On my Mac Pro I have two internal hard drives I rarely use. Some times they “sleep” and while doing so, every file opening dialog, search in Spotlight or search in Dictionary might wake them up and that takes some time. I could, of course, disable sleeping in power settings, but then the drives would be unreasonably wasting power all the time, so I decided to write an AppleScript to mount or unmount a drive depending on it’s state.
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Archive for the “Technical” category
AppleScript to mount/unmount a drive
Friday, March 5th, 2010Mouse cursor skipping (jumping) bug on Mac OS X
Thursday, February 25th, 2010Permission error of AppleScript in iTunes
Sunday, January 31st, 2010I was getting a permission error (code -54) when trying to set an id3 tag of a track using AppleScript. The solution was to add a delay between each operation: delay 1
Note that the track will remain “locked” until you restart iTunes.
Скрипт для замены основного шрифта сайта
Friday, January 22nd, 2010Я написал небольшой скрипт для файрфоксовского плагина GreaseMonkey, заменяющий основной шрифт сайта на Helvetica Neue. Это имеет смысл в тех случаях, когда дизайнер сайта использовал шрифт, отсутствующий на вашей Mac OS X, а предлагаемая им же замена выглядит намного хуже оригинала.
Inability to upload files using any browser on Windows
Sunday, January 17th, 2010One my friend who runs Windows XP encountered a strange problem: she couldn’t upload any large (more than ≈100 KB) files using upload forms on websites under any browser. We tried Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome with no result, although Flash uploaders were still working. The solution was to change the MTU value in the registry.
Slow startup and sleep problems on MacBook Pro 2,2
Sunday, January 17th, 2010Once I noticed that it has been taking up to 5–7 minutes for my MacBook Pro 2,2 to boot (the longest phase of the startup process was the blue screen which usually appears right before the desktop) and additionally, sleep (hibernate) mode stopped working. Both problems appeared simultaneously, so right from the start it was clear that they’re related.
Create an iPhone ringtone on Mac
Saturday, December 26th, 2009This “how to” will guide you through the process of making an iPhone ringtone from a mp3 file using free tools on Mac OS X. I’m pretty sure most of those steps can as well be reproduced on Windows, since both applications we’re going to use — Audacity and iTunes — exist for both systems.
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“Building boot caches” error when changing startup disk
Friday, December 11th, 2009Once I tried to change the default startup disk on my Mac running Snow Leopard and the following error appeared: “you can’t change the startup disk to the selected disk. Building boot caches on boot helper partition failed”.
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“Failed to expand the files” error
Thursday, December 10th, 2009Getting “failed to expand the files” while installing Canon camera software, such as ZoomBrowser Ex? Just turn off your antivirus.
BBEdit preview shows raw PHP code
Thursday, December 10th, 2009If your BBEdit preview shows raw PHP code, go to “Preferences” and configure a “HTML web-site” with “Use local preview server” ticked.