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Entries in Apple (128)

Saturday
Oct132012

MacBook Wireless Borked Again, Still, etc.

A while back I had regular issues with the wireless adapter on my MacBook after I had upgraded to OSX Mountain Lion, but after the removal of Little Snitch (I still ran the beta version) it seemed that times were a changing... Seemed that is.

This morning I was fiddling about with my photo website, and needed to see the results in several different browsers. One of them being Google Chrome.
Trying to launch the Chrome app, it crashed immediately. Reopening didn't help. So I tried to download a newer version, since I hadn't updated mine since the upgrade to Mountain Lion. The result; It still crashed. Even after removing all Chrome (and Google) references on the disk, it still crashed.

So, it became time to consult the book of knowledge, and see what the Internets had to say about my little ordeal.

Click to read more ...

Friday
Aug032012

Unable To Turn On Wireless In OS X Mountain Lion

Last night I was minding my own business on the couch, when the wireless connection on my MacBook (UniBody)  decided to call it a day. According to the symptoms (no bars visible in the WiFi icon in the menu bar, no visible wireless networks in the vicinity), the WiFi adapter was turned off. Turning the WiFi back on was not possible though.

Click to read more ...

Sunday
Jul292012

Reset 'Open With' Dialog in Finder

After the upgrade of several programs I found that these programs had multiple entries in the 'Open With' dialog in OS X Finder. The following command (executed in the Terminal app) rebuilds the LaunchService database, and removes the duplicate entries.

Note that the following command is 1 (one) line of code, that you need to copy & past in the terminal window.

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user

As far as I can tell, it works on OS X Mountain Lion and every earlier version (at least till 10.6).

Friday
Jun152012

Junos Pulse, Apple iOS, and Split-Tunneling

When you create (SSL)VPN access for you employees, you might enable split-tunneling to save corporate bandwidth. No split-tunneling means that all traffic is forwarded into the VPN tunnel. So if you browse the internet with an active VPN, the traffic goes through the VPN, and accesses the Internet through the corporate Internet connection. This isn't a big problem with a couple of employees, but with hundreds on the road or working from home, this might frustrate the employees in the building.

Click to read more ...

Monday
Jan232012

Courier IMAPd and Mail.app warnings

After installing an ISPConfig deployment, everything seemed to work properly, but every now-and-then I got this weird error that there was something wrong with the mail server configuration. The Apple Mail.app showed a exclamation mark with the following message:

The server returned the error: The attempt to read data from the server server.domain.ext failed.

Some research showed that the Apple mail clients tend to open several connections for IMAP, and the default setting of the Courier IMAPd server is to allow (only) 4 connections from the same IP address.

Modifying the Courier config file (/usr/lib/courier-imap/etc/imapd) and allowing e.g. 20 connections from 1 IP address solved this problem.

<ORIGINAL CONFIG>
##NAME: MAXPERIP:0
#
#  Maximum number of connections to accept from the same IP address

MAXPERIP=4

<MODIFIED CONFIG>
##NAME: MAXPERIP:0
#
#  Maximum number of connections to accept from the same IP address

MAXPERIP=20

 If your company / household holds several imap mail clients you may need to increase the counter even more (65536 is the maximum amount of connections for ANY IP address).

If you have SSL enabled on the Courier IMAPd server you also need to add the MAXPERIP variable to the imap-ssl config file (/usr/lib/courier-imap/etc/imapd-ssl).

Finally, you need to restart the Courier IMAPd services (/etc/init.d/courier-imap restart)

Friday
Dec162011

Screen Capture Can't Be Saved

After upgrading my iMac to OS X Lion (10.7) everything works (or at least seems to work), until I tried to do a screen capture with the built-in tools.

Things that worked:

  • Capturing the entire desktop to file
  • Capturing a selection (using the cross-hair) to file
  • Capturing the entire desktop to the clipboard
  • Capturing a selection (using the cross-hair) to the clipboard

Things that didn't work:

  • Capturing entire windows to file or the clipboard (SHIFT-COMMAND-4 + SPACE / SHIFT-COMMAND-3 + SPACE)

All I got was a weird notification box with the message:

Screen capture can't be saved

The console application also showed an error message:

12/16/11 1:40:08.762  com.apple.SystemUIServer.agent: screencapture could not capture window 3c

Lurking around the Interwebs, I found this seem to occur after an upgrade of the OS, but real solutions are hard to come by.

This is what I did to solve my problem:

  • Remove the screencapture PLIST (preferences) file (~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.screencapture.plist)
  • Copy a com.apple.screencapture.plist file from a working OS X Lion environment and place it in the correct location on the troubled OS X installation.

That seemed to result in two com.apple.screencapture.plist files (one with an additional extension of .locked). I removed the .locked file, rebooted the iMac, and screen capture worked again.

I must mention that I didn't see the .locked file initially. Could be that it existed before. In which case I probably did more than was required to get things fixed....

Sunday
Oct092011

Unofficial iOS5 upgrade

After reading the iOS5 upgrade on the Lifehacker website, I decided to upgrade my iPad2 to iOS5. It's unofficial, because iOS5 hasn't been released yet. The version mentioned on the Lifehacker websites is considered to be the Gold-Master version. Meaning that it's the final version, waiting to be released somewhere this month.

First I installed the iTunes beta version as mentioned and downloaded the appropriate iOS versions for my iPad and iPhone. The upgrade went extremely well. Just remember to backup your device before the 'upgrade' proceding.
After the iPad upgrade, I decided to upgrade my iPhone3gs. This went as smooth as the iPad upgrade.

The biggest new feature for me so far is the possibility to use custom text/notification tones. The iPhone3gs also feels more responsive.

There was one annoyance with the initial configuration of the iPad;
My Apple ID was a basic username, and not an e-mail address. This is NOT accepted by the initial iOS5 configuration wizard. Your Apple account NEEDS TO BE an e-mail address. It took me a while to set that up properly in my online account settings.

Thursday
Oct062011

R.I.P Steve Jobs

He died way too early @ the age of 56. A terrible loss for his family, friends, and the industry.

Steve Jobs (1956 - 2011)

Wednesday
Jul202011

Burn OS X Lion Installation Package to DVD

The moment you download OS X Lion, you'd better have a copy of OS X Snow Leopard, because by default the new Apple OS can only be installed on a previous installed Operating System (upgrade). So if you need to reinstall your Mac in the future, you need to install OS X Snow Leopard first, and then upgrade to OS X Lion. Also, there's no way of ordering an OS X Lion copy on DVD..... Well, that sucks.

Fortunately, there's a way of creating the installation DVD by extracting the actual disk image from the downloaded OS X Lion installation package.

Click to read more ...

Wednesday
Jun292011

Hostname and (Apple) Mail Server Dependencies

My Mac Mini with OSX Server had this thing that the hostname (as displayed in the Terminal app) would change after a reboot. Something that annoyed me tremendously. Thankfully there are several (Terminal) commands to change the hostname (back) to its 'original name'.

Since I wanted to change my hostname PERMANENTLY, I used the following command:

sudo scutil –set HostName new_hostname

This worked perfectly. Or so I thought.

Click to read more ...