UPDATE: this technique didn’t work. I’m still trying to find something that does. One friend suggested hard-coding the address of all Adobe websites into your “hosts” file, and blocking them. This would prevent you from visiting Adobe’s sites – but would prevent the evil Adobe Updater trojan from downloading – […]
fixing your desktop
60 posts
… It removes one of the most valuable features of OS X for laptop owners: OS x lion WILL NOT recharge a plugged-in iPhone when the lid is closed (after 10 seconds of pretending to charge – just long enough to fool you – Apple cuts the power) At conferences, […]
Here’s ANOTHER overheating bug in Apple’s OS X. This time, it’s the BlueTooth simulator built-in to the iOS Simulator (used every day by iPhone and iPad developers). The iOS5 version of the simulator has this crazy BT demon (process “BTServer”) that will sometimes – for no apparent reason – take […]
UPDATE: So … it seems Suffusion has (buried deep inside the config) a way of displaying category pages with a higher-level workaround to the WP “missing feature”. Although so far I can’t find a way to set the settings on individual pages (which is what you generally need). So, I’ll […]
One of the features of Gmail that I’ve long relied upon is the: “Default: Reply to all, instead of Reply” In 95% of cases, this is correct – it’s only rarely that you want to actively remove everyone else from the conversation. …but this stopped working shortly after Google+ came […]
Today I finally discovered that the iPhone has StreetView. That means it’s only taken me THREE YEARS to find this secret feature that Google has worked very hard to make sure no-one ever uses. The best bit? The top two Google results for “iPhone Streetview” were both incorrect, and useless […]
Eclipse current version (3.7?) randomly chooses some of the fonts from the System Font settings – this strikes me as rather stupid: you are only “allowed” to customize 90% of the fonts. Since OS X (10.6.7) still can’t render fonts correctly, when Eclipse grabs the system fonts, they’re often “wrong”. […]
Following my own install-guide from Jan 2011 (because Google didn’t provide one at the time)… Google still doesn’t provide an install guide Eclipse is a *little* clearer on what to download – but only slightly Eclipse.app on Mac OS X is *still* broken ADT is still “hidden” by Google for […]
Typical. Just as I finally brave the source code to Master of Mana (neé Fall From Heaven; the most popular / succesful mod for Civilization 4), and fix a major bug that’s bothered me for ages … the main server at masterofmana.com goes offline :(. Anyway, if you’re playing the […]
Mozilla has “pulled a Microsoft” and put in place a font renderer that makes all text horrible on anything except low-quality monitors. On Windows, you have to “disable hardware acceleration” in the preferences menu (what? you get to choose “slow browser” or “readable fonts”? That sucks). On OS X … […]
Even with version 4, the epic 5-year-old bug that makes Firefox unusable on Mac with any page that uses fancy forms like TinyMCE (these days: an awful lot of them) is still unfixed: “We’re going to have to back out the core fix to this bug because of bug 620906.” […]
If that’s what you *think* just happened, then check this: Settings App ..Mail, Calendar, etc ….your Gmail account ……the “Notes” slider; is is set to “off”? If so, flip it to ON, find a working wifi / 3G signal, and your documents will miraculously re-appear. For most people, there is […]
…because Apple hates giving customer support, and buried this address deep in their website, in a tiny font where it’s almost impossible to find: contactus.uk@euro.apple.com …and they just screwed-up an order we’d made, but all their emails were sent from fake Apple email addresses (“You have replied to a confirmation-only […]
I use regexp a lot, very useful, but OS X has weak support for them – Apple’s products rarely support regexp for search/replace. In particular, the latest version of Xcode (Xcode 4) has no support, which is tragic. So … I wrote an app that makes it fast and easy […]
OS X still has some fragility (or bugs?) in kernel-related code, it would seem. I just had my laptop go to 150% CPU usage … with no apps running. “top” showed that the rogue process was the core kernel process (PID 0) – i.e. only way to stop it is […]
Short story: if you try to do *any* iPhone development with a 1st/2nd/3rd gen Pro or Air right now, you may screw-up your laptop – massive overheating. I did. My Air is now almost unusable – thanks, Apple! Apple is currently: Forcing all iOS developers to use Xcode 4, even […]
Sob. I just lost about a dozen incomplete/unsaved documents due to a bug in OS X. Seems that sometimes, for no particular reason, OS X just deletes all your autosave information. (and … there’s plenty of threads about this on Apple.com and elsewhere. No response from Apple so far. Sigh) […]
When you switch on your Mac… Click on the network icon (e.g. the wifi icon for most people) and click “Turn Airport off”. Then start Firefox. Click on the network icon and select “Turn Airport on”. You will find that Firefox starts up 10-100 times faster, with fewer crashes, and […]
Most professional artists don’t pay for their software (their employers do), and PSD files are the main interchange format for high-end graphics. But PSD isn’t always possible to open or edit. Adobe’s crappy copy-protection refuses to run on some of my computers, and CS is far too damn expensive for […]
UPDATE: updated August 2011, with more detailed / idiot-proof instructions – and a couple of shortcuts. NB: when you’ve done this install once, and checked the relevant bits into your Source Control, it becomes *very* fast/easy to re-install – it’s only long-winded the first time. I thought I’d blogged this […]