Latest Posts in Mac 911

iMac and the constantly ejected CDs

Reader Linda Gardner seeks a cure for a cantankerous media drive. She writes:

Lately, when I insert a CD into the drive, the computer, after a few seconds, ejects the CD. I have to insert the CD several times before it finally accepts the CD. My iMac is only a little over a year old. Why is this happening and what can I do about it?

This could be happening for a variety of reasons. Moving from best case to worst:

Your CDs are dirty. Do your kids routinely handle the things after eating peanut butter and honey sandwiches? Take a gander at the ones that are being ejected. If they’re dirty, give them a good wipe with a damp soft cloth.

Your iMac’s optical drive is dirty. The inside of a computer can get really dusty. It’s possible that some of that dust has made its way to the lens of your optical drive. You can pick up a lens cleaning CD (one that has tiny brushes on it) for less than $10 on Amazon or any store that handles gadgets and electronics (Radio Shack, for example).

It’s confused. This isn’t terribly likely, but it’s worth a shot before taking the Ultimate Measure (see next bold item). Shut down your Mac. Start it up and immediately hold down Command-Option-P-R. Let the Mac chime two times and then let go of the keys. Try a CD and see what happens.

It’s broken. Stuff breaks and if nothing else has worked it’s likely you’ve got a bad drive. Apple can tell you for sure. Hopefully you’ve purchased AppleCare for your iMac, thus making this repair/replacement “free.”

Bugs & Fixes: Tying up loose ends

Usually, I’m too busy writing up new material for upcoming columns to have much time to look back on what I’ve already written. Today, I’m taking that time. Here are updates to three recent Bugs & Fixes columns.

Apple TV deleted files: Fixed?

A few weeks ago, I wrote about a problem where DRM-protected files might get deleted from an Apple TV without the user requesting it. While it was a bit difficult to nail down the exact circumstances that triggered this symptom, it appeared to result from having iTunes open, your Apple TV connected and syncing, and no Internet connection. At the time, I wrote: “I have contacted Apple about all this and they intend to reply. If appropriate, I’ll include their response either in an update to this column or in next week’s column.”

As it turns out, Apple never did get back to me on this matter. They did, however, release version 2.4 of the Apple TV software. For me, as well as for a few others who wrote to me, this appears to have eliminated the problem with deleted files. Apple hasn’t officially confirmed this; its release notes for the update only mention what’s new, not what’s fixed.

On the downside, if you’ve installed Boxee on your Apple TV, the 2.4 update wipes it out.

Read more...

Cataloging Mail by date

Reader Kent Pletcher is a generally heppy ket with his move from Microsoft Entourage to Apple’s Mail. He has one concern, however, that goes like this:

With all the e-mail I get in a day I need my messages divided by date. In Entourage, you have a ‘Today’ header, ‘Yesterday’ header, ‘Last Week’ header, ‘Last Month’ header, ‘This Year’ header, etc. All of these allow me to look quickly for a message I may have received in the last couple of days. Is there a way to do this in Mail or a plug-in that will enable me to do this?

Like you, I find these Entourage entries (termed “Saved Searches” in Microsoft parlance) useful. Fortunately, you can create something similar in Apple’s Mail by putting Smart Mailboxes to good use. Try this:

Open Mail and choose Mailbox -> New Smart Mailbox. Configure the resulting Smart Mailbox window to read:

Contains Messages That Match All of the Following Conditions:
Date Received is Today
Message Type is Mail

Give it a name like “Today” and click OK. Any e-mail messages you receive that very day will appear in this smart mailbox. Because smart mailboxes are dynamic, when today becomes yesterday, these messages will be removed from this mailbox—and moved to Yesterday, if you've created such a smart mailbox. Speaking of yesterday, you can create additional smart mailboxes that include conditions such as Yesterday, This Week, and Last Week. If you want to go waaaay back and file all the messages within a particular year, configure the mailbox so it reads:

Date Received is in the Date Range

and then enter a date range. For example, if you want all your messages from 2008, configure the rule to read:

Date Received is in the Date Range 1/1/2008 to 12/31/2008

This smart mailbox gives you the day's messages and excludes RSS feeds.

Mac 911 Lightning Round

Over the course of time I collect questions that merit no more than a couple of lines in response, which makes for an awfully puny column. But gang them together and you’ve got something. Something like this:

Issue: Reader Clay Ross would like to uninstall Safari 4 and replace it with Safari 3 because he (unlike many other people) finds it slow and unstable.

Solution: The bright minds who’ve examined this one claim that the easiest solution is to reinstall OS X and choose the archive and install option. That’s right, I said easiest. Turns out that it’s dreadfully difficult to uninstall this sucker and replace it with an earlier version. If you’d like some insight into the issue and a gander at a few of the more convoluted methods for removing Safari 4, check out this Apple Discussions thread.

Issue: Justin Biddle asks how to view .wmv (Windows movie) files on the Mac.

Read more...

Bugs & Fixes: iPhone 3GS signal strength oddities

I warn you at the outset. This is not going to be one of those Bugs & Fixes with a neatly defined set of symptoms and a iron-clad solution. This one’s a bit messy. Here’s the deal:

Almost immediately after getting my new iPhone 3GS, I noticed that it spent more time connected to the EDGE network, rather than the faster 3G network, than did my prior iPhone 3G.

As my old 3G was still in use (it’s now my wife’s iPhone), I could conduct a test. Turning off Wi-Fi on both phones, I tracked their behavior. I confirmed that there were numerous occasions when the iPhone 3GS connected to EDGE while the iPhone 3G hooked up to a 3G network—even when the two devices were side-by-side. The reverse virtually never happened. Most of the time, the two iPhones connected to the same network, but a difference was definitely detectable.

Checking online, I found others reporting a similar situation. So I contacted Apple Support for an explanation. They said they were familiar with this matter and that there was nothing wrong. At least not with my iPhone 3GS. According to Apple, the software behind the status bar on an iPhone 3GS does a better job of showing when a switch from 3G to EDGE has occurred than does the comparable software on an iPhone 3G. The status bar on the older iPhone 3G may persist, at least for awhile, in showing the 3G icon even when the phone is actually on an EDGE network. In other words—again according to Apple—both iPhones are likely on the same network at the same time, even if their status bars don’t always agree.

This iPhone 3G-vs.-3GS difference is most likely to occur when you are on the edge (sorry for the pun!) of a 3G network coverage area. This is where the signal strength is borderline, thus resulting in switches to the EDGE network and sometimes frequent switching back and forth.

While this made sense, it still left a couple of questions unresolved:

Read more…

Securely wipe your hard drive

Reader Jim Bradley seeks a way to securely wipe the data from his hard drive. He writes:

Some time back there was an ad for software that would erase hard disks with the method approved by the U.S. government by writing 0s and 1s on the drive in several manners. Does such a software still exist, what is the name of the vendor, and is it for the Macintosh (PowerPC and Intel)?

Such software does exist and you’ll be happy to know that it’s free and likely already on your Mac if you’re running Tiger or Leopard. You’ll find it this way:

Launch Disk Utility (/Applications/Utilities) and when the application opens select the drive you want to erase in the pane on the left side of the Disk Utility window. Click the Erase tab and then click the Security Options button below. In the sheet that appears you’ll see four options—Don’t Erase Data, Zero Out Data, 7-Pass Erase, and 35-Pass Erase.

Disk Utility provides a variety of ways to erase your hard drive.

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Capturing Internet audio

Reader Hayden Alexander is interested in capturing audio from the Web. He writes:

I would like to record some audio messages from the Internet. I usually play the message on Firefox 3.0.11 and would like to record them using either Apple’s Soundtrack Pro V1.1 or Adobe’s Soundbooth CS4 V2.0.1. However, I cannot get either program to record the sound. Any ideas?

What you’re missing is the means for channeling your Mac’s system audio to your audio editors. If you’re dead certain that you want to stick with these tools, download a copy of Cycling ’74’s free Soundflower. This is an audio routing utility that works this way:

After installing Soundflower, open the Sound system preference, click the Output tab, and choose Soundflower (2ch). You can leave the Input tab alone.

Open your audio editor and choose Soundflower as the input source. In Soundtrack Pro you can do this by record-enabling a track and in the resulting Recording palette choose Soundflower (2ch) from the Device pop-up menu. To listen to what’s playing, choose the output you normally listen to (Built-in Line Output or Headphones, for example) from the Device pop-up menu in the Monitor section of the Recording palette. Having done all this you should now be able to capture any audio your Mac plays.

Capturing audio with Soundflower.

If you’re willing to drop some dough on the problem (and gain the flexibility of such features as recording audio from specific applications and creating scheduled recordings) give Ambrosia Software’s $69 WireTap Studio or Rogue Amoeba’s $32 Audio Hijack Pro a try.

Bugs & Fixes: Apple TV deletes files

You launch iTunes. It immediately recognizes that your Apple TV is connected and initiates a sync. Nothing unusual so far.

Normally, assuming no changes have been made to what is being synced, this should take a matter of seconds. Except this time, something unexpected happens. iTunes begins copying several hundred files to your Apple TV. No error message or warning appears. The files just copy as if you had newly added them to Apple TV’s playlists. This is especially odd because you recognize these files as ones that have been previously synced and should already be on your Apple TV.

Depending on how much data needs to be copied, and the speed of your network connection, this recopying can take from minutes to hours.

Making matters worse, the exact same thing may happen again and again, as often as several times a week. It probably doesn’t happen every time you launch iTunes. But often enough to be really annoying.

How do I know all of this? Because it’s happened to me. It has also happened to numerous other Apple TV owners, as described in an Apple Discussions thread and a MacRumors Forums thread.

The recopied music appears to be DRM-protected music. The consensus theory is that somehow, at some point, either Apple TV itself or iTunes is blocked from connecting to the iTunes Store. Without this connection, there can be no confirmation that you are authorized to play the protected files. The result is that the files are deleted from the Apple TV. When you next sync Apple TV in iTunes, after iTunes Store access has been restored, the authorization is recognized and the files recopy. In my case, a temporary loss of Internet access from my cable modem appeared to be the triggering event.

While I understand the need to block unauthorized playing of protected music, there must be a better way to deal with this than to have massive amounts of data potentially get deleted from an Apple TV every time a cable modem gets a hiccup and loses its Internet connection. Presumably, the better way will have to come from Apple in the form of an iTunes or Apple TV update. I have contacted Apple about all this and they intend to reply. If appropriate, I’ll include their response either in an update to this column or in next week’s column.

In the meantime, the only effective solution I can suggest is to pay to have all of your music upgraded to the DRM-free iTunes Plus version. I understand that this will not be a welcome solution for many people.

A final note: As annoying as this problem can be, there’s one that’s even worse: All of the data on your Apple TV could get deleted. After copying it back at the next sync, it may get deleted again a few weeks later. According to an Apple Discussions thread, Apple Geniuses have confirmed that this is a known problem. The cause is a corrupted Apple TV drive. The hopeful solution is to do a factory restore of the Apple TV. If that fails to work, the drive is apparently beyond fixing. It’s time to get an new Apple TV.

Splitting and archiving iPhoto libraries

A reader who prefers to go by the name Perygrine (no, not peregrine), has an iPhoto library that’s swelled in an ungainly way. The aliased-one writes:

I’m using iPhoto and my hard drive is full, even after moving non-essentials to an external hard drive. I’m volunteering on a community project, and the photos I have stored in iPhoto are essential, though they are scattered by date.

I want to split my iPhoto library and move non-essential photos to the external hard drive, and then recombine them when I get a new Mac. With over 12,000 photos, I don’t have time to separate photo by photo, but could do so by year and move back the few individual photos needed. How can I divide the library quickly, while maintaining all the components and a link to the app so I can navigate to the part I need?

You have two tasks to perform. The first is to organize your photos by year and the second is to then copy those photos to a new library and delete them from the original library.

To organize your photos by year in iPhoto, choose File -> New Smart Album, and in the resulting sheet, create a condition that reads “Date is in the range 1/1/xxxx to 12/31/xxxx (where xxxx is the year you want to sort by). Give the album an intuitive name along the lines of 2005. All the images from that year will now appear as part of that smart album.

Now tool on over to Fat Cat Software and pungle up $20 for the most excellent iPhoto Library Manager. This utility makes it easy to create multiple iPhoto library and copy content between them.

Read more...

Resolving iPhoto library size discrepancy

A reader who prefers the anonymous life, noticed a discrepancy between iPhoto and the Finder. He wrote:

I have a MacBook Pro that is a couple of years old and recently, to clear up some much needed space, I went through and (after backing up my pictures) deleted about half of my photos. I gained a lot of space but I then noticed that iPhoto tells me that I have just under two-and-a-half gigabytes of photo yet when I select the iPhoto Library file inside my Pictures folder and press Command-I to bring up the Info window, I see the file is several gigabytes larger. Where are those extra gigabytes coming from?

It’s useful to know what you’re looking at when you examine each number. When you’re in iPhoto and select Events or Photos, the Information pane at the bottom of the window displays, among other things, a Size entry. The number here indicates the accumulated storage consumed by the original photos. So, if you were to export all the photos in their native format and resolution, the resulting folder full of the things would be approximately that size.

Now biff on over to the iPhoto Library item in your Photos folder, Control-click on it, and choose Show Package Contents. Inside you’ll find a load of items including Modified and Originals folders as well as thumbnail database and metadata files. Those other items take a fair amount of space too. That Modified folder, in particular, could be eating up huge amounts of storage because, within it, are images that you’ve edited. (This whole Originals/Modified scheme is what allows you to revert edited images to their original state by choosing Photos -> Revert to Original.)

There’s very little you can do about the contents of the iPhoto Library package, but there is something you can do in iPhoto. Control-click on the Trash icon in iPhoto’s Library list and choose Empty Trash. This deletes all the images you thought had been deleted (but hadn’t been because you didn’t realize that you need to invoke this Empty Trash command to really get rid of them).