In at least Snow Leopard, and possibly older versions, hot corners are nearly always hot. For example, if you setup a hot corner to show the desktop you can drag a file from a finder window to that hot corner and cause it to fire allowing you to place a file on the desktop or a folder on the desktop easily.
Category: Computing
Fixing Internet Explorer file downloads and flash playback
Last week I helped someone rescue their computer. The striped disk set had gone wonky and would only occasionally boot properly. If it booted at all it would run fine, but getting it to boot was the tricky part. They wanted me to fix the issue and as long as I was doing so, upgrade the system to Windows 7.
After some effort, I got the computer to boot and promptly created an image of it using my favorite disk imaging software. I then broke the raid set and used the one drive that was still good to install Windows 7. Once installed I copied the appropriate data from the old Vista system on to the new Windows 7 system. All seemed well until I got an email claiming the computer wouldn’t download files or play flash videos.
While attempting to download a file they’d get the following error.
Internet Explorer cannot download
from
Internet Explorer was not able to open the Internet site. The requested site
is either unavailable or cannot be found. Please try again later.
After much trial and error I found the solution. Rename the Temp directory located at %userprofile%\AppData\Local. Once this was done IE was able to download files and play flash videos once again. I’m not sure what the real issue was but this fixed it.
Mac tip of the week: Change dock location
You can change the location of the dock by clicking the Apple icon in the upper left and choosing what orientation you want for the dock from the Dock fly out menu.
Mac tip of the week: Disable volume change feedback
Don’t like the audio feedback you get when adjusting the audio with the keyboard? You can hold down the shift key while adjusting the volume or disable it all together in the sound preferences.
Mac tip of the week: change your default browser
Like Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox over Safari? Make sure links that you click in other apps such as Mail open up in your browser of choice by visiting Safari’s Preferences and choosing your Default web browser on the General page as shown below
Mac tip of the week: Recent items stack on the Dock
This is a bit more advanced but I find it really useful. Open a terminal window and type in or copy paste the following and press enter:
defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-others -array-add '{ "tile-data" = { "list-type" = 1; }; "tile-type" = "recents-tile"; }'
Then type:
killall Dock
to restart your Dock. You will have a new stack item on your dock allowing you to access the ten most recent applications.
Fixing roadmap view in Trac with the Agilo plugin
Where I work we’ve had a long standing problem with the roadmap view in Trac with the Agilo plugin. We were seeing a “ticket 0 does not exist error” and after finally finding the right keywords to search with, I found my answer. Turns out that if you’re using PostgreSQL as your database backend, any Sprints that have a ‘ in the name will cause the roadmap to stop working. The fix is to simply rename any Sprints so they don’t have a ‘ in their name.
Labeling Linux partitions
Here’s something a lot of Linux users probably overlook. If you manually create a partition or file system on a new hard drive but you want mount during each boot you should mount the drive based on its label instead of it’s device name. This will prevent the system from mounting a drive in the wrong place if you ever switch cables around or move the drive to a different machine.
Labeling a partition is simple, just use e2label /dev/
e2label /dev/sdb1 "NewDrive"
To mount this drive on boot, edit your /etc/fstab file as root with your favorite editor. Add a new line at the bottom with, based on the example above, the following:
LABEL=NEWDRIVE /mountpoint
You can use the other entries in the file as a template. Use ‘man fstab’ and ‘man e2label’ to learn more about how to use e2label.
Mac tip of the week: Start application at login
Real simple tip. If you have a program in your Dock you’d like to have start whenever you sign in, simply right click on the Dock item and choose ‘Open at login’
Mac tip of the week: “Hidden” menu bar items
This is a simple one. There are a number of menu bar items that aren’t easily accessed through system preferences that can be found in System -> Library -> CoreServices -> Menu Extras. Double click an interesting item that you find in that folder. To remove the menu bar item simply command drag the menu bar item away from the menu bar.