Apple

Missing Garage Band Loops in Leopard

Posted by Rick on in Apple, Technology How To's 4 Comments

Missing Garage Band Loops in Leopard

In GarageBand 4 (part of iLife 09) it’s easy to have issues with the sound loops. There are after all over two gigabytes of them. On top of that when first installing iLife you may want to opt out of installing all them to save space. To make things confusing, when Garage Band is uninstalled some of the more popular loops are still present.

Usually just clicking on a missing loop will trigger GarageBand to attempt to install them from the iLife DVD, or better yet via Software Update. But this does not always work. In addition, manually reinstalling iLife does not fix either.

To get this auto-install to work again open up the loop library in GarageBand. (It’s the eye icon) In finder go to /Library/Application Support/Garageband/ drag the Sound Loops folder into the loop library portion of Garageband. This will recreate the index files of all the loops. In some cases you may need to delete the Index out of /Library/Application Support/Garageband/ first.

After the index is recreated, click on one of the missing loops again. Tell GarageBand to reinstall. Once it does the full range of loops will be back. Keep in mind that the download is 1.1GB in size, so installing off the iLife DVD may be faster.

How To: Change Default Mail Client on OSX

Posted by Rick on in Apple, Leopard, OSX, Technology How To's 0 Comment

How To: Change Default Mail Client on OSX 

When I moved away from Entourage to Thunderbird I had a huge issue with mailto: html links still attempting to open Entourage to send emails. OS X itself simply does not provide a simple way to change this default behavior.

So, the trick is to open OS X’s Mail Client and use that. Simply create a dummy account, it doesn’t matter what info you put in as you won’t be using it. Once Mail is opened, go to Preferences then click on the General Tab. There will be a “Default Mail Reader” drop down menu. Choose your default client (even Firefox or Safari if you have something like Zimbra or another web mail) and exit the client.

The other, and possibly better trick if you’re going to make this change across multiple computers such as an entire Enterprise setup is to edit one of the plist files.

In ~/Library/Preferences/ look for com.apple.LaunchServices.plist

Add

    LSHandlerRoleAll
    com.mail.client
    LSHandlerURLScheme
    mailto

Just under
LSHandlers


Options for mail client would be com.mozilla.firefox or com.microsoft.entourage or the preferences name of any other mail client. These can easily be found in the same folder. Once this is done, mailto: links will then open in your preferential mail client!

Troubleshooting: Facebook constantly logs out in Safari

Posted by Rick on in Apple, Technology How To's, troubleshooting 2 Comments

**Update** Facebook made updates that fixes this problem.

Troubleshooting: Facebook constantly logs out in Safari

A recent problem has cropped up with the latest version of Safari, 3.2.1 and Leopard 10.5.6. When using Facebook (and possibly other websites such as Last.fm, Gmail, and Twitter, that require authentication to login,) users are finding that they constantly have to re-login again. Of course this gets annoying, and makes accessing those sites nearly impossible. This problem is bad enough that it could even be affecting Firefox users too.

The culprit maybe partially on Facebook’s side as they attempt to combat the recent virus threats and the Leopard/Safari upgrade may be coincidence. Another guess is that Apple changed how multiple programs handle cookies and this is causing issues.

In addition users of iPhones and Adium in conjunction with Facebook seem to have a high chance of having an issue. Using Facebook Chat in Adium and on the iPhone is one of the culprits.

While not a guarantee, here are some possible fixes.

iPhone Users: (may have to be jailbroken to work, I do not have an iPhone to confirm)
1.) Download a terminal program for the iPhone
2.) chown -R mobile /var/mobile/
3.) Power Cycle the iPhone

It seems that the /var/mobile directory is owned by the root user instead of mobile and is causing some of these problems problems.

Adium Users:

  • Disconnect from Facebook or Google Chat before logging in to Facebook or GMail

    • Safari: One or all of these options may be needed to fix

  • Disable Private Browsing (Under Safari Menu, the Private Browsing)
  • Empty Safari Cache (Safari Menu, Empty Cache)
  • Clear Cookies (Safari Menu, Preferences, Security, Show Cookies, Remove All)
  • Reset Safari (Safari Menu, Reset Safari)
  • Reinstall Safari (Download from here)
  • Remove Autofill (Safari Menu, Preferences, Autofill, User Names and Passwords, Edit, remove the site that is having issues)
  • Remove Keychain Entry (Applications/Utilities/Keychain Access. Remove affected site, then go to Menu, Keychain First-Aid, then Repair.)
  • Delete cookie.plist file (/User Home Directory/Library/Cookies/Cookie.plist)

    • Advanced Safari Tip: Enable Developer menu using the command line: defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1 or download Safari Enhancer and clear cookies from this menu.

    Dashboard:

  • Disable any Web Clippings

    • If any of these do work, or you have another solution (or a question about the above,) let me know in the comments and I’ll see what I can do.

    How To: Disable ._ Files and .DS_Store on Network Shares

    Posted by Rick on in Apple, Technology How To's 3 Comments

    How To: Disable ._ Files and .DS_Store on Network Shares

    In heterogeneous networks of Macs and Window users, few things tick off Windows users then the “droppings” Macs leave behind in the form of files with . or ._ in front of them. These files are known as resource forks on the Mac side and store all kinds of really nifty information that makes OS X interact with files quicker and more efficiently. Among their uses they store metadata about files such as keywords, file size, and preview information.

    None the less for various reason Windows (and to a lesser extent, Linux) is not able to always ignore these files and automatically sorts them to the top of the file view list. These files tend to be confusing if one is not aware of what they are. Or worse yet cause problems in directories with thousands of files present.

    If on a small network with only a few Macs there is a program that takes care of this automatically. For $13 BlueHarvest works just perfectly.

    Of course there is a simple trick to disable .DS_Store files. In Terminal run the command:

    defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true

    If the network is Leopard only, then editing nsmb.conf is a good trick too. In /etc/nsmb.conf look for the following line: streams=no and change to streams=yes .

    If the file does not exist, then it can be created via TextEdit or VI.

    These files are only viewable under very certain circumstances but they can cause a lot of coworker friction, and worse yet even cause management to question the usability of OS X in the work place. These simple tricks will go a long ways to resolving those issues and making work much more friendly.

    How To: Fix Safari 3.2 Crashing

    Posted by Rick on in Apple, Leopard, Technology How To's 0 Comment

    I’m still a huge fan of Apple’s Safari Browser. I feel it’s faster (and much less of a memory hog) then Firefox.

    But, the 3.2 Updated introduced a strange bug. Whenever I use tabbed browsing, it started crashing a lot. Clearing Cache and deleting preferences have not fixed at all. Even Onyx didn’t seem to help.

    I was able to find a nice utility called AppleJack that really helped a lot. It can be downloaded from this VersionTracker Link: http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/19596

    Once AppleJack is installed reboot the computer. While it’s restarting hold down the ‘s’ key to go into single user mode. type (as an admin user): applejack auto restart

    The computer will do a bunch of stuff cleaning up files, checking disks, etc, then reboot automatically. After this, Safari should all be good to go.

    I have also heard that reinstalling Safari totally with the stand along installer off of Apple’s website fixes this issue.