also works with SSIDs hidden.

There is a 8 second delay for itunes to connect to AirTunes for some reason, which sucks when pause/resuming Any input on this would be helpful.

Original Post:

As my friends know, I am a bit of a geek and love da cool features.

Currently I use my uber cool Linksys WRT54GS router, which is also my wireless connection to my laptop.

For playing tunes, I normally use my iPod connected via a dock to the stereo. This works well.

I also have a Phone Valet Messaging Center which does things like record calls, shows caller ID on my screen and can run AppleScripts when my phone goes off or on hook. Two of the scripts they provide interact with iTunes and iChat.

The iTunes script pauses and resumes iTunes as I use the phone. This rocks! The iChat script changes the status and status message of iTunes. I just fixed this script to save the available status, so now it does not mess up custom settings, like playing the current track in iTunes.

What the iPod/Stereo solution does not afford is pausing and muting when I use the phone. So I’d like to use an Express to play the music. However, there is a hitch, of course. The Express cannot bridge with my Linksys.

Now I have two solutions I can think of. Spend even more money and buy two express, or run a long ethernet cord into the living room. Both suck.

Are there any other solutions? Does someone sell a AirTunes compatible WAP (Wireless Access Point) that might work with my Linksys?