Problems to Solve Welcome Guest | Login or Register

Edit: While the sound controls work, I’ve been having major issues with soundflower, from audio disappearing to getting stuck and looping on a sample. Looks like soundflower still needs a bit of development. :(

This has been driving me nuts for years.

I have an external firewire audio interface, a MOTU 896, that has served me well for 7 years. It powers my studio monitors, has multi inputs and delivers superior sound compared to my internal computer speakers.

The only problem with it is that OS X’s volume controls don’t work with it. The volume keys don’t work on the keyboard, the apple remote volume doesn’t work, and you can’t control the volume with AirMouse on the iPhone. In system preferences, you get the message “The selected device has no output controls”, and you get an annoying disabled speaker when you try and use the volume controls.

Thanks to this post and the wonderful folks at Cycling 74, there is a free solution. You can install soundflower, which allows you to route all of your audio to a soundflower device. Once you’ve installed soundflower, you can run Soundflowerbed from your applications menu, which makes a finder menu appear that allows you to choose which device to route audio to. Choose your external device, and you’re done!

Finally, you can leave the volume knob on your external device in one setting, and control the volume from across the room with a remote! Glorious!

Soundflower is also a great app for interapplication multichannel audio routing, similar to rewire or jack.

Firefox 3.6 has been driving me nuts by always opening on my secondary monitor, no matter if I drag windows over, restart, delete user preferences, etc. Every time I hit command N, the new window opens on my secondary monitor.

This is a known bug with Firefox 3.6.

The work around for now on OS X anyway is to drag a firefox window to your primary monitor, hit the green plus button to maximize the window, and then hit the green plus button again to restore it. Now windows should remain on the primary monitor.

Use this script to monitor VNC connections with Vine Server:
nice -n 100 tail -n 0 -f /Users/jordan/Library/Logs/VineServer.log | php -r 'while ($m = fgets(STDIN)) shell_exec("growlnotify -p 0 Vine Server -m ". escapeshellarg($m));'

Change “jordan” to your username (home directory), or the whole path of the log if you’re monitoring something else. “Vine Server” is the alert title, which could be anything (“Hello World”).

Save this as a file such as vncnotify.sh. Run
chmod 755 vncnotify.sh
and then you can run the command by typing ./vinenotify.sh.

Duplicate this file and name it vinenotify.command.
Finally, in System Preferences > Accounts > Start up items, add vinenotify.command, and make it hidden, and it will run when you log in.

Things I’m still working on: preventing a string of notifications when you launch VNC; hiding the terminal window when you log in; and grepping for only connect/disconnect/login failures.
Thanks to drewish.com for the growl tail code.

Use this command to find the log you’re looking for:
lsof | grep -i log

On OS X, typical directories I look in are /var/log/, $HOME/Library/Logs/, and /private/var/log/.

There are some really nifty apps out there that I have set to run all the time, and they’ve been starting to crowd up my dock.

Jungledisk is better than Mozy and is my preferred online backup utility. It’s secure, it uses Amazon S3, it supports versioning, and allows online access. Anyway I noticed their latest version of the app allows you to show the app in the status bar instead of the dock. Update Jungle Disk and then go to Configure > Application Settings > Show application in: Status Bar.

QuickSilver is another great keyboard launcher app I use all the time. It also supports hiding the app from the dock. Go to Preferences > Application and uncheck Show icon in dock. It automatically shows in the status bar when you do this.

Growl is one of my favorite apps, as is HardwareGrowler. However HardwareGrowler has no user interface but still hangs out in the dock. You can fix this by following the instructions on this page. It took me a couple tries (I put the <key>LSUIElement</key><true/> in the wrong place the first time and had to start over…Also you touch the whole HardwareGrowler.app package in the finder), but now it’s hidden from the dock.

Now if only I could get VineServer working with Growl. VineServer does allow you to install a system server, but unlike the app, it does not notify when someone connects, which I prefer to know about. So for now, VineServer sits in my dock as a hidden application.

So here’s a somewhat complicated but entirely graphical way of backing up your SMS messages from your iPhone into an excel spreadsheet. I couldn’t get Syphone to work so here is my solution.

The first thing you’ll need is iPhone Backup Extractor. It’s a mac program, but there are other cross platform backup decoders out there such as mobilesync-inspect. You’re looking for the SQLite SMS database (iPhone Backup Extractor calls it SMS.db). iPhone Backup Extractor is not compatible with iPhone OS 3.0 yet but it does work with 2.2.1. Hopefully 3.0 will work soon.

Run iPhone Backup Extractor and select your most recent backup. Scroll down to the bottom of the applications and choose iPhone OS. Choose a folder to save it in.

Then, use an SQLite browser such as SQLite Manager (don’t know why this is a firefox addon, but it rocks) to view the database.

All of the SMSes are stored in the messages table – you can right click on it and export it as a CSV. Alternatively you could export the whole database as an SQL or XML file. But open up the CSV in excel and you’re done! Sweet!

I’m trying the new iPhone 3.0 OS because I’m a registered developer. So far it’s sweet! My only issues so far are that wifi had trouble connecting at first, and my notes apparently didn’t sync.
Turns out my notes were in mail. They didn’t show up in my left hand navigation bar at first, but I tried doing “new note” and just writing “test”, and then the rest of them all showed up from my iPhone. (no clue where windows would put them.)
Hurray!

This is a follow up to my previous post about locking the system out of itself by trying to set “Everyone”’s priveledges to “no access” via get info and locking Leopard out of its own system.
I recently discovered that my file sharing is not behaving like it is supposed to. “Everyone” having “read only” access indeed SHARES ALL OF MY FILES with read only access and no password required. If you try and set “Everyone” to “no access” via get info like I previously described, when you reboot Leopard fails to launch and the Leopard install disk cannot repair the permissions. (See my previous post for my fix).
But when I try and change the read only access for Everyone, “no access” is greyed out:

This is a huge bug apple!! Leopard has downgraded the ability to share files with a password.

For several months I have been trying to stream my iTunes library from my iMac to my wireless laptop in the living room on the same network. I’ve streamed iTunes with various software to other devices (other PCs, Windows Mobile phone, iPhone) using SlimServer, Simplify Media and Mojo, but for some reason it would not stream over the network.
I tried updating iTunes on both machines but had no luck. I tried using Simplify Media to share instead but that didn’t work either. I double checked the preferences on both machines. I disabled the firewall and AVG antivirus. Still no luck.
Finally, I solved it: I opened up Apple Software Update and installed the Bonjour update for Windows. So it was Apple’s fault but I couldn’t find any documentation anywhere. Oh well, it’s fixed now. Hurray!

For a while I was getting a maddening “The iPhone cannot be synced. An unknown error occurred (13213)” error every time I would try and sync my iPhone. No amount of iphone resetting or iTunes restarting would solve my problem. Finally this apple disccusion solved my problem – I had to turn off iTunes Genius and then it worked fine.
But that sucks, I liked Genius, and iTunes stupidly got rid of the mini store so now I can’t see any reviews or album information of the tracks I’m listening to. (Genius isn’t much better actually, it shows you artists’ top albums by default instead of information on the one you’re listening to. Bring back the mini store!)
Anyway, the solution was to upgrade quicktime, which I had been avoiding because it requires a reboot. Actually my 10.5.5 update crashed and almost hosed my machine so I had to use the 10.5.5 Combo Update (which I highly recommend, as you still have Finder and activity monitor control as it works) to upgrade and then upgrade quicktime.
Anyway, after I installed the quicktime update and reinstalled Genius, my iPhone sync worked fine.