Latest Posts in Mac 911

Perplexed by permissions

Reader Paul Moortgat’s Mac appears to be unhappy with a new hard drive. He writes:

I replaced the 500GB internal with a 1TB drive in my Mac Pro. I used SuperDuper to copy the disk. Now each time I create a file or a folder on the Desktop and place it on the hard drive icon or trash an item, I’m asked to enter my password. I reset the PRAM and repaired permissions to no avail. How can I get rid of that authentication dialog box?

This is indeed a permissions issue, but it can’t be treated with Disk Utility. And the reason it can’t is because Disk Utility’s Repair Permissions feature repairs permissions only for files installed by OS X, Software Update, or an Apple software installer. It won’t touch your documents, the stuff in your Home folder, or third-party applications.

That said, something definitely got mucked up when you copied your files from your old drive to the new one. What I suggest you do is select one of these files, press Command-I, and in the Sharing & Permissions area of the resulting window, see who “owns” the file. If it’s not you but some other entity, there’s your problem. If you change the permissions so that you own the file, you won’t see the warning.

The broader way to deal with this is locate the folders that contain your files—Documents, for example—do a Get Info on those folders, change permissions so that you’re the owner, and then choose Apply to Enclosed Items from the Tools menu at the bottom of the window. That should change the permissions of all the items in the folder to match those you just set.

Dealing with incompatible extensions

Reader Marc Manassian is confused by a warning he sees when booting his Mac. He writes:

An error message shows every time I start my MacBook Pro—“System Extension Cannot Be Used: the system extension /System/Library/Extensions/ CDSDAudioCaptureSupport.kext was installed improperly and cannot be used. Please try reinstalling it, or contact the product’s vendor for an update.”

The Big Picture answer is that you’ll see these kinds of errors when an incompatible system extension is installed on your Mac. These errors are commonly seen when you first update to Snow Leopard after migrating from an older version of the Mac OS. When you boot your Mac, Snow Leopard checks its naughty-or-nice list, finds those incompatible extensions, refuses to load them, and then tells you so.

The message details exactly what you need to do if you don’t want to see these warnings—update the applications from whence these bits of incompatible business sprang. Updates that are compatible with Snow Leopard will replace the extension with one that works.

If no updated version exists, you can try reinstalling the application and see what happens. It’s possible that during the OS upgrade something went awry so that an extension that should be kosher isn’t (permission issues, for example). If that doesn’t work, contact the application’s developer and ask when an update might be available.

At this point, feel free to rummage around in the Extensions folder inside the Library folder inside the System folder at the root level of your Mac’s startup drive and chuck out the offending files. Programs that depend on these extensions won’t function properly (not that they likely did anyway), but at least you won’t see a warning whenever you start your Mac.

In your very specific case, the CDSDAudioCaptureSupport.kext file comes with Roxio’s CD Spin Doctor—the audio capture utility bundled with Toast Titanium. When Snow Leopard shipped, CD Spin Doctor was not compatible with Apple’s latest cat. It now is. You can download the update from Roxio’s Update Your Software page.

Bugs & Fixes: iTunes 9.0.3. and the 'remember password' bug

On Monday, Apple released iTunes 9.0.3. According to the release notes, the update’s numero uno bug fix is “iTunes no longer ignores your ‘Remember password for purchases’ setting.” In other words, if you enable this iTunes Store option, you will no longer have to continue to re-enter your password each time you make a purchase. Actually, if you are logged in to your account, the dialog is now skipped altogether. Prior to 9.0.3, enabling this option in iTunes 9 had absolutely no effect.

Until iTunes 9.0.3, ‘Remember password...’ kept forgetting.

Thank you, Apple. This has undoubtedly been the most irritating glitch in iTunes 9.

My only question to Apple is: Why did you need to keep your repair work a secret until now? It’s not like this was some security bug, where there is a danger in letting people know of the leak before it gets plugged. Nor did it involve some secret new product that you wanted to keep under wraps until you were ready to go public. So…why not simply state, sometime soon after iTunes 9 was released, that you were aware of the problem and intended to fix it?

There’s no shame in doing this. Other companies do it all the time. You even (sort of) do it yourself at times, when you issue a support document that describes a symptom without a final cure, and end the article with “This document will be updated as more information becomes available.” So couldn’t you have offered at least this much help for this particular bug?

I only ask because, in the absence of such guidance from Apple, I spent several hours, over the course of several days, trying to figure out and fix whatever was going on. Since the feature worked fine in iTunes 8.x, and since Apple made no mention of the bug, I initially assumed the problem was on my end. There must be some new option I had failed to set correctly. At the very least, there must be some easy fix (like deleting an iTunes .plist file) that would get things working again. But nothing worked. I searched the Web and found numerous reports of the problem (including, of course, on Apple’s Discussions Boards). But no one had a sure solution. Eventually, frustrated, I gave up.

I expect that thousands of other iTunes users went through the same experience.

Apple could have saved us from this wasted time by acknowledging the bug. No such luck. I could find no support document or Board posting or any other Apple statement on this matter—until the release of iTunes 9.0.3 and the announcement that the bug had been fixed.

I’d like to believe that Apple will be a bit more considerate the next time a similar situation arises. But I’m not counting on it.

Troubleshooting a missing Apple TV

Reader Mark LeSage finds his Apple TV missing in action. He writes:

My Apple TV doesn’t show up under the Devices heading in iTunes’ sidebar. Any suggestions?

I can tell you for certain that growling at it doesn’t work (and yes, I’ve tried). Here’s the Apple TV fixit list:

1. Make sure that you’re using the latest versions of the Apple TV and iTunes software.

2. Is the Apple TV able to talk to the world? Ask it to play a trailer or Internet radio station to ensure that it’s communicating over the network. Likewise, make sure your Mac can also connect to the outside and other devices on your network.

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Bugs & Fixes: Avoiding phishing scams

Want to avoid becoming the victim of a phishing scam? It’s usually easy, because most scammers are too inept or too lazy to do a decent job of the deception. Case in point: I received an e-mail this week, purportedly from Adobe, announcing “a new version of PDF Reader/Writer.” (Even though it was Windows-only software, the general advice regarding phishing applies to Mac users as well.)

It took me all of about two seconds to determine that this was almost certainly a phishing expedition.

First of all, Adobe’s product is not called “PDF Reader/Writer,” it’s called “Adobe Reader” or “Adobe Acrobat.” Actually, the e-mail itself could not be entirely consistent about the name, also listing it as “Adobe PDF Reader- Writer.”

Second, the e-mail message was poorly formatted, including having adjacent duplicate redundant links. Adobe would never send out anything this messy.

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Capturing iTunes Videos

Like all educators these days, reader Jennifer Chestnut is looking for ways to cut costs in the classroom. She writes:

Is there a way to burn videos you purchase from the iTunes Store to a DVD? I’m a teacher and purchasing a single episode to watch in class on iTunes is much cheaper than purchasing entire seasons on DVD thru the Discovery Channel store ($2 instead of $50).

Regrettably, no. You can burn iTunes’ video content to DVDs, but only as data, not in a playable form. One option is to play the episode on your Mac and use an application such as Snow Leopard’s QuickTime, Shinywhitebox’s $30 iShowU HD, or Ambrosia Software’s $69 Snapz Pro X to capture it as a QuickTime movie that you can then burn to a DVD.

Do this, however, and you’ll break any number of license agreements. And, in the case of QuickTime, you won’t be thrilled with the quality of the resulting capture because QuickTime doesn’t capture video at full frame rates (meaning that the resulting video will be choppy).

A more ethical way around the issue is to play the content on a computer in the classroom—one hopefully connected to a large monitor or projector—or download it to an iPod and then connect that iPod to a monitor or projector using one of Apple’s $49 video cables. Again, you may be breaking an agreement by playing this content publicly, but schools are often allowed access to this kind of content without bringing the law down upon them. Check with your principal or appropriate overlord to see if this is something they're comfortable with.

Hide Preview's transparent layers

Reader Daniel sees both more and less from the PDF documents displayed in Preview than he cares to. He writes:

When I open a PDF with Preview that was created with the “Save to PDF” option in the print dialogue of any application, the background is transparent—it shows up as a dark and light gray checkerboard behind the text. This makes the text impossible to read. It’s the same behavior you’d expect to see in a transparent image file in Preview or Photoshop. I assume there is a setting somewhere to disable transparency for PDF files (but not images) in Preview, but I do not know where to find it. How can I fix this?

You’re correct, this checkerboard pattern indicates that Preview is displaying a transparent layer. To make it go away, simply uncheck the Show Document Background command in the View menu. You should now see the document as you’d like, rather than with the distracting pattern.

Bugs & Fixes: Flash Player and iSight

Open a Web page designed to work with Adobe’s Flash Player and you can get an iSight camera (the ones built into every recent MacBook, iMac and Cinema Display) to function within Safari or any other Flash-compatible Web browser. Although this capability has been around for quite some time, I only first tried it last week. My initial experience was disappointing. I could not get it to work. Period. It would not work in Safari or FireFox. It would not work on my MacBook Pro or my Mac Pro. It would not work on a train or in a plane, said Sam I Am.

Seeking help, I went to Adobe’s Support site. It told me to make sure I was running the latest version of the Flash Player plug-in. I was; I had version 10.0.42.34 of Flash Player.plugin installed in /Library/Internet Plug-Ins. I was further instructed to confirm that no other application that accesses the camera (such as iChat) was currently open. Check. Beyond that, Adobe had nothing useful to offer. (If the ultimate solution is on its site somewhere, it is well hidden!)

Using Google, I widened my search. Among the results, there was a general consensus that I needed to change the preference setting for the type of camera Flash expected to find. Several different ways of doing this were suggested; none of the ways I initially tried worked. Apparently, a method that may have worked a few years ago, when a Web site posted its advice, no longer applied to the current software.

Finding the right advice for the latest Flash Player took a bit of time. Eventually, I did find a couple of sites that pointed me in the right direction. Putting it all together, here is what you need to do to get an iSight camera to work in a Web browser:

1. Go to any Web page that uses Flash to work with a webcam. As a test, I chose the webcam page from fonomo.com, a site that offers free video conferencing.
2. 
   After the page loads, an Adobe Flash Player Settings dialog (the top image) pops up.
3. 
   If you now click to Allow, the dialog will vanish but the camera will not activate and no image will appear. That’s where I had been getting stuck. The trick is to Control-click (right-click) on Allow. This brings up a contextual menu; select the Settings item and the dialog shifts to display the middle screenshot.
4. 
   From here, click on the webcam icon button (the one with the cursor over it in the middle image). This brings up yet another screen — featuring a drop-down menu with three choices of camera types. Change the selection from the DV Video default to USB Video Class Video (as seen in the bottom image).
5. Click the Close button and you return to the initial Settings dialog. From here, click Allow (finally!). If all has gone well, the iSight camera will turn on and you will see yourself in the Web page’s webcam window. Success!

Tips for weathering power outages

As a central-California resident, I’m accustomed to a couple of flavors of weather—mild and not-as-intensely-mild-as-it-was-last-week. Yet this week we’ve been getting hammered with real, honest-to-god weather—hail, buckets of rain, high winds, thunder, lightning, and the occasional flurry of toads. And, because our power lines remain above ground—as the early decades of the 20th century intended—the power went phut and I spent much of the day in the dark.

But I was prepared. And you can be too with these few tips for what to do before and during those dark hours.

Get the right UPS

First, you should have an uninterruptible power supply (or UPS). And it must be robust enough to handle the devices plugged into it. Fat lot of good it does you plugging a Mac Pro, laser printer, and 30-inch monitor into a 350VA UPS. With such a puny UPS you’ll have just enough reserve power to utter “damn!” before the battery drains.

Different devices draw different amounts of power. An old Power Mac G5 sucks more power than a modern Mac Pro. An iMac pulls less power than a Mac Pro. And an Apple laptop of any stripe beats them all. Get a UPS that can handle your computer’s power pull. You can have a 1500VA UPS for between $150 and $200.

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Bugs & Fixes: Solving 'circular loop' problems in iPhone apps

It started as an annoying symptom in one of my iPhone apps. It eventually led down a rabbit hole of “what if” scenarios and what to do about them.

The app in question was Goodiware’s GoodReader, an overall excellent file viewer app. After you select to display a document from GoodReader’s initial list of files, a set of controls overlays the screen. The controls include a Back button, needed to return to the file list. After a few seconds, the overlay fades—so that you have an unobstructed full-screen view of the document. To get the overlay to reappear, you tap on the screen.

GoodReader for the iPhone

The problem I had was that, with certain documents (especially PDFs), a tap did not get the overlay to reappear. Making matters worse, GoodReader was set to automatically open where it last left off. This meant that, if I quit and relaunched GoodReader, it immediately returned to the problem document (without any overlay). There seemed no exit from this circular loop, no way to regain access to GoodReader’s file listings.

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