Yes, this blog is run on Blogger, but I have several Wordpress blogs. I got so sick of my Wordpress blogs getting hacked that I finally started to password protect my wp-admin directory with an .htaccess password. That worked perfectly for awhile, until I discovered that I could not use friendly URLs with that setup. I reluctantly took the .htaccess password off of the wp-admin directory and used the following techniques to secure my WP install.

My iTunes could not connect to the iTunes Store. No matter what I did I could not get it to work, even after uninstalling and re-installing. I finally found a fix. In Windows, click Start and type "cmd" in the Run field. That opens a command windows. Type the following commands followed by hitting Enter:

netsh winsock reset catalog

[hit enter]

netsh int ip reset reset.log hit

[hit enter]

Reboot and you should be good to go!

After installing XCode in Mac OS X Lion, I could not compile any programs using gcc. I had no Developer folder, and command line compiling returned an error - "gcc: command not found." Here's how I fixed it:

In Xcode, go to: Preferences -> Downloads with "Components."

Find Command Line Tools, and click on install. After entering your password and your Apple Developer userid and password, the command line tools gets downloaded and installed, including gcc.

That's it!

Password manager LastPass posted a notice on their blog last night that they may have been hacked. From the LastPass Blog:

In this case, we couldn’t find that root cause. After delving into the anomaly we found a similar but smaller matching traffic anomaly from one of our databases in the opposite direction (more traffic was sent from the database compared to what was received on the server).

Because we can’t account for this anomaly either, we’re going to be paranoid and assume the worst: that the data we stored in the database was somehow accessed. We know roughly the amount of data transfered and that it’s big enough to have transfered people’s email addresses, the server salt and their salted password hashes from the database. We also know that the amount of data taken isn’t remotely enough to have pulled many users encrypted data blobs.”

I trusted Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson when they said that LastPass was secure. I watched an entire episode of Security Now in which they explained why LastPass was totally secure. Maybe LastPass is totally secure, but then why are they forcing users to change their passwords? Let this be a lesson to everyone, never ever, ever, ever trust anyone else with your passwords. There is always a way to hack something.

I'm glad that I only stored non-essential websites in my LastPass vault. I did not store any bank websites, or even email accounts in LP. Whew!

If you want information from a third party I found this blog post had some helpful tips.

My artwork in iTunes for Windows was randomly disappearing. In addition to the artwork disappearing, I had new information appearing in the track info when I played a song. Sometimes it was a new composer, or a new spelling of the same composer. It turns out Windows Media Player is responsible for this. It is getting the album information via a background process, but it makes it look like iTunes is doing. How nice.

The Fix? Go into WMP options and tell it to stop going to the Internet to retrieve album information. In my version I did this on the Library and Privacy tabs.

I have a late 2008 MacBook Pro 15" 2.6 GHz laptop. It's the last model before the unibody came out. The other day I noticed a weird electrical hissing noise coming out of the speakers. I searched and searched the Internet and found multiple articles about a hissing noise caused by the dual core processor. They suggested turning off one core, and/or running Photo Booth to see if the sound went away. This was NOT the problem I had. My sound was coming from the speakers, and if I plugged headphones in I could really hear the sound.

The sound was a hissing of sorts, but more like an electrical sound. It reminded me of the sound my Ionic Breeze air filter makes when it gets dirty. The sound was intermittent and if I muted the speakers it would not go away. Rebooting the laptop caused the sound to stop, but only until I launched something that activated the sound card (iTunes, QuickTime, etc.). Once I launched a program that involved sound, the hissing would come back.

I just knew my logic board was fried or something and I could not find a single article that described this problem. Again, I could hear the sound through the speakers and the headphones. I tried one last ditch effort before ordering a new laptop. I reset the PRAM using these instructions. Since I reset the PRAM I haven't heard the sound again. I'm crossing my fingers because it could come back, but so far it seems to be working.

A little research shows that one of the things that gets stored in PRAM is the sound card volume. Maybe something got freaked out in there and was causing my issue. I don't know. I'm just glad I got it fixed. I hope this helps someone else.

UPDATE: This didn't really work. Clearing the PRAM worked for awhile, but when I came back to my laptop the sound was back. I have switched out the battery as I was using an extended Fastmac battery. So far the noise only happens with that one battery but we'll see and repost the results.

UPDATE 2: I went to the Apple Store and they think it's either a sound card problem, or a grouding problem. Either way, I have to send it in to get fixed. How lame.

I was getting error reports on my PC. I ran chkdsk and found that I had some bad sectors on the disk. I ordered a new drive but then ran across this dos program called SpinRite. I watched a few videos and then paid the $90 for the program. It ran for almost 20 hours, but it did fix my drive. If you have any data recovery needs or just need to maintain your drive check out SpinRite.

One note, after SpinRite did its thing I did need to defrag the drive. It takes awhile to work on these big drives (mine was 200GB) but it's worth it if it can recover your data. Check it out.

I took my MBP to a friend's house and it started acting weird. It was very sluggish and things kept locking up. When I got home I ran Disk Utility and found that I had all kinds of permissions problems, and a "Sibling Link Error" that could not be repaired. I Googled the error and tried several options but nothing worked. One of the suggestions that kept coming up was to purchase Disk Warrior. I went to their site and read all of these user emails that claimed that Disk Warrior was incredible. They actually sounded like the company wrote them so I figured it was just marketing. I was skeptical, but I gave it a shot.

At $99 I knew I was rolling the dice but I had no other option. This is a relatively new 500GB disk that I put in my MacBook Pro, and I didn't want to have to reformat. Reformatting is easy, but I'm running PGP Whole Disk Encryption. If I reformatted I would have had to re-encrypt the drive and that takes about 24 hours. So, I went for the $99 solution and it worked. I couldn't believe it. Normally these types of software solutions don't really work, but Disk Warrior actually fixed the drive and it has been running smoothly ever since.

There is a chance that the drive is actually going bad which is why I had a problem in the first place. It could be that Disk Warrior just bought me some time. Normally when drives go bad you hear something though, and I hear nothing. My drive has been running smoothly for several days now so I'm fairly confident it's fine.

Do I think the $99 was worth it? Probably, but I still think it's an overpriced piece of software. They should really charge $49 for it in my opinion. It did work though. I'm a believer in Disk Warrior now!

I purchased a new Seagate 500 GB FreeAgent USB drive thinking I would simply clone my MacBook Pro's HD. I've done it in the past and it worked like a charm, but this time I thought I'd try Time Machine. I have never been able to get Time Machine to work wirelessly, so I basically gave up on it. When I plugged in my external drive and ran Time Machine it went for a couple hours (trying to backup about 300gb of data) then stopped with the following error: "Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while copying files to the backup volume."



I Googled "Time Machine Error" and there were tons of people with the same problem. This topic in Apple's Forums had several people complaining of the same issue.

I tried several suggestions like the following:

• Renaming my Backup HD to not include spaces in the name.
  
• Rename my MBP to not include odd character's in its name
  
• Delete the "in progress" file on the backup drive
  
• Reformat my external drive
  
• Check the drive for errors
  
• Reboot the OS
  

None of these worked. What I did next was look at the system log by launching the Console. It's not easy to read so I downloaded these two programs to help:

• Time Machine Error Logger
  
• Time Machine Buddy Widget
  

By looking at the logs through these programs it was obvious that I had one file that could not be copied for some reason. It was a mp4 file of a movie (A Few Good Men). I went to the Time Machine options and excluded that file, ran the backup again, and it worked like a charm.

A couple of things trouble me about this error. First of all, without downloading third party software the error message that Time Machine is of no use. I had no idea why my backup stopped. Secondly, why can't Time Machine just exclude that file and continue while notifying me, or prompt me and give me a choice to continue or not?

In any case I finally got my backup to work. I hope this helps someone.

I've been having a problem in Gmail where my contact picture was not being saved. It would be there for the session, but if I changed computers or browsers my contact picture would be reset to an old photo that I don't even remember uploading.

Searching for answers yielded nothing but I finally figured something out. I clicked the "older version" link in Gmail. Once in the older version I deleted my contact picture and reuploaded a new one. I saved the new photo and when I went back to the "newer version" all seems fine.

Gmail must have an issue in the "newer version" even though it doesn't seem all that new. I hope this helps someone.

UPDATE: This is not a permanent fix. After a day or so my contact picture was deleted again. C'mon Gmail.

For the past few weeks I've been having problems with Firefox. I thought it was a Flash issue so I uninstalled and reinstalled Flash. All seemed well, but now every time I go to Yahoo Mail Firefox is sluggish and draggy until I quit and restart it. If I don't visit Yahoo Mail I'm fine. Weird.

I know what you're thinking. "Are you crazy? Mac is so much better than Windows." That may be true, but there are a few things that I wish my Mac could do the way Windows does it.

1. Alt + Tab
I really miss my Alt + Tab keystrokes in Windows. I got it to work on my Mac with a third party program called Witch, but it should be built in to the OS. You can do a Command + Tab in Mac OS X, but that doesn't bring up a program that may be running but is minimized to the Dock.

2. Apple Menu as Start Menu
Wasn't there an Apple Menu in the old Mac OS's that acted like the Windows Start Menu? Sometimes I want to be able to launch a program from a menu and not from the Dock. I downloaded a program called Butler to make it happen, but again it should be built into the OS.

3. Menus appear in Window
I don't like the way Mac has one master menu at the top of the screen that changes as you change applications. I think it makes much more sense to have a menu in each window.

4. Ability to Move the Apple Menu
This may be possible, but I don't know of a way to do it What if I want the menu on the bottom of the screen? I don't, but somebody might want that.

5. Stop relying on applications like iPhoto
I prefer to browser my pictures in the Finder window and not in iPhoto. I can do that on my Mac, but if I'm trying to import a photo into an iMovie project I can't just grab it from a folder. I have to import it into iPhoto first. That's lame.

6. Write to NTFS drives natively
I really wish Mac would support writing to NTFS drives more easily. I can write to them with a third party hack, or by placing the drive on my network but it would be much easier to be able to plug in an external drive and write to it.

7. Permanently delete files without the trash
There is no easy way to delete a file from your desktop (or anywhere else) without first placing it in the Trash. I like to keep some files in Trash in case I need them, but other large files I want to delete immediately. There's no easy way to do it on the Mac. The way I do it now is to drop it on the Shredder, but that takes awhile. I also launch Terminal and type the command:

rm -f -r

and then drag the file that I want into the Terminal window. That gets rid of the file but it shouldn't be that difficult. Holding Shift +Del in Windows gets rid of the file immediately.

8. Delete Key
I don't like that there is no delete key in Mac. Holding down Function with the Delete key works, but that's an extra stroke that would be made easier with a delete key.

9. Clicking in the address bar of an Internet browser
I don't like the way Mac selects text in my Internet browser. In Windows, if I click in the address field the entire field is selected automatically so I can simply type a new address. I Mac, I click in the address field and the cursor is at the beginning of the line. A double-click then selects what Mac perceives to be a word and I have to triple click to get the whole thing selected. Lame.

10. Home Key
I miss the home key. Sometimes I want to select a line of text and in Windows I can hold down Shift + Home to do it. In Mac you can do it with Shift + Command + Arrow Key, but I've found that it doesn't always work. It seems to be application specific and some apps don't support it for some reason.

I noticed my default applications were getting reset in Mac OS X Leopard every time I reboot. It turns out that FileVault has a bug in it which causes all default applications to be reset. I found the answer at the Related Link below.

I've had a situation where large files are in my Mac's Trash folder, but I cannot delete it because I do not have sufficient permissions. I tried to create a new folder on my desktop and move the files there but I couldn't do that either. I searched and finally found this snippet from Apple's Support site.


Emptying the Trash

In some circumstances, folders for which you do not have write permission can end up in the Trash; and you will not be able to delete them or the files contained in them. Remember that in Mac OS X there is not a single Trash folder. Instead, each user has a Trash folder in their home directory (named ".Trash"). There is also a Trash folder for the startup volume, and Trash folders for other volumes or disks. When a user throws away a file on a local non-startup volume, the name of the folder on that volume is "/.Trashes/UID", where UID is the user ID number of the user (which may be seen in NetInfo Manager). In either case, all Trash folders are hidden from the user in the Finder. In these situations you can either start up into Mac OS 9 to locate the files and delete them, or you can use the Terminal application. Issues with emptying the Trash are much less likely to occur in Mac OS X 10.2 or later, since the Finder empties the Trash as the root user. However, issues may still occur with files on remote volumes for which your local root user has no special privileges.

Warning: Typographical error or misuse of the "rm -rf" command can result in data loss. Insertion of a space in the wrong place could result in the complete deletion of data on your hard disk, for example. You may wish to copy and paste the commands below into a text editor to verify spacing. Follow these steps to delete Trash for the logged-in user:

1. Open the Terminal application.
2. Type: sudo rm -rf
Note: Type a space after "-rf". The command does not work without the space. Do not press Return until Step 6.
3. Open your Trash.
4. Choose Select All from the Edit menu.
5. Drag all of your Trash into the Terminal window. This causes the Terminal window to automatically fill in the name and location of each item in your Trash.
6. Press Return.

All of the items in your Trash are deleted. As an alternative method, you may execute these commands. The second and third commands will delete Trash belonging to other users. The commands are:

Warning: Typographical error or misuse of the "rm -rf" command can result in data loss. Insertion of a space in the wrong place could result in the complete deletion of data on your hard disk, for example. You may wish to copy and paste the commands below into a text editor to verify spacing.

Important: There is no space between "/" and ".Trash" or ".Trashes" below.

sudo rm -rf ~/.Trash/
sudo rm -rf /.Trashes/
sudo rm -rf /Volumes//.Trashes/

Note: To end the sudo session, you should either execute the exit command, or log out of Mac OS X and then log back in.

Respectively, this permanently deletes all files in the current user's Trash, the startup volume Trash, and the Trash for other volumes (if any). These commands cannot delete locked files. You have to unlock them first.

Note: The sudo command can be used to temporarily obtain super user status and change permissions on files that otherwise could not be changed. However, it is only available if you are logged in with an administrator account, and it requires an administrator account user password for authentication.

I've been using FileZilla lately after FTP Voyager started to give me problems. FileZilla is okay, but it does not support WebDAV. I need WebDAV so I could access my Mac iDisk from my Windows PC but unfortunately not many FTP clients support the WebDAV protocol.

I finally found BitKinex which supports WebDAV quite nicely. It turns out they used to charge for BitKinex but now it is freeware.

Finally a client that allows me to connect to my Mac iDisk from Windows, without using Explorer. This is much faster!

I've been messing around with Tumblr tonight. I can't believe how interesting it is. It's like Twitter for Blogs. You follow other blogs in the same way you follow people on Twitter.

You can also post to your blog in a variety of ways. You can go to the Tumblr web site of course. You can also post via a Mac dashboard widget. You can email or IM a post to your blog through AIM. How about calling in and recording an audio post for our blog? You can do that too. I predict great things for Tumblr.

Moving your blog to Wordpress? Wordpress allows you to import your Blogger Blog, but not if you're hosting the blog on your own server. I searched all over the web for the answer and simply couldn't find it. I found a lot of people asking how to do this, but no definitive answer. Well, here's the answer:

Temporarily switch your Blogger Blog back to blogspot.com hosting and then import your Blog with Wordpress. It actually works.

There is one small catch that I ran into. When I switched my Blog back to SFTP hosting, it changed my legacy template just a bit. I couldn't get it back to the way it was. Blogger is apparently using a different code to get their navbar at the top of the blog, and that code messed me up a bit. I did get my Blog imported into Wordpress though.

Does Apple know there is a recession going on? Apparently they're not concerned about losing customers because according to reports, Apple is about to raise the price of premium tracks on iTunes to $1.29.

I've been using FTP Voyager for years, but recently it started to give me problems. My uploads were slow and the program kept crashing. I tried to download a new version, but uploading was disabled so I could not test it out.

After weeks of frusration I did a search online and found FileZilla. Not bad at all. I configured it to look just like FTP Voyager with the remote window on the top and local on the bottom and I'm good to go. There aren't as many features as FTP Voyager, but it's close enough. I'm sold on this free software!

I've been a frustrated fan of the Palm Treo since its inception. I've had every model of the Palm Treo at one time or another, in addition to various other Pocket PC phones, iPhone, BlackBerry, etc. I keep going back to the Treo because despite its faults, I like the power it has to do what I need to do. I also really like having a touchscreen device with a keyboard. With a little program called "PushEffect" I have push email just like a BlackBerry, but without depending on RIM's servers to stay up.

As much as I like my Treo I'm extremely frustrated by the bugs. I've heard of other people having to return their Treos because they "just died." I've never had that experience as I've always been able to bring mine back to life. With that said, I did have to hard reset mine a few times. That's why I always keep a backup of my data on my microSD card. Anyone with a Treo 800w or Treo Pro should have a microSD card with a backup of your data on it. Contacts are no problem as you can simply resync with Outlook, but all the programs that you've installed will be wiped if you have to hard reset.

Please Palm...make sure the Pre is a better device (fewer bugs) than the Treo. And for goodness sake, start making slightly larger screens. My Treo screen is soooo small. While other handset makers are doing with larger screen Palm seems to be stuck on the small screen. Get with it Palm! We want a top smartphone.