Trinkets

Posts in this category will tend to have a significant novelty value, but are unlikely to have a long-lasting affect on the content of things that I post.

Fixing Apple Mail

/ Christopher Parsons / 12 Comments

I had a permissions error with my Apple Mail last night. Specifically, I was receiving the following below error: “Mail can’t open because you don’t have the necessary permissions to change the folder where it saves information.”

I’ll detail what I tried to do to fix this problem, and what actually worked.

Repairing Permissions, Part One

First, I opened the Disk Utility, clicked on my Macintosh HD, and Repair Disk Permissions. While this successfully fixed a previously unknown CUPS permission issue, it didn’t do anything to fix my Apple Mail woes.

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Resetting Windows Vista Media Center

/ Christopher Parsons / 1 Comment

I’ve begun shifting away from using my file server to store media/files to a drive enclosure holding 1TB of storage – I’ve moved over about 600GB of data, which will probably increase to at least 850-900GB by the time that I leave for Victoria. Then it’ll be time to get more file storage space, I guess grin. The shift to a drive enclosure has been brought on by the fact that I need to move my stuff halfway across the country, and don’t want to be bringing any more computers that we need to.

The Problem

In the process of trying to redirect my home theatre PC to the new networked drives in my drive enclosure, I ran into a problem: there is no way to delete all of the file location information in Windows Vista Home Premium’s Media Center (WVHPMC; isn’t that an ugly acronym!). This meant that, when I pointed the Media Center to the new location of all of my files, I was left with duplicate entries of my files, only half of which actually led anywhere (once the server was turned off).

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Repairing iWeb

/ Christopher Parsons

For the past two days I’ve been troubleshooting a problem with iWeb, and thought that I’d post my problem (and troubleshooting steps and solution) here so that other people who experience a similar problem can diagnose and remedy the problem.

Problem:

I had used iWeb to toss together a quick placeholder site for my girlfriend’s new domain without any incident a week or two ago. A few days later I went back into iWeb and was unable to add new pages, or create a new site. While the options to do both actions were available, clicking on them neither added a new page, nor created a site.

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The Making of a Media Center

/ Christopher Parsons / 2 Comments

This guide is intended to let me (and you) quickly set up an Apple computer as a media centre. I’m currently using a PC running Windows Vista Home Premium as the media centre – it’s native media centre functionality works quite well but, given my hope to move to a more Mac-centric environment, I want to see if it’s possible to actually use something like a mac mini as a media box. For the purposes of this guide, the media centre has to do the following:

  1. Be reliable! No weird and unexpected crashes. Moreover, I don’t want to be servicing the damn thing on a semi-regular basis.
  2. Be fairly easy to manage. I’m not going to have a lot of time to futz around with this thing come September.
  3. Be simple! If it take a lot of work to maintain, my hopes of spreading that work around are doomed to failure!
  4. Be as good as Vista Home Premium! While I really do want a dominantly Mac environment, I’m not willing to do so at the loss of overall functionality.
  5. Access media from my Fileserver (this, really, is what makes this whole thing a pain in the ass).

Now that we’ve identified the conditions for victory, let’s go and investigate how to do this!

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A Not-Good Relationship

/ Christopher Parsons

I tried. I tried so hard. I’ve spent literally years drooling over her. I’ve seen her cousins at some of my friends’ offices, and I was blown away. My choice of either a tall, slim image or one with a little more meat on the sides. My choice, and I could switch things around whenever I want.

I wanted to be with her so bad. After the time we’ve been together, I’ve touched her. I’ve caressed her. I’ve spent tens of hours reading about how to make us work together a bit more. I’ve really tried – I mean that. I realize that all relationships have a honeymoon phase, and that I might have been a little too optimistic that everything would work out between us, but I’ve never had a relationship like this be so challenging.

In this case, there is no compromise with her; she’s definitely a prima donna. In the past I’ve been able to put my ladies to either side of my primary display. This time, however, my Dell 1907 has to be in the front of me or else the colours are washed out. It’s amazingly annoying – to have spent a ton of money on a nice new 19′ monitor that I have the ability to rotate 90 degrees is pretty awesome. I had hoped that I could just wait it out, that I could adjust where it was and things would be better. Of course, this meant that I waited beyond the time that I could return the monitor. It’s not that it’s bad per se, but simply that it’s not good. Continue reading →

Techno-Trinkets: Firefox Bookmarks, Flash Books, and Redundent Data Storage

/ Christopher Parsons

This is going to be the beginning of a semi-regular series where I’ll post some of the (what I find) interesting things that I’ve been playing with/working on. I expect that the its will tend to be somehow related to my work in IT, my work as a graduate student, and my persistent work in developing a redundant large storage system at home.

Bookmark Sync and Sort

I work on a lot of computers on a regular basis. I have a series of them at work, my laptop (which travels pretty well everywhere with me), and a few at home. You know, in addition to all the other computers I pass by on a regular basis. To date, the best bookmark synchroniser that I found was Foxmarks, but I wasn’t a terribly large fan of putting my data on another person’s server. In addition to that, when you send your data it isn’t encrypted (while https data will be encrypted using standard Firefox encryption, it still means that what you have bookmarked will be sent along whatever networks you happen to be operating on). Ultimately, those two matters meant that I wasn’t particularly comfortable with the Foxmarks solution.

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