Mac 911 – Dec. 2007

Hiding iWeb pages

Q: Every time I make a page in iWeb, a link to it appears in the navigation bar at the top of every page. I’d like to make some pages accessible only through links that I put on particular pages in the site. Is this possible?— Amal Chandaria

A: If you know where to look, it’s easy to do this in Apple’s iWeb ’08 (part of the $79 iLife suite;   ) or the original iWeb. Select the page you want to hide in iWeb’s Source list, choose View: Show Inspector, click on the Page tab in the resulting Inspector window, and deselect the Include Page In Navigation Menu option (see “Control iWeb Pages”). The link to that page (or set of pages, if you’ve added a template such as Blog) will disappear completely from the site’s navigation bar.

Copying Keychains

Q: I have a lot of passwords stored in my PowerBook’s keychain. I want to put an exact copy of the keychain on my iBook, just in case my trusty PowerBook gives up the ghost, but Mac Help is vague about how to do this.— Jason M. Krellenstein

A: The first step to copying your keychain is finding it. Look inside your user folder /Library/Keychains. Login.keychain is the default user keychain file that OS X creates—the one you unlock with your login password. (If you’ve created a new keychain—Chris’s keychain.keychain, for example—you’ll find it here as well.)

Copying a keychain from one computer to another, however, can be problematic. If that other computer uses a different user name or password, it’ll bombard you with password requests. Even with the same user name and password, you’ll run into the occasional request for a password you know is in the keychain. For example, when I copied my keychain to another computer that used the same user name and password, Internet Connect asked me for my virtual private network (VPN) password—despite the fact that it never did that on the original computer.

If you subscribe to Apple’s .Mac service ($99 per year), you’ll be happy to know you already have a way to avoid these problems. The service gives you the option to sync your keychain between your .Mac account and any Macs you sync with it (see “Keychain Syncing”).

You’ll find the option for syncing keychains—as well as bookmarks; calendars; contacts; Mail accounts; and Mail rules, signatures, and smart mailboxes—in the Sync tab of the .Mac preference pane. Select the Synchronize With .Mac option and then choose from the list.

Easy blind carbon copy option for Mail

Q: I like to use the Addresses window in Apple’s Mail to address my messages. But I don’t see a button there that will let me put an address in the BCC field instead of the To field. What’s the best way to do that?— Marty Grauer

A: The Addresses window (Window: Address Panel) in Apple’s Mail for OS X 10.4 (Tiger) doesn’t include a BCC option. Try a different approach: create a new e-mail message (1-N), choose View: BCC Address Field (1-option-B), open the Address Panel, and then drag the recipient names you want into the BCC field.

Safari’s regrettable memory

Q: Safari does a reasonable job of trying to guess and fill in the Web address I am about to type. After a while, though, its memory becomes cluttered. When I type

g

A: Apple’s Safari 2.0.X doesn’t provide one single command for getting rid of these memorized entries. They’re concocted from Safari’s bookmarks, cache, and history. You can get close by choosing Safari: Reset Safari, but doing this can be problematic. In the first place, it doesn’t touch your bookmarks, so some of those entries will still appear. Secondly, it will clear more data than you probably want it to. In addition to deleting the history and emptying the cache, it clears the Downloads window, removes all cookies, and gets rid of any user names and passwords you may have asked it to save. As a result, you might prefer to clear out Safari’s memory piecemeal instead. Start by choosing Safari: Empty Cache. Then choose History: Clear History. Then go into the Bookmarks area and clear out bookmarks you don’t want.

Alternatively, adopt some new habits. The first would be to type more than just that first letter

g

go

You can help prevent the addition of entries by choosing Safari: Private Browsing when you surf. With this option enabled, Safari won’t cache the Web sites you visit or add them to its history; therefore they won’t appear as Autofill entries.

Bugs & fixes

Bug: iPhone error 1603

When trying to restore your iPhone in Apple’s iTunes, you may see the following error message: “The iPhone could not be restored. An unknown error occurred. Error 1603.” To fix this problem, restart your Mac and try again. If that doesn’t eliminate the error, connect your iPhone to a different USB port, ideally one that’s connected to the Mac itself (rather than to a keyboard or USB hub).

Fix: Console log infinite loop

Launch Apple’s Console utility (/Applications/Utilities) and check your Console log. Do you see the same message repeatedly—for example, “Looking for devices matching vendor ID=1193 and product ID=8717”? If so, this almost certainly means that a running program is searching for a hardware peripheral that’s not connected to your Mac. It’s a minor problem that could slow down your Mac’s performance.

How does the offending software wind up on your Mac? In my case, it happened when I installed the software for my Canon scanner. It installed two items in my Login Items list, each necessary to enable the buttons on Canon scanners. However, only one was for my model; the other (named NO67U_ButtonManager) was for a different model. That was the file that was generating the errors. The solution is simple: go to your Accounts preference pane, click on the Login Items tab, and delete the unnecessary item from the list. Log out and log back in, and the Console errors should stop.

Fix: DMG file mounting glitch

After you download a disk image ( .dmg ) file, it should either mount automatically or mount when you double-click on the file. If it doesn’t, the Finder might be attempting, and failing, to open the .dmg file in a seemingly random application (in my case, Adobe GoLive CS).

To fix this, select the image file, hold down the option key, and select File: Always Open With. In the menu that appears, select DiskImageMounter. If this application is not in the menu, select Other and navigate to the /System/Library/CoreServices folder. You’ll find the DiskImageMounter application there.

[ Senior Contributor Ted Landau is the founder of MacFixIt and the author of Take Control of Troubleshooting Your iPhone (TidBits Publishing, 2007). Share your problems at bugs@macworld.com or on Macworld.com’s Mac 911 forum. ]