The MacTrack – iPhone, iPod, iPod Touch and Mac News

In my system console log I noticed errors connected with Apple‘s built-in updating routines, and over in Apple’s discussion forum I had a thread describing the problem I was having with the Software Update process. I’m posting details of this issue here in case it proves helpful to others.

Symptoms included errors in the log reading:

• Package Authoring Error: installation-check results requires a message
• JavaScript error “Undefined value” while running “__choice_su_visible”
• __choice_su_visible returned error: Undefined value

At the same time updates that my Mac may have needed were not downloading automatically. It looked like Software Update had failed. Read the rest of this entry »

Occasionally, when using iTunes (if iTunes has previously crashed), I come across a fault: iTunes won’t quit, it just reloads itself each time I try to close it. This issue also prevents my Mac from restarting/rebooting unless I do a quick and dirty cold restart (either using the 10s power button method or dropping to a terminal window and issuing a ‘sudo shutdown -r now‘ terminal command).

Further investigations have discovered that the SRS Labs iWow plug-in (see my previous post) is to blame:

Here is some background

Read the rest of this entry »

If you want to enhance your iTunes audio, for a modest outlay, I thoroughly recommend iWoW by SRS Labs.

This iTunes plug-in gives much deeper and richer bass, and a fully immersive surround sound quality to your music.

At $29.99 it’s worth every cent (or for me in the UK, every penny). Try the free 14 day trial. You’ll never be satisfied with iTunes’ plain vanilla audio again!

The plug-in processes audio in realtime so your actual tracks remain intact and unchanged.

One particularly good feature is it’s Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re interested in learning about UNIX for the Mac OS X, or perhaps you occasionally need to open a terminal window to force a system restart, or maybe to kill a hung process (for example to restart the Dock) then a good place to begin is osxfaq and it’s UNIX tutorials.

Another good website to look at is MacRumors:Guides and it’s Terminal Commands Guide where you can learn about the delights of sudo and killall (for starters).

Remember: Terminal commands have the potential to be very powerful and wide-ranging, please use them with caution.

Web sites often display pop-up windows, or forms, and suppress the location (address) bar so you cannot see where you’ve been routed to, or the full address of the page that has popped up.

Occasionally, you may close the main Safari window by mistake leaving you with only the pop-up window and no obvious way to edit the address, or to enter a new address.

By pressing Command ⌘ + L Safari will re-display the location bar. This is a simple but very handy trick to wrestle back control of your browser. It’s got me out of a fix on many occasions

I thought I’d share a little utility that I use on a daily basis but would be lost without, in fact I don’t really consider it an add-in as it’s used so much. You Control: iTunes gives you full control over iTunes from the menu bar. There are many utilities that can do this but where this one excels, for me anyway, is the ability to rate a song directly from the menu bar without having to switch back to iTunes.

I can already control track playback with my Apple keyboard but was frustrated that firstly, most of my tracks remain un-rated and secondly, to rate a track I had to interrupt what I was currently doing and switch back to iTunes (hence the reason for most of my tracks being un-rated).

The interface to You Control: iTunes is highly configurable allowing you to show as much or as little of the controls as you wish.

Scrolling track and album details can be shown in the menu bar, either Read the rest of this entry »

The excellent free RSS news feed reader Newsfire has been updated with a minor bug fix release [now v1.5 (73)]. Flickr images in news articles are now displaying correctly 100% of the time.

Newsfire is a great feed reader for Apple Macs. If you are looking for a reader for your RSS feeds you should look at Newsfire. It’s extremely fast and works smoothly and without error.

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Updated 11/05/2008: I did in fact purchase a “Western Digital My Book Studio Edition 500GB” from Play.com on 22th April 2008 but am having to return it There is an overheating issue with the individual drive I received.  It’s getting extremely hot and occasionally there is a burning smell – not good!

I’m getting a refund and am going to go with a LaCie 500GB Quadra v2 eSATA / USB / Firewire 400 / 800 at £114.99.  Hopefully this will prove a better choice for me.

Note: As far as I am aware the fault I encountered is restricted to the one individual unit I purchased.  Luck of the draw I guess!

Original article 02/01/08:
I’m thinking purchasing a 2nd (larger) external hard drive for my Mac. Primarily for Time Machine usage but also to add some redundancy to my system. I’m after a large drive (at least 500gb) with a Firewire 800 port as that’s how I will be connecting to it.

Currently the drives under consideration are:

Read the rest of this entry »

Have you ever needed to access your Mac when away from the office, your home, or when out and about, for example at an airport, friends house, or internet cafe?  If so then your problems are over:

LogMeIn Free is a great service provided by LogMeIn (surprisingly). Once set-up on your Mac (Windows is also supported) you can securely access it from anywhere in the world. After the software is installed it sits unobtrusively on the menu bar until it receives a valid an authenticated remote control request from the LogMeIn website.

Initially, before you can connect to a computer (be it a Mac or a Windows PC), you have to authorise your LogMeIn account with the machine in question. In other words you have to be sitting at it.

When away from your Mac/PC simply log in to the LogMeIn website and you can see the status of all the remote machines connected to, and authenticated against, your account. Providing the remote computer is switched on and connected to the internet (otherwise it’s status shows as offline) you then simply click on the computer name, follow the prompts, and off you go!

Let me know how you get on, and enjoy your remote access. Hopefully it’ll prove invaluable when you realise you’ve left that all important file behind

Ever wondered what Apple’s Time Machine is actually doing?

Here’s a quick tip on how to view the Time Machine logs:

1. Open the Console utility (found in: /Applications/Utilities)
2. If the toolbar is not showing click on the little lozenge shaped button in the very top right of the console utility
3. In the left hand pane ensure ‘All Messages‘ is selected under the section labelled ‘Log Database Queries‘
4. The search field is located in the top right of the toolbar, labelled ‘Filter’. In this field type in ‘backupd‘ (without the quotes)
5. The right hand pane will update as you type finally restricting the log messages to those relating to the process backupd (the Time Machine process).

You’ll see lots of potentially interesting information (depending on your point of view) including pre-backup and post-backup thinning and the amount of space needed etc.

If you are unlucky you may even see some errors

Here’s a sample (edited) of the sort of output you will see (error free):

No pre-backup thinning needed: 100.0 MB requested (including padding), 267.47 GB available
Copied 14399 files (28 KB) from volume Macintosh HD.
Starting post-backup thinning
Deleted backup 2008-05-08-160302: 267.51 GB now available
Deleted backup 2008-05-08-150256: 267.54 GB now available
Deleted backup 2008-05-08-141309: 267.56 GB now available
Post-back up thinning complete: 3 expired backups removed
Backup completed successfully.

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If you are looking for a great download manager, or a tool that improves your download speeds then take a look at iGetter (available for both Windows and Macs). iGetter integrates with your chosen web browser and takes over the handling of the download task(s).

iGetter allows you to queue up downloads, have multiple downloads running, schedule timed downloads (for example when your ISP has less traffic), resume interrupted/broken downloads (this depends on the website you are downloading from as it’s protocol dependent), and perhaps one of the most important features is iGetter can open many connections to one site, each connection or stream will download a different section of the same file, in most cases this allows for blazingly fast downloads (bandwidth allowing). Read the rest of this entry »

Apple’s Safari web browser is built around the open source web engine called Web Kit. This is developed by the open source community and updated each and every day (and is recompiled nightly).

This ensures that the browser’s ‘engine’ is the most up to date possible, supporting emerging standards and compatibility. Additionally you benefit from faster rendering of pages and their content.

Web kit is available for both Windows and Mac OS X operating systems so the vast majority or users are covered (sorry Linux users!). The Web Kit runs Safari as the front-end application but with Web Kit as the rendering engine running “under the hood”.

To quote the Web Kit site:

WebKit is an open source web browser engine. WebKit is also the name of the Mac OS X system framework version of the engine that’s used by Safari, Dashboard, Mail, and many other OS X applications. WebKit’s HTML and JavaScript code began as a branch of the KHTML and KJS libraries from KDE. This website is also the home of S60′s S60 WebKit development.

The Web Kit open source home is at webkit.org to download either the Mac OS X or Windows version click on the nightly builds button:

To test your current browser you can run Acid3 Test <- note: this link runs the test. The Acid3 test puts the Read the rest of this entry »