Dylan Verheul is the CEO of a small company focused on IT solutions for biodiversity, ecology and nature conservation. Our expertise has also attracted other clients, such as law enforcement and government agencies.
This site is my personal blog, opinions posted here are mine and do not represent the view of my company, our clients or any other organization I am affiliated with.
You can contact me at dylan.verheul@gmail.com or through Twitter (@dyve).
Here's the command, works on both Leopard and Snow Leopard:
/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user /(It's one long command, not multiple separate lines)
If you have an older Canon scanner attached to your Mac, you're lucky, because Canon is very good at keeping older hardware drivers up to date. The usual update procedure is that you delete the previous driver using their DelDrv application, and then install a new driver.
Unfortunately, DelDrv requires Rosetta to run, and some Snow Leopard users are trying to keep Rosetta off their machines. I'm one, and until now, I've been successful.
After updating my Canon drivers, I routinely encountered an error message stating
/System/Library/Extensions/CNQL1208_ClassicNotSeize.kext could not be loadedA little research showed that this was part of the old Canon driver that should have been deleted by the DelDrv application which I did not run. I manually removed the file (you can either do this through Finder or using the command line). My scanner has been working fine afterwards, and there were no other ill effects that I noticed. I just thought I'd share this info for anyone else that was bothered by the error. It's fine to delete /System/Library/Extensions/CNQL1208_ClassicNotSeize.kext.
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Disclaimer: Try this at your own risk. This should be a temporary fix until Vodafone publishes its own K3760 Snow Leopard compatible software.
The Vodafone K3760 USB modem (black USB stick) is currently not supported on Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6). However, you can get it to work by combining the latest Vodafone Mobile Broadband software (VMB, formerly VMC) with the OEM driver (OEM = Original Equipment Manufacturer).
This is a step by step guide. You may or may not get some kext errors every now and then during install, just ignore them.
That's it! Run the VMB software and make sure it all works. Note that this newest VMB doesn't require you to set up a modem and manually dial up with the K3760, everything is done for you.
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Canon makes good on its promise to deliver Snow Leopard compatible drivers for its older hardware. I just installed the newest drivers for my aging Canon Canoscan Lide 35 flatbed scanner. Even though I got some kind of warning during installation, and I didn't delete the previous driver (the DelDrv driver uninstaller requires Rosetta, and I'm trying to keep that of my system), it's all working just fine. Including the hardware buttons on the scanner.
Well done Canon!
To download, visit http://www.usa.canon.com/consumer/controller?act=ModelInfoAct&tabact=DownloadDetailTabAct&fcategoryid=351&modelid=10241 and manually select Mac OS X as your operating system (if you don't do this, the Snow Leopard drivers won't show up, probably a small glitch in the Canon site).
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I don't burn DVD's often, but it's one of those things that I think should just work. It's easy on a Mac. Select files, right click, "Burn X items to disk".
Alas, I was greeted by the dreaded message "Failure to calibare laser power ..." (the Dutch version of it). Some frustration and Google research later, it seemed that this error message meant nothing other than "Your DVD lens is dirty".
A great solution is hidden on this page: http://muzso.hu/2008/08/17/how-to-clean-the-lens-of-a-slot-loading-optical-drive-a-macbook-pros-superdrive
To mae it a little easier to find, I'll reproduce it here:
After this, my MacBook Pro (late 2007) was burning DVD's again, without any errors.
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To get the most out of my music collection, I am fanatic about rating music. The star ratings of the songs, combined with a few playlists power my iPhone syncing and my "personal radio stations". One of the great tools to make rating your songs a breeze is a free little gem of an app called I Love Stars. This application is so tiny, it lives in a blog post!
What it does is nothing, until you play a song in iTunes. Then it shows itself as an editable star rating in your menu bar, making it easy to rate the currently playing song. I Love Stars can even alert you to unrated songs.
Please note that if you are running Snow Leopard and/or iTunes 9, you need to upgrade to the latest version of I Love Stars. Earlier versions have a small problem with the new "sudden termination" feature of Snow Leopard, causing iTunes to restart instantly after you quit it.
Kudos to Andy Kim (@andypotion) for making this application available to us all!
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Mac OS X's .plist files come in 2 formats: binary (requires a special editor) and XML (any text editor will do). OS X also comes with a command line utility that will convert a .plist file from binary to xml or from xml to vinary. That utility is called plutil.
To convert a file to XML format, type:
plutil -convert xml1 some_file.plist
To convert a file to binary format, type:
plutil -convert xml1 some_file.plist
For more information about plutil, type:
man plutil
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Last Friday I upgraded my MacBook to Snow Leopard. Very easy, noticeable speed improvement, everything worked except for 2 pieces of hardware (both driver issues). My ancient Canon Lide 35 scanner sort of works, but the hardware buttons on the scanner aren't responding. My Vodafone K3760 3G modem (Vodafone's newest modem) causes kernel panics.
Of course it would have been ideal if all companies were properly prepared, but it's not an ideal world. However, note the difference in Canon's and Vodafone's response to the Snow Leopard issues:
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Because JungleDisk refused to play nice with my mobile internetconnection (causing my system to bog down), I started looking for an alternative offsite backup solution. I ended up using CrashPlan. My MacBook now backs up to a home server at my sister's house. CrashPlan has been running on my laptop for over 2 months now, and it's been a smooth ride. No interference when on low bandwidth connecion, and a small footprint altogether. From my family members I hear that CrashPlan works just fine on Windows XP and Vista too.
Highly recommended, if you're not backing up to an offsite location yet (think of all those documents and pictures), be sure to have a look at CrashPlan. If you don't have a remote server to back up to, or if you'd rather store your backup at a data center, CrashPlan offers paid plans for offsite backups to their servers.
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