Latest Posts in Mac 911

Un-minimize windows via keyboard command

Reader Brad Dahr is annoyed that the Mac's Minimize command appears to be a one-way street. He writes:

I often minimize application windows to clear my visual space as I focus on a single app. How can I de-minimize an application just using the keyboard? I use Command+Tab frequently to switch between apps. It will switch to the app but it won’t make the app window pop back up. I hate having to use the mouse for everything!

I sympathize. It is a little clumsy having a perfectly fine keyboard command to minimize the active window (Command-M) that works in many applications (and the Finder) yet no equally fine keyboard command for bringing it back. There are, however, ways to do this without touching the mouse.

The free way is to press Control-F3 (or Fn-Control-F3 on a laptop). This highlights an item in the Dock. You can then let go of these keys and use the left and right arrow keys to move through items in the Dock, highlighting them along the way. When you reach the minimized window you want to expand, press Return.

Witch

The more-efficient paid way is Peter Maurer’s €9.95 Witch. This highly configurable window switching preference pane lets you assign keyboard shortcuts to a wide variety of windows navigation actions, including selecting specific windows to un-minimize.

Fixing permissions in Leopards old and new

We recently received an email from a reader who found that, after updating to Mac OS X 10.5.8, something had gone awry with disk permissions on his startup drive. In particular, when he selected Verify Disk Permissions in Disk Utility, many more errors appeared than had shown up at his previous check under 10.5.7. After selecting to Repair Disk Permissions, none of the errors were repaired. The list remained the same. Apparently, based on reports in this Apple Discussions thread, many other users were having the same symptoms.

As a first step in looking into this matter, I selected Verify Disk Permissions on my own drive, something I had not done in quite some time. It took several minutes and resulted in a rather long list. I copied the list to TextEdit to see exactly how long it was. It was 911 pages long (yes, 9-1-1, a cry for help perhaps?).

While this was a bit distressing, I wasn’t too worried. Looking over the list, most of the errors seemed pretty innocuous to me. In any case, I wasn’t having any problems with my Mac that appeared to relate to permissions settings (which is why I rarely bother with permissions checking anymore).

Still, I selected Repair Disk Permissions. It had a huge effect, bringing my error list down to only 4 pages. But what about these remaining errors? Were these the same ones that others were complaining about?

Read more...

Dealing with a full hard drive

Reader Matthew Mitchell feels the walls closing in. He writes:

I have a 17-inch MacBook Pro with a 320GB hard drive. (Formatted it has 297GB, but who’s counting?) I’m down to 70GB and I heard that a full hard drive is a slow hard drive. I went looking for files to delete and found a fair few that were either hardly ever used or never used. Are there any secret locations on my hard drive that large and disposable files could be hidden?

There’s lots to talk about here.

Let’s start with the capacity of your hard drive. For just about ever, hard drive manufacturers have defined a megabyte as 1,000KB. The Mac OS defines a megabyte as 1,024KB. It’s for this reason that a 320GB drive (using the 1,000KB measurement convention) appears to have much less capacity, because it’s being measured by the OS using the 1,024KB definition. It’s been reported that this behavior will change in Snow Leopard so that OS X 10.6 will show a 320GB hard drive having exactly that capacity.

As for a full hard drive slowing down your Mac, it’s true. OS X uses your hard drive to swap files out of RAM and if there’s very little room to do that, your Mac needs to work harder at the job and therefore slows down. Note, however, that at 70GB your 320GB isn’t there yet. Continue to leave 10 to 15-percent of your hard drive free and you should be in fine shape.

Now, let's turn to lurking files and folders. In this regard it’s worth your while to download a copy of The Omni Group’s free OmniDiskSweeper. This utility will tell you how much space is consumed by folders and files on your Mac. When you find something you believe you can do without, simply highlight it and click on the Delete button in the bottom-left corner of the window.

Good places to start looking are in the /Library and ~/Library folders. For example, look in the Audio folder within the /Library folder and you’ll find an Apple Loops folder that holds GarageBand’s audio files, which take up many gigabytes of storage. If you don’t use GarageBand, this folder can go. Similarly, iDVD’s themes (found in /Library/Application Support/iDVD) take up a couple of gigabytes of storage that you can free up if you never touch iDVD.

Because it doesn’t go without saying for everyone, allow me to offer a couple of safety tips. First, don’t throw out items in the System folder unless you really, really, really know what you’re doing. And, more generally, don’t toss out files and folders stored elsewhere on your Mac unless you know the purpose they serve. Doing so could land you knee-deep in the soup.

Cure for the non-working number pad

Reader Gordon Whitney finds the right fifth of his keyboard strangely unresponsive. He writes:

I don’t know why, but a couple of weeks ago the number pad on my Mac’s keyboard stopped working. The Plus and Minus keys seem to work okay but none of the numbers or the Enter key. I’ve tried restarting and looking in the Keyboard and Mouse system preference but nothing fixes it. What’s wrong?

Odds are that you’ve managed to enable an accessibility feature called Mouse Keys. This feature lets you use the number pad keys to move the Mac’s cursor around the screen (8 is up, 2 is down, etc). Although you can switch it on within the Mouse & Trackpad tab inside the Universal Access system preference, it can also be enabled when you press the Option key five times in a row. It’s likely you did that and didn’t notice the little “chitter” sound that indicates Mouse Keys has been switched on

Turn Mouse Keys off and the keyboard's number pad returns to its default behavior.

Just bang that Option key another five times and you should hear the descending chitter sound that indicates Mouse Keys is now off and your number pad is ready to use again.

Bugs and Fixes: MacBook Pro oddities

Apple’s latest MacBook Pro lineup has been getting rave reviews. And deservedly so. Of course, as with any new hardware, these models are prone to a few minor hiccups that don’t affect older MacBook models. Here are two of the oddest ones:

Unusual optical disk drive noises. As first reported by Apple last month, the optical drives in these new laptops may exhibit an “unusual series of noises” when starting up or waking from sleep, even though no disc is in the drive. For those wondering exactly what “unusual” means here, Apple provides a recording of the noise. Out of context, I found the noise to be a bit funny; I’ve even thought about using it as a wacky ringtone.

To banish these sounds from your MacBook Pro, insert a disc “almost all the way” into the slot-loading drive (not releasing it from your hand). Then remove the disc and reinsert it, this time letting it go all the way. This unlikely procedure, dubbed by Apple as “resetting the drive,” should eliminate the problem.

Unexpected sleep. If you are lucky enough to have more than one mid-2009 MacBook Pro (or Late 2008 13-inch aluminum MacBook), Apple advises not stacking them on top of each other (at least not with their magnetic latches all facing the same way). If you do, the top computer may go to sleep unexpectedly, even in the middle of a startup.

While not likely to be a common problem, I found it interesting to learn exactly why it can occur. It can happen because “the magnet in the bottom computer may activate the magnetic switch in the top computer.” Apple considers this to be “normal behavior,” because this is how sleep onset is normally activated when you close the lid of an unstacked MacBook. Sleep is triggered when the magnet in the laptop’s display clamshell gets close enough to the magnetic “Hall Effect” switch in the MacBook body. By the way, Apple didn’t make up the name for this switch; you can check out various Web sites, including this Wikipedia page, to learn more about Hall Effect switches.

Streaming large movies

Reader Michael Quinn has a lot of questions regarding a single movie. He writes:

I have a 1.75GB MPEG-4 Quicktime Movie file. If I subscribe to MobileMe and upload it using iDisk, will friends and family be able to see it? If so, could they stream it, or would they have to download it? Or, is this file too large for them to access at all? If MobileMe can’t do this, is there any other movie/video hosting app that could?

If you dropped it in you iDisk's Public folder your friends and family would be able to download it but not stream it. But let's back up a second. That’s a honkin’ big movie and one that, in its current form, I wouldn’t advise streaming. First of all, it could take a long time to start streaming to your viewers. And, perhaps more importantly, if a lot of people access the thing, you could easily run over your MobileMe monthly data transfer limit (that limit is 200GB of data transfer for a standard MobileMe account).

If you want to go with MobileMe I’d severely slim down that movie. One good way to do that is to import it into iMovie ’09, pull it into a project, and then choose Share -> MobileMe Gallery. In the sheet that appears you can choose a size that will work better for streaming—Tiny (176 x 144), Mobile (480 x 272), Medium (640 x 360), or Large (960 x 540) for a 720p HD movie.

From the sound of your question, you don’t yet have a MobileMe account. If the MobileMe Gallery feature is the single thing that’s pushing you toward this $99-per-annum service, perhaps you could save some money by creating a YouTube account and posting your video to that fine free service using the Share -> YouTube command. As with MobileMe Gallery you have options for creating movies of different sizes and you needn’t grant the general public access to your movie. Just make it a personal movie and then grant access to your family and friends.

Eliminating a Word macro virus

A reader who wishes to remain anonymous has acquired a Word cootie and is at a loss as how to deal with it. Anonymous Person writes:

My copy of Microsoft Office 2004 seems to have picked up a virus, or some such thing. I’ve used McAfee’s Virus Scan for Mac to clean one of my Macs, but don’t have that available for the other three affected Macs (one of them still has Word X for Mac). The virus shows up as W97M/Thus.gen. Although our own Office programs seem to function just fine, Office documents show up on non-Macs as having a virus. This has become quite a problem.

You’ve managed to acquire a Word macro virus. Dealing with it is a two-step process. First, you need to clean the documents you have, and next, prevent further infections.

Because you have an antivirus application on hand, I’d suggest you take all your Word documents, bung ’em into a folder, copy that folder to the Mac that has the antivirus applications, and run them through the application to clean them. When you’re certain that they’re clean and that they open as they should, delete the originals on the other Macs.

Before copying them back to the other Macs, open Word on each of these Macs, select Preferences from the Word menu, and in the resulting window, select Security. In the Macro Security area of that window, enable the Warn Before Opening a File That Contains Macros option. With this option enabled, any time you open a Word file that contains a macro, you’ll be given the option to enable or disable those macros. If you weren’t expecting a document to contain a macro (indicating it’s probably infected), open it after disabling macros and then copy and paste its contents into a new document. This will remove the macro virus from that document. Then trash the original, infected file.

Enable the option to receive a warning when a Word document contains macros.

(“Won’t this be a terrible loss!?” you wonder. In some circumstances, yes. But consider this: The current Word 2008 can’t run macros at all.)

Finally, the Normal template document that Word defaults to is likely contaminated as well. This is a bad thing because any new documents you create based on that template will contain the macro virus. Quit all open Office applications, travel to your user folder/Documents/Microsoft User Data and toss out the Normal document. You can always create a new one by opening a new blank document, choosing File -> Save As, and in the resulting dialog box choosing Document Template from the Document Type pop-up menu.

For those in Readerland faced with this problem who don’t have an antivirus application and aren’t keen to get one, you can deal with these infected files in the tedious way I described earlier. After enabling the Warn Before Opening a File That Contains Macros option, open an infected document. You’ll be told that it contains macros. Disallow those macros. When the document is open, copy its contents, paste them into a new document, and save the macro-free document.

Bugs & Fixes: iPhone app icon mix-up

Imagine that app icons on your iPhone’s Home screen decided to play a game of masquerade. You tap an app displaying the Bento icon but the MacGourmet app opens instead. The displayed text names of the apps remain correct, but the icons are wrong.

Numerous iPhone users don’t need to imagine this. It is exactly what happened to them. According to reports, it is especially likely to occur immediately after updating to iPhone OS 3.0. In a few cases, the symptom is even more disconcerting: rather than swapped icons, the items are the equivalent of “white noise” (as depicted here, a graphic I grabbed from an Apple Discussions thread).

Simply turning off the iPhone and rebooting has no effect. According to most reports, even deleting all the apps from your iPhone and adding them back again will not prevent the symptom from recurring. Restoring from a backup is not likely to work either. At least this appears to be the consensus.

What seemed to have the best shot for a fix (short of a full restore of your iPhone) was to tap Settings -> General -> Reset and select to “Erase All Content and Settings.” After that, you have to re-enter all your settings and resync all your content.

Most of the people reporting the problem were running Windows. However, several Mac OS X users reported the symptom as well.

Admittedly, users are shooting in the dark a bit here. No one knows for sure what the cause or solution is. It would really help if Apple officially acknowledged this symptom and offered a definite fix via one of its Knowledge Base articles.

Disabling Safari 4's image cache

Reader Martin Pace finds that Safari 4 adds a bit of bloat he’s uninterested in carrying about. He writes:

I’ve just noticed that Safari 4 has an image cache for every web page I visit (~/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari/Webpage Previews). Safari stores a jpeg and png version of every web page visited. Is there anyway to turn this feature off?

What, you mean you don’t take full advantage of Safari 4’s Top Sites feature? The eye-tastic feature that displays websites you've visited on an image wall? Me neither.

Oh, you do? In that case you want the images in this folder because they appear on this wall. Oh, you don’t? Fair enough. I just glanced at my folder full of images and it consumed just under 250MB of storage. Nothing, really, in these days of terabyte drives, but if you’re particularly parsimonious with your storage, I can understand not wanting the extra burden.

Lock the Webpage Previews folder to keep from accumulating previews.

Safari’s Empty Cache command won’t dispose of them. Instead, just open that Webpage Previews folder using the path you indicated and toss out its contents. Then back up one level, highlight the folder, and press Command-I. In the resulting Info window enable the Locked option. With the folder locked Safari will find it impossible to save images to it.

No, you're not infected

A reader who wishes to remain anonymous is concerned about a very scary looking website. I attempt to calm the waters.

I used Yahoo to search for something and was sent immediately to the following [redacted] site. I believe my Mac was invaded and don’t know what to do!

First, relax. Your Mac wasn’t invaded, infected, compromised, co-opted, or conquered. If you’d clicked through a few of those dire pop-up warnings you might have been as amused as I was to see a phony Windows Security Alert appear on a Macintosh. What you’ve encountered is termed “scareware”—a scam that attempts to frighten those confronted with these pages into downloading a hunk of software that will allegedly deal with the problem.

The chain of events goes like this: A perfectly legitimate URL is hijacked by the scammers and you’re redirected to the scareware page. That page is designed in such a way that several dialog boxes pop-up, warning you that your computer is infected. Click Cancel and you’ll just get more warnings and an interface that makes it appear like your computer is being scanned. If you fall for the trick and click the buttons necessary to download the offered antivirus software, you’ll pay for a product that is likely a hunk of malware (and I hate to think what happens to your credit card information). This malware is bad for Windows PCs but has no effect on Macs.

Typical scareware warning.

Regrettably, these pages are sometimes difficult to dismiss because the constant pop-up warnings prevent you from leaving. Clicking OK may get rid of the pop-ups so that you can close the window or tab (and no, doing so won't automatically download the software to your Mac), but I faced a situation with my wife’s Mac (who was just concerned as you were) where I had to force-quit Safari to get away from the scareware page.

You can take some comfort in knowing that the search engine folks do their best to weed out this junk and that those who promote it have been—and will continue to be—prosecuted for engaging in such malicious and scammy activities.