Articles posted in January, 2004

More USB glitches

Monday, January 26th, 2004 • 8:31 am

I have mentioned problems with USB flakiness before. Some of the problems seem to have disappeared for now. I am no longer losing the USB devices connected to the ports on the back of my secondary monitor, an Apple flat-panel 17″. But today I started my computer from my Disk Warrior CD in order to […]

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More AirPort nightmares

Monday, January 26th, 2004 • 8:24 am

I am not having a good time with my hardware these days. First of all, after much more fiddling with settings and what not, I have come to the conclusion that, in my setup at least, Panther is unable to operate a so-called “roaming network”. I have already described my various attempts to try and […]

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Disk Utility non-sense

Monday, January 26th, 2004 • 8:08 am

I have just been experiencing major problems with my external FireWire drives. So once they were mounted again, I launched Disk Utility to verify and repair the disks if necessary. The first time I launched Disk Utility, it immediately crashed, even before listing the volumes. The second time, it launched OK. I then selected one […]

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New “Apple Peel” column at Applelust.com

Monday, January 26th, 2004 • 1:56 am

My latest “Apple Peel” column is up at Applelust.com. It’s called “The Mac OS X Hall of Shame – Part 1“. Feel free to comment on it below.

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FA Cup 4th Round: Arsenal 4 – Middlesborough 1

Saturday, January 24th, 2004 • 3:04 am

Swines. Stupid Canadian broadcaster Sportsnet changed their minds at the last minute and decided to show a Scottish Cup game instead! So I ended up following the game online with the text feed provided by the official club site Arsenal.com. It’s a bloody Java application and it doesn’t work too well, but it worked well […]

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iTunes Music Store RSS Feed Generator

Saturday, January 24th, 2004 • 1:28 am

Apple seems to have finally jumped on the RSS feed bandwagon. You can subscribe to feeds for Knowledge Base Changes, Top Mac OS X Documents, Top Safari Knowledge Base Documents, etc. Even more interestingly, it is now offering access to a RSS feed generator for the iTunes Music Store. You can use this tool to […]

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Word X Tip: Page Up and Page Down without moving cursor

Friday, January 23rd, 2004 • 4:33 am

In a document window in Normal view mode in Microsoft Word X, the default behaviour of the “Page Up” and “Page Down” keys is to jump approximately one screen up or down and to move the cursor (insertion point) accordingly. I personally find this highly problematic, because it means that if I want to scroll […]

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Mac OS X: Very strange problem with Mail

Friday, January 23rd, 2004 • 12:33 am

I had a very strange problem with Mail in Panther yesterday. I have several email accounts with my own domain name (@latext.com), hosted on a server somewhere in Australia. I also have several accounts hosted on another servers, some local, some in another remote places. All of a sudden, yesterday, Mail started telling me that […]

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Panther: Mouse pointer in Resize box

Thursday, January 22nd, 2004 • 5:48 am

What’s the problem with the picture below? Well, to me, the tip of the mouse pointer is on the Resize box. But when I click, the click goes right through it and brings whatever is behind this window to the foreground, instead of grabbing the Resize box of the foremost window. Clearly there’s something wrong […]

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Office 2004 and advanced XML features

Wednesday, January 21st, 2004 • 11:29 pm

You need to go to New Zealand to finally find an article that scratches below the surface of the official press release propaganda and actually provides information about what the next version of Office for the Macintosh, Office 2004, will or will not include. And the truth is that it will, once again, be a crippled […]

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Magnatune: Another model for on-line music distribution

Wednesday, January 21st, 2004 • 11:01 pm

USA Today has a good article about Magnatune, an on-line music distribution service that might be closer to what the future of the recording industry is than Apple’s iTunes Music Store. The sad truth about the iTunes Music Store is that it’s a compromise that leans too heavily (for my taste) on the side of […]

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Getting a mouse pad for your optical mouse

Wednesday, January 21st, 2004 • 7:47 am

One of the big selling points of optical mouse peripherals is that they do not require a mouse pad and can be used on any surface, provided that it’s not too reflective (like glass). My personal experience with the Apple Pro mouse, however, is that, even on a regular, slightly varnished wooden desk surface, optical […]

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Mac OS X: Need more consistency across applications in the Window menu

Tuesday, January 20th, 2004 • 4:27 am

In Mac OS X’s Finder, when you have several windows open and one of them is minimized (i.e. reduced to a small icon on the right-hand side of the Dock), then if you look at the “Window” menu you’ll see that the title of the minimized window has a black diamond in front of it: […]

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Panther’s Mail: Unexpectedly closing message windows

Tuesday, January 20th, 2004 • 4:23 am

Sometimes you are in the process of reading an email message in its own window in Mail. You see a sentence or a paragraph that you’d like to forward to a friend. So you select the relevant portion of the text in the message and click on the “Forward” button. Mail correctly creates a new […]

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iChat: Not very clever with Address Book entries

Tuesday, January 20th, 2004 • 1:22 am

iChat is integrated with Address Book in Mac OS X, which means that it uses the contact information included in Address Book entries to determine your list of potential iChat interlocutors. If you click on the “+” button at the bottom of the “Buddy List” window in iChat, a dialog sheet will slide out with […]

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