Macintosh

I agree with Glenn Wolsey on this. I see a lot of complaints about the ads introduced in Twitterrific 3.0, which don’t bother me at all. Pownce’s ads are a lot more annoying, and they seem to appear more often than once an hour.

Twitterrific 2.1 had some very annoying update glitches in Leopard. It bothered me enough that I had switched to Twitterpod, which seems to crash pretty often. With 3.0 I’m happy to be able to use Twitterrific once again with Leopard.

The folks at IconFactory explain why they did it:

Twitterrific has gone from a fun side project to a full-fledged application that is enjoyed by tens of thousands of users every day. This growing user base reports bugs, requests new feature sets and regularly sends support questions. All of these things take time, and ultimately money, to make a reality.
Adding inline advertising via The Deck allows us to keep the app “freeâ€? without crippling any of its features. Hope you can understand our point of view. Thanks for listening.

Of course if you don’t want to see the ads, you can pay $15 to register and eliminate them.

Many users are reporting problems with wireless networking in Leopard. I’ve seen a slightly different symptom on my MacBook Pro. Instead of progressively slowing down, I find that my Airport connection suddenly dies. A few times I’ve seen an alert saying “the network appears to have been compromised and will be disabled”. Other times it would simply stop responding without any message.

Although I was able to get Time Machine to recognize my external drive when connected to the Airport Extreme base station, it was nearly useless. That base station would randomly hang or I would lose the connection. I finally ended up connecting that drive to my iMac and sharing it.

For the last day or so, I was completely unable to connect to my Linksys WRT54G’s 802.11g network. Even removing the entries for that network from my keychain didn’t fix it. Renaming the network finally fixed that problem.

As you’ve probably heard, Leopard’s Time Machine won’t work with a disk connected to an Airport Extreme base station. However, there’s a very simple work around.

Connect the drive directly to your Mac and tell Time Machine to use that drive. Disconnect the drive and connect it to your Airport Extreme Base Station. Connect to the base station and mount the drive. Time Machine will now recognize the drive and start backing up to it.

However, I find that AirDisk in general is very flaky. Even in normal use, I find that it often drops the connection at random times.

The only major problem I had with Leopard is that it won’t see my Brother HL-1440 laser printer, which is connected to my Linux box and shared via CUPS (which I had reported as a bug).

It turns out that Leopard only uses Bonjour to discover shared printers by default. However, CUPS browsing can be easily enabled.

Edit /etc/cups/cupsd.conf and look for the following lines:

# Show shared printers on the local network.
Browsing On
BrowseOrder allow,deny
BrowseAllow all

Add the following line after it:

BrowseProtocols all

To activate the change, restart cupsd (sudo killall -HUP cupsd). You should now see any shared CUPS printers and be able to add them.

I’m now running the final version of Leopard on my MacBook Pro. I had been running various developer builds on my iMac since WWDC, but I never installed it on my MacBook Pro since this is my main personal and work system.

After doing a full backup to an external drive and verifying that I could boot from it, I did an upgrade install rather than archive or clean install. It took about an hour, although at one point it said the install would take 5 hours. The upgrade went smoothly and everything worked without any problems.

Although MacFixit tries to frighten people about OS upgrades, and in particular using anything other than archive or clean installs, in most cases it’s perfectly safe.

Leopard feels a bit faster than Tiger on my MacBook Pro and almost all of my applications work with no problems. However I really miss SAFT’s safari enhancements and Chax’s iChat enhancements, since neither of them work in Leopard. Input Managers (including SIMBL and most Safari enhancers) are no longer supported in Leopard.

The dock appearance in Leopard never bothered me, even though I put my dock on the right side of the screen. The new plain dock does look nicer, though. I never did like the translucent menu bar, but it doesn’t look bad at all if the top part of the desktop picture is a solid color. I use Hamad Darwish’s Vista Wallpapers, which work nicely with the translucent menu bar.

I rarely bother with Text To Speech, but the new high quality voice Alex sounds a lot better than any computer voice I’ve ever heard.

The picture screen saver has a great new mosaic style. It assembles a mosaic of each selected picture from your iPhoto library.

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I’ve noticed that my new MacBook Pro often misses the first letter I type. Until now I thought it was just me since the keyboard does feel a bit stiff and I didn’t really think too much of it. Now I see it mentioned in MacFixit. It turns out to be a known issue that was acknowledged by Apple.

Since Apple’s recent success, every whiner and troll has taken aim at them. Greenpeace, in particular, has been taking every opportunity to attack Apple, even though other companies have much worse environmental records.

Similarly, every phone company sells all of their phones locked, yet Apple is the only company that’s being criticized and even sued for it. Before these trolls start attacking Apple, they should look at other companies practices.

I’ve tried many solutions to do a daily sync backup of my MacBook Pro to my Terastation, but I was never really happy with any of them. Among the software I’ve tried were Chronosync (which is probably the best of the bunch), Synk Pro, and Deja Vu.

Samba on the Terastation can be painfully slow – it can take several hours to back up my home directory. I’ve hacked my Terastation to support SSH, NFS, and a few other features (information is available at terastation.org). NFS is a lot faster than Samba, but the version I have on the Terastation has lots of problems.

I found that by far the fastest way to back up is using an rsync server. It isn’t too difficult to set up an rsync server on a Terastation or another Mac.

1. Make sure /etc/services contains the following lines:

rsync           873/tcp                         # rsync
rsync           873/udp                         # rsync

2. Add the following line to /etc/inetd.conf, if it isn’t already present:

rsync   stream  tcp     nowait  root    /usr/bin/rsync  rsync --daemon

After you add that line, send a hangup signal to inetd (killall -HUP inetd).

3. Finally, you’ll need to create /etc/rsyncd.conf which should specify which directories should be available to rsync:

#you should probably use your own user & group IDs
uid = nobody
gid = nogroup
use chroot = yes
pid file = /etc/rsyncd.pid

#this is the name you will use in your rsync command
[share]
#this is the actual directory
  path = /mnt/array1/share
  read only = no

To use it, specify the destination as an rsync URL on your rsync command, for example:

rsync -avzC --delete --exclude="._*" Music Documents Sources Work Pictures rsync://tank.local/share/Backup/mike/


This will tell it to back up your Music, Documents, Sources, Work, and Pictures folders from your home directory to /mnt/array1/share/Backup/mike on the rsync server (using the full path specified in the rsyncd.conf file).

For convenience, you can create a shell script with any rsync backup commands and schedule it to run using cron. Cronnix is the easiest way to set up your backup cron job.