Crazily, even though OS X went all mental on me it wasn’t long before I had everything back as it was.

As I expected I resorted to re-installing OS X with the “archive and install” option.  It essentially keeps your User folder as it is, but replaces all the folders that have something to do with OS X itself.  And all the folders that are replaced are nicely archived away for you in a folder.

This method of install works a treat on OS X and restoring everything has been so much easier than it was when ether I had to do anything similar with windows.  Probably because all the apps keep their settings and support files in logical folder locations.  Rather then been crammed into a registry where settings are difficult to migrate into. and mix and match

Most of my apps worked fine, some that didn’t I could get working by manually finding the things they require in the archived /Library dir.  Things like Audio Unit Components and the the like.

Only with 2 apps so far have I resorted to reinstalling.

All this ease has done little to please my paranoid side however.  I cannot stop from wondering what could have possibly caused the problem.  Whatever was messed up was something at the heart of the OS, because it was only seconds into booting before getting dumped to the terminal.  Something that shouldn’t be written to in every day use, so I can’t help thinking it must have been caused by the hard drive itself.  It had shutdown fine the night before.

So am I going to start finding files randomly getting corrupt? ugh.  I’m not sure how I could diagnose the issue.  All the hardware tests I’ve tried so far have come up fine and dandy.

Why I must have strange neighbours and a neat way to store your personal info.

Yesterday I was using my iMac when suddenly a bluetooth dialog popped up offering a jpg, I was the only one in the house but still I instinctively scanned my surroundings.  No poltergeist had gotten out it’s PDA.  Still, I nervously accepted it. And that image you see was the fruit.  Very…Odd.  I especially am concerned that judging by it’s wonkyness it appears to be a poster.  So now I’m thinking, is this stuck on my next door neighbours wall?

Even worse I didn’t think I had bluetooth enabled, I’d hidden the menu icon, but obviously not actually disabled the functionality.  Well I have now.

I’ve come up with a neat idea.  Use keychain acess on the mac to keep personal info, like pin codes and shit that you might often forget.  I haven’t read about this anywhere else so I can only presume that i’m either a genius for coming up with it, or there’s some major security based reason for not doing this.

If you open keychain access, which is probably in Applications/Utilities, but it’s just easier to quicksilver it, you can manually add keys.  Click the wee +.  And look, the password box is multi-line, you can write an entire paragraph in there if you wanted.  So go do it.  You seem to need to manually enter your login name and i’m presuming its best not to forget.

Also important, after adding a new one, you need to immediately open the new item and go to the access control tab.  Click Ask for keychain password.  Also, whenever you revisit this item always click “Allow Once”.  If you accidental click “Allow Always” or you discover that it seems to be letting you view the item’s password box without entering the password go back to this access control tab and remove “Keychain Access” from the list of applications.

There’s a list of Categories on the left, but i can’t seem to get them to do anything, my keys always just end up in “Passwords”

Hey, I should have investigated this more before turning to wordpress.  Seems there’s a special item for making notes.  “File->New Secure Note Item”.  Hmm, mind you, unlike the password type, I cannot see a way to undo having accidentally allowed access always.

So yeah, ages ago I went mad and spent an unspeakable amount of money on a bundle of music software by Native Instruments. I guess I was feeling frifty.

Thing is, I have certainly not had my moneys worth. Although from scratch the bundle only shipped with 3 of the 12 components being a universal binary (that is compatible with an intel processor based macintosh computer) they had promised (including in print on the box) that they would all be ready by updates within a couple of months (I read that as 2 months), and as such the bundle was sold as being for owners of intel macs, it even had the universal badge on the box, as you can see. Heck as well that was november 2006. It is now March 2007, 4 months and counting since purchase and I am still waiting for 4 components of this bundle to be made compatible with my machine.

It is completely disgraceful for this company to have promised, nay, sold a software bundle for intel machines if they were not confident of having the whole thing running within good time.

Whats worse in my opinion is that they haven’t even apologised. You can check all over their website and there isn’t an ounce of regret.

Apple have finally unleashed the i’m a mac adverts on the UK and i’m both impressed and surprised by their choice of actors.

Mitchell and Webb are probably now best known for their self titled sketch show, which alternated between strokes of genius “numberwang” and slight pointlessness.  Before their sketch show they played the two main characters in sitcom “Peep Show”, which I love so much.  God I hope they do some more.

Problem is, as much as I love Mitchell and Webb I’m not sure they work quite right in these adverts, maybe it’s because i’m used to the american ones.  Mitchell’s tone of voice isn’t quite matter-of-factly enough for the PC character, and I’ve seen Webb play idiot characters too many times to go with him as the mac guy.  Hmm, i’ve just realised, i’ve presumed which is Mitchell and which is Webb, when I actually have no idea.  It’s the ant and dec syndrome.

Noticed something a bit off about weather services.

The top one is from the mac’s dashboard and the bottom is captured from the Wii.

So my question is, which one it so be believed?  I would have thought all weather services would get their info from the same source, such as sheffields met office.  So thats odd.

Ugh, I’m never going to meet my months workout goal now.

That wasn’t a very interesting blog post now was it?

Mac OS X tip of the decade. Hyped up a tad lad.  I intended to mention this weeks ago after discovering a neat trick in one of those “hmm, I wonder if…” type moments, but I’m Mr forgetful.  Quite often I need to choose/open a file which I already have in front of me in finder, the software doesn’t offer a drag-n-drop method and I’m thinking gawd, it’ll take ages to navigate to the file in the file dialog.  For instance when uploading a file to a web site. Well, turns out you can drop the file onto any gap on a standard mac file dialog.  Neat!  Slight bug though, sometimes when you do it it will navigate to the folder but won’t select the file, but if you drop it a second time it will select.  Either way it’s a time saver!

When I first tried Blender on the Mac I dismissed it because it looked like just another linux/windows port that didn’t use the Mac interface properly.

Well, after giving up waiting for Autodesk to get Maya universal, or in fact to upgrade the free Personal Learning Edition of Maya to version 9, which it doesn’t look like they’re going to do, probably because when maya was by Alias they were an alright bunch, but Autodesk acquired them and Autodesk are money grabbing thieves who care not for the mac.  So, i’ve tried Blender out again and followed a few pages of a guide and I’ve discovered that my hasty conclusion was wrong.  It’s not un-mac-like because of laziness but because Blenders interface is all very unique.  It’s actually a really nifty piece of software.  I just wish I had some 3D Modelling skills, but heck, I can’t even model in 2D let alone 3D.  But that doesn’t stop me trying!  Do you like my attempt at following the first tutorial?  I dunno why but the head melted a bit… looks like the elephant man employed as a lollipop lady with hobbit feet.

I downloaded a nightly of VLC the other day and discovered to my delight that it now supports the Apple Remote. You have to go into preferences and drill down to Interface->Main Interfaces and place a tick against “Remote Control Interface”.

Unfortunately i’m finding the odd bug with this nightly, but that’s to be expected.

I’ve forgotten to add the first letter style to the new theme, I like having a chunky first letter. All Olde English. Oh heck. Ah well. I was going to quickly write some things I’ve been meaning to blog but all of a suddenly my mind has gone blank. I discovered a bottle of nicely chilled white wine rather too early in the day…. Not to mention the Leffe. Oh Jez I think I’m an alchoholic.

Eddie does a good Che Guevara.. My newly found obsession with photography is getting more expensive. I now have the DSLR, the kit 14-45mm lens, a tripod and from today a remote control so that I can take pictures on the tripod without risking shaking the camera when pressing the shutter release. The next purchase will be a 45-150mm lens. And then maybe even a macro. Crikey. Well, I say expensive but I’m still a tight arse, I saved a fiver, yes 5 square pounds by purchasing the remote second hand on Ebay. I’m slightly regretting being so stingy though because I’m not finding it to be terribly reliable. I dunno if the battery is running low or what, but I doubt that because it’s supposed to last 5 years and an obscene amount of uses before the battery fails. Hmm, I suppose it’s possible it has been pressed continuously during transit or storage. Also, the zoom and exposure buttons don’t do anything, only the shutter button, I don’t need them though so I don’t care about this. Also, it didn’t come with the instructions and I had to scour the t’internet for a PDF.

KDE on Mac. Someone, or some people have ported KDE, and the QT foundation to Mac OS X. This is more than just an X11 recompile and I’m quite excited about the possiblities. When you launch one of the KDE apps it fits in really well with the Mac environment, the app’s icon is displayed in the Dock as it should be and the app’s menu bar correctly uses the mac’s at the top of the screen rather than being contained within the window. This is a great step in the right direction for a true cross-platform GUI, and one that doesn’t rely on some smelly, slow interperated language. I think this was it but now i’m not entirely sure because i tried it a week or so ago and forgot to note the URL. Sorry Susan.
Tesco Office. Tesco, the UK’s #1 supermarket, a shop which makes me shudder… is going to be selling it’s own branded cut-price software, including an Office clone and some anti-virus security bundle. When I first heard about this I thought oooooh I bet it’s OpenOffice, that’ll do the open source crowd some great PR. Unfortunately it isn’t, Tesco’s Office is going to be based on Ability Office, which as far as I can tell is a Windows only wanky shameful MS Office rip-off.

Bought a Tripod today, Scott Kelby told me not to get a cheap one, but this was only 50 quid, yet it’s the brand he recommends. So is that good or bad? It’s pretty damn fine actually, it’s light and has a ball head. The legs and that seem stable enough but the the quick-release socket where the camera goes has a tiny tiny amount of give and I’m wondering if it’s enough movement to shake when the shutter goes. Dunno.

I was listening to a mac podcast the other day and they brought up a subject I hadn’t given much thought to. It’s all about security, a boring subject, especially where the mac is concerned because it’s almost a non-issue but there are some surprises.

The Mac has 3 user levels where security is concerned and they are almost impossible to compare to the 2 windows provides so I won’t even bother. The do anything security level is “root” which anyone familiar with unix will know about, if you are logged in as root you can cause huge huge damage such as reformat the hard drive.

Next is admin who can modify most desktop level things without hassle, but can even do root level stuff by giving an application permission to escalate the user level. An admin only needs to give their own password to do this.

The least privileged user is “standard” who can access their own files and that’s about it. But, they can provide an application with admin access by providing the application with an admin’s username and password.

With a fresh installation of Mac OS X, after you have given the welcome sequence a username and password to use the machine with you will be logged in as “admin”, this is the default user-level and all would seem well because the OS hasn’t given you any rhyme or reason to change things. Well, this podcast mentioned that this is really dumb, in fact there is even a flaw with the package installers, they can, if they wanted escalate your user-level to root without even prompting. I’m actually quite shocked at this, if you use your mac day-to-day as a standard user you will have no such risk, it is impossible for an app to escalate to root without you giving it an admin’s login details.

I’ve dropped my account to Standard and I haven’t had any problems or naggles at all so I recommend everyone to do this. The only hassle is that when you do something like drag an app from a DMG to the Applications folder you will need to provide the admin account details. Ack, it’s not bad though, I can live with that quite easily. Also, when you are a standard user threes a gotchya with the terminal you should know about. Standard users don’t have access to sudo, so when you read a tip that says things like do “sudo defaults penis.plist erect = 1″ you will need first to poop “su admin” where admin is the name of the admin account.