I recently decided to upgrade the internal hard drive in my iMac. What surprised me was how simple it really is to do, and how much of a performance benefit I gained.

Time Required: About 1 hour.
Tools needed: 1 new large and fast SATA hard drive, screw driver kit with Torx 6 and 8, 2 or 3 suction cups, can of compressed air, LCD cleaning cloth.

iMac ready to undergo surgery

I picked up my current 24" iMac September last year, it has suited me very well. But I've never been pleased that you can't add additional hard drives to the iMac like you can a Mac Pro, or most PC's. I have a couple of externals that I use for additional storage and for cloning with SuperDuper! Finally I decided that I'd be better served with a large drive in my iMac and a large external drive to clone it onto. Just a two drive system, no other externals for extra storage capacity - this is simple and easy and fits my lifestyle better.

Once I realized that a ReadyNAS NV+ really wasn't be best and easiest solution I began to look for information on how to go about upgrading the hard drive in a new iMac, I knew it wasn't a user accessible drive but figured somebody had figured it out. Sure enough - Tom Sawyer over on the MacRumor forums had been a pioneering fellow and posted a tutorial on how he did the deed. I read his write up twice and decided I could surely do this myself.

Tom has written a nice guide, but there were some things that I felt could have been elaborated on a bit more so I am writing up my experience in a guide.

• I'm sure you're wondering if you have what it takes to upgrade the drive in your own iMac. If you have ever put together a PC or maybe swapped out a motherboard in a PC, hell if you've ever watched McGyver I think you're qualified to take on this task successfully. Seriously, all you need are the right tools and some patience and care.

• Before beginning you'll need to get a new hard drive, I chose the Samsung F1 750GB drive which was $140 delivered from Newegg. I would have loved the extra space and outstanding performance of the Samsung F1 1TB drive, but it is almost double the price so I went with the 750GB instead. Hard Drives are like operating systems and religions, people firmly believe in the brands they like. I don't think you can go wrong with the Seagate drives, I'd stay away from the large Western Digital GP drives because they are only 5,400rpm despite being labeled as variable 5,400 to 7,200rpm. The new Samsung drives are getting mixed ratings at NewEgg, but most of the problems are because of some issue with these drives, Vista and nVidia drivers - nothing that affects us Mac users. I've used Samsung drives before and they've always been fast and dead silent, so my choice was easy.

• I read Tom Sawyers guide to doing the upgrade over at the MacRumor's Forums.

• Snagged a screw driver kit for the weekend from our IT guy at work, complete with Torx size 6 and 8, two most used items in the upgrade. You need suction cups to pop the protective cover off the iMac, instead of buying a set of them at Home Depot I opted to use the side window Sun Shade in my car which has two suction cups (happy to save a couple dollars in the process.) You'll definitely want to have a can of compressed air for cleaning out your iMac and getting all of the dust off of the LCD when you put it all back together.

My new 750GB Samsung F1, screwdriver/Torx kit, window shade (with suction cups), and Tom's tutorial

• I first removed the iMac from my office, and placed it lying facing up on my kitchen counter on top of a folded bath towel which was protect the iMac from case scratches.

• Next I attached the two suction cups to one side of the [plastic, not glass] cover on the front of the iMac. Here's one of the first mistakes I almost made. You really need three suction cups, two on one side at both ends, and one suction cup on the opposite end of the screen in the center. When I pulled the screen off with the two suction cups and started to pull it up higher, I heard a bad noise. It turns out that there are pins attached to the underside of the plastic cover, and unless you pull the screen relatively straight off, you can break these pins and or the entire plastic cover. I was working carefully so didn't damage my cover, but this was a close call. You can probably do it with just two suction cups if you pull the one end up only a couple inches then reach over and lift up the other side with your fingers. The red dots indicate where I would put the suction cups, lift with the side with two cups, when it pops up, lift with the third cup to fully remove.

• Be sure to take extra special care to not touch the LCD screen after removing the protective cover.

suction cups attached, ready to remove the cover.



protective screen now removed

• Next you need to use your Torx screw driver and remove all the screws surrounding the LCD screen from the aluminum front bezel. I put red dots on the picture above to show where the screws are that need to be removed to get the front bezel off.

• Remove the memory access panel now.

• Life the aluminum bezel from the top of the iMac, be careful to not lift very far, you need to disconnect the iSight.

iSight cable to disconnect

• After disconnecting the iSight cable, (be sure you removed the memory access panel, keep lifting the bezel from the top and wiggle it a little and it will fully come off the body of the imac. Where the bezel fits at the bottom of the iMac is just a tongue and groove type fit, you may have to push the bezel downward slightly at the bottom of the iMac after lifting the bezel at the top of the iMac. The bezel comes off very easy after disconnecting the iSight.

iMac with the bezel removed

• Next is to free the LCD from the iMac. First remove the 8 Torx screws holding it to the iMac (I show 6 of them with red dots in the picture above, there are 4 screws on either side of the screen.) When you begin to lift the LCD panel away from the computer, I found it best to lift it from the top by the iSight, pivoting at the bottom. When reinstalling the LCD panel, set the bottom in first then carefully put the top back down into the iMac.

• Side note - the main fan had a fair amount of dust in it, so I covered my LCD screen with a clean kitchen towel and cleaned the fan out with a can of compressed air. Look at the visible dust in the first picture, then how much cleaner it is after blowing it with air. Note - I also cleaned the other fan I noticed near the hard drive, I think there is a third fan also but I didn't notice it.

Dirty Fan



Clean fan

• There are two sets of wires that you need to disconnect from the iMac which prevent you from lifting the LCD away from the iMac. I didn't snap a picture of the fist set, but it is a set of 4 wires and they are just to the right of the main fan at the lower left of the imac. I've drawn a red line next to the wires in the picture just above.

LCD DVI connection.

• The next set of wires I think is the DVI connection, it is shown in the picture above, circled in red. Tom's guide talked about this being difficult to put back in upon reassembly but I found that it just snapped right in without any issue at all.

• Tom recommends removing the power connection to the LCD which requires removing a small circuit board, I think it's much easier and safer to leave it connected and work on the iMac with the LCD still connected to the power. If you have somebody to help they can hold the panel up for you, I did it myself, by putting the LCD just inside the lip of the iMac's back plastic case and tilting it up, then I rested the LCD panel on my head while I worked on the hard drive.

LCD panel tilted up



angled view

• The picture above shows where the hard drive is installed, my drive is out at this point but I outlined where it was in red.

• Before you remove the drive, you need to disconnect the thermal sensor, it is under a 1" foam square. Pull off the foam square, and remove the sensor attached to the wire from the plastic mount on the drive. I show a picture of the mount down below.

• To remove the hard drive you need to remove the two Torx screws on the top side of the drive, from the black plastic handle / mount.

• Carefully lift the drive up (where you just removed the two screws). There are two screw/pins mounted on the bottom side of the drive, pull it towards the top of the iMac to remove these pins from the mounts.

• Carefully remove the SATA and Power cables from the drive and lift the drive out of the belly of the iMac.

• Using a knife or screwdriver, remove the thermal sensor mount from the hard drive. I pushed it onto my new drive, and used a little Gorilla Glue on either end to ensure that it would stay put.

Thermal sensor mounting bracket.

• This item I either missed from Tom's guide, or he didn't list it, but on the other side of the hard drive is a small square of foam tape attached to the drive, it's about 3/8" square. I only noticed this after I'd put my iMac completely back together again, but you can certainly transfer it to your new drive now that you know about it.

• Now you being the reassembly of the iMac. Everything goes back together in exact reverse as the disassembly took place.

• One thing I messed up was when I sprayed my LCD panel to remove any dust, I tilted the can of compressed air too much and it sprayed liquid onto my LCD panel! I freaked out momentarily after seeing a reside remaining after it dried. Luckily an LCD cleaning cloth cleaned it up very easily. I would highly recommend you have one of these clothes handy, it's very likely that you will get a small smudge or two on the LCD during the drive upgrade - these clothes make quick work of them. I got my cloth with my LCD TV when I purchased it, but I think it's the same cloth used to clean optical glasses too.

I think I could do the job in about half the time the next time I do it, I was going slowly and cautiously, but it really wasn't as difficult of a job as I had been anticipating. In fact it was darned right easy to do.

Now that it's completed I'm really seeing the benefits. I've got a large internal drive with enough capacity to warehouse all of my data on a single drive. I only need 1 external firewire drive to Clone my main drive for safety (using SuperDuper!). I've decided to just go with a SuperDuper! clone and not use Time Machine.

SPEED, there's the great thing, my new hard drive is far faster than the stock Western Digital 320GB drive that it replaced. My Xbench score on my original drive was a respectable 72.91, the new Samsung F1 750GB measures 93.02, a 28% increase. This change (and going from 3GB to 4GB of RAM) increased my overall computers XBench rating from 151.17 to 164.95, a 9% overall increase. These are benchmarks you say, they don't mean anything! But I am seeing dramatic improvements in speed in real life usage as well. It now only takes about 6 seconds to launch Windows XP in fusion, about 3.5 seconds to close it. I'm seeing DOUBLE the transfer rates when doing the initial clone of my drive to my external FireWire drive. My iMac definitely is faster with disc activity than it was when stock.

I couldn't be more pleased at how easy this upgrade was to do, the increase in performance, and the simplicity it brought to my storage needs.

Thanks again to Tom and his guide for giving me the information and courage to attempt the upgrade myself.

If you are interested, I have posted a 20mb zip file with full size images of all the pictures in the guide.

The newest release of Chax adds a very cool feature for iChat - now you can use a unified contact list. Instead of separate windows for different services, you can now use a single window.

How nice (Apple, you already did tabs, lets step it up and follow suit.)

One of Leopards best new features is Quick Look, it's fantastic to be able to view so many files without having to open the native application associated with files. When you are viewing a file in Quick Look and want to open it in it's native application though, maybe for editing, you don't need to close Quick Look and double click the file. Just do the keyboard command Command+O to open the file.

There is a not so obvious - but very simple way to have iChat auto-accept chat invitations when somebody sends you a message.

Go into iChat Preferences, click on the Alerts Tab, in the Event box, select Text invitation, and then select Run AppleScript: Auto Accept.applescript. This is a script that Apple includes with iChat - so take advantage of it.

When I heard about Stacks, I thought they would be incredible. Despite the recent spiffy icons that people have figured out how to use with stacks, they still lack a key functionality that I want - and that is to be able to click on a Stack and have it open in a Finder window. When you click on a Stack, there is a button that you can click to show in finder, but now it's a two step process which, well, it takes twice as long. There are view options for Stacks, you can default a stack to show as a Fan or Grid layout, unfortunately there is no Finder view option.

What I have opted to do is use Folder Aliases instead of Stacks. I create an alias of a folder, move that Alias to my Documents directory, then I drop the Alias in my Dock near the Recycle Bin. Now I have a folder icon, which when clicked will open that location in a Finder view.

Until a View as Folder option is added to Stacks, this is a perfect work around.

Some people are trying to upgrade from Tiger to Leopard and are finding out that they have an Apple Partition Map (APM) hard drive and Leopard won't install on a non GUID partitioned hard drive. A co-worker of mine ran into this problem, and he used this exact same approach as recently outlined on MacOSXhints with great success.

1. Formatting your external: Plug in your external drive and back up anything that's already on it. Go to Disk Utility, select your FireWire drive and in the right side, click on the Partition tab. Click on the Options... button and select GUID as your Partition Type. Lastly, click on the Partition button to format/partition your external drive as GUID. Approx time: Less than five minutes.

2. Copying your data: Once it's formatted, run SuperDuper. For your source in the left dropdown, select your original, internal hard drive. For the destination in the right dropdown, select your external drive. For the "using" dropdown, select Backup - all files. Click on the Options button, and then in the During Copy dropdown, select the first option that says Erase, then copy files. Press OK to close the options window, then click Copy Now. Approx time: about 100 seconds for every GB.

3. Boot off your external drive: Restart your computer and hold down the Option key. A volume select menu should come up within seconds. Click the arrow under your external drive to boot from it.

4. Re-partition your original drive: Once you're booted into OSX again off your external drive, open up Disk Utility and select your original internal hard drive. Click on the Partition tab on the right side, and then click Options and select GUID. Click the Partition button to erase/repartition your original hard drive as GUID. Approximate Time: Less than five minutes.

5. Re-copy your data back to your original drive: Open Superduper again. Two warning windows may pop up about Volumes not being found, but just click Cancel and ignore them. In the left Copy pulldown, select your external drive. In the right Copy pulldown, select your original internal drive. Under using, select Backup - all files. Click on the Options button, and then in the During Copy dropdown, select the first option that says Erase, then copy files. Press OK to close the options window, then click Copy Now. Approx time: about 100 seconds for every GB.

6. Reboot and enjoy! Whew! So after all this work, you now have a GUID-partitioned internal hard drive that is essentially untouched from before, but now with a proper partition type than can be upgraded to Leopard or have bootcamp installed.

Here are some tips and tricks for your shiny new Leopard OS, things that can make it even better for you.

Time Machine

Create a 10 gig partition on your Time Machine drive, then a second partition with all the remaining space on the drive for use with Time Machine backups. Clone the Leopard Install DVD to the 10GB partition, this way you can boot up off of that partition and be able to access your time machine data in case of an emergency. Sure you can always use your Leopard DVD, but you may or may not have it handy with you, and this method of having it on the hard drive is faster when you go to use it.

Details on how to clone the Leopard DVD to your hard drive is here on MacFixIt.

Note, I'm still running SuperDuper! in addition to Time Machine, until I'm confident that SuperDuper! is overkill in addition to Time Machine - I feel better operating using both.

The three pane 'hack' stopped working with Mail in Leopard, here is an update.

Download here: WideScreenMailPlugIn

This is a plugin for Mail.app (for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard) which turns the message view from a two-row horizontal view, to a two-column vertical view.

Eternal Storms is the developer of a great iTunes addon, GimmeSomeTunes. Now they have made a utility, OpaqueMenuBar, to take the new transparent menu bar in Leopard and make it not be transparent - like Tiger used to show it.

While I do like much about the new Dock, I don't like the transparency of the Menu bar, so this is one that I'm jumping on.

For some unknown reason Camino only ships with the option for Google as your search engine of choice in the search box. I have switched from Google search to Yahoo! search, so wanted a way to be able to use the Camino search box for Yahoo! and not Google.

My temporary work around was to just initiate my web searches with LaunchBar, where I could quickly and easily search with Yahoo! (or any other service of my choosing.) But some times it's handy to use your web browsers search engine.

I just ran across an article on MacOSXhints on how to add search engines to Camino's list! Wahoo, and it's really easy too.

All you have to do is add a new key in the file :
/Users/[Your User Account]/Library/Application Support/Camino/SearchURLList.plist

In the Pref Setter image below you can see the strings I used to add Ask and Yahoo!, if there are others that you would like to add, you can search out how to do that, or just try doing a simple search at the engine of your choice, and replace the search text with %s in the searchurl file.

You can see that I now have Yahoo!, and added ASK for the heck of it too.

You can edit the plist file in a text editor, but a much better option is the free plist editor Pref Setter.

Here is what editing a plist file looks like in Text Wrangler:


Here is what editing a plist file looks like in Pref Setter

Yesterday I posted a how-to on preventing volumes from mounting when you boot, the near opposite it todays topic.

How to automate the mounting of filesystems of any of the following type AFP, FTP, HTTP, NFS, and SMB. How cool to be able to easily mount a volume on your desktop for not just network drives off various computer flavors, but also FTP and HTTP. Slick!

Disclaimer, I had great success and ease using this to mount my Windows LAN, I spent about 1 minute trying to mount the MacSeven.com ftp site just to test it out, and I wasn't successful. Since it was only a test I didn't pursue further - your mileage with FTP mounting may vary.

Update: AutomountMaker actually connects great to the MacSeven.com FTP - I had a setting wrong, on the "Volume" Setting I had an incorrect entry, by just leaving it blank it connects great and puts the mounted drive right on my desktop, very cool.

AutomountMaker is just the tool to make this happen. I used AutomountMaker to automate the mounting of a volume on a Windows computer on my LAN, so I used the SMB protocol. It's very easy to save pre-defined connections that you can run on demand, or you can launch any of the presets so that you can mount the volumes when you boot.

If you like it, DiggIT.

WARNING: While I have done this tip myself, and it works great for me, any time you are entering commands into terminal, please have a backup of your system in case of an error or problem. Please take caution.

I'm going to present this tip as it was necessary for me, using my situation should help demonstrate how this is a cool tip, preventing drive volumes from mounting when you boot into Mac OS X. My example is about preventing an external firewire drive from mounting, but you can prevent USB2, internal, or other volumes from mounting also.


Situation: I use SuperDuper! to maintain a clone drive of my Macintosh HD. Considering how inexpensive both an external drive and SuperDuper! (hard drive cloning software) are, we should all keep a cloned copy of our internal drives. Not only does it provide you with a safety copy of your drive, but you can also boot from it if needed. Several times I've been very thankful that I have a clone drive, saved my butt.

By the way, here is a current deal, an AcomData 500GB FireWire 400 for only $120 with free shipping (USA). I've got three AcomData external FW400/USB drives, they work really well.

With SuperDuper! you can schedule 'backup' clone activities, and SD! has the smarts to mount an external drive before the event if the drive isn't already mounted, you do need to have the drive mounted in order to setup the scheduled activity. SD! will even unmount the drive if it was unmounted before the scheduled event.

I don't want spotlight wasting resources indexing my Clone drive, and for some reason OS X won't let me add my Clone drive to my Spotlight exclusion list, or if it does add it to the list, it disappears the next time I reboot.



Question: Now the question which remained for me was how can I keep my Clone External firewire drive from mounting when I reboot? OS X offers no visible means of doing this.


Answer: Some digging around over at MaxOSXHints.com revealed the answer, you just need a bit of information from Disk Utility, and then to type in a line of code in a terminal session. Don't be scared of the terminal entry, it's really very easy.


Step 1) Open Disk Utility select the volume that you do not want to automatically mount when you boot into Mac OS X, click on Information, select and copy the "Universal Unique Identifier" code.

Step 2) Open a Terminal session, type in:
sudo pico /etc/fstab
hit ENTER, and then enter your password.

Step 3) Now enter the following line (using your own UUID). Note the "noauto" is what prevents the drive from mounting, see this page for more detail.

UUID=CDB15826-88A3-36AC-8009-3E71355F0B18 none hfs rw,noauto

You can enter additional lines for additional volumes.

Hit Cont+X to Exit, Y to Save.

Step 4) That's it, reboot and now that volume won't reboot.

Now when I reboot, my Clone drive is not mounted, I don't see it and Spotlight doesn't index it, nightly when my SuperDuper! scheduled event runs, it automatically mounts the volume, performs the clone update and then unmounts the volume. Perfecto!

I think it was over at TUAW where I saw this tip posted not long ago, I certainly realized that you can press the oblong button at the top right of a window to show/hide detail at the top of a window. What I didn't realize is that this is a great tip for installing applications faster, from a mounted DMG file.

By pressing the oval on a DMG install window, it will allow you to see all your drives and quick access locations, making it super easy to drag the application onto your Applications folder. Some developers show your Applications folder on the DMG window, but many don't and this is a great tip to make it easier for those instances.

I put together a quick video to demonstrate. Click here to see the video.

I recently pointed out a file made available by the fine Perian folk. They have updated and enhanced their utility which gives a proper icon to media type such as FLV, instead of the blank icon that you would otherwise see.

Grab the updated installer and file type Perian't Type Installer here.

Perian is a great utility which adds codec's to QuickTime's arsenal, allowing you to play more file types with QuickTime. A fan of Perian has created a simple applescript that will get your Mac to show a nice QuickTime icon instead of a blank icon for the following file types: FLV, AC3, MKV, MKA, and VOB.

Well done!

You can snag the applescript here to fix your icons.

In the WWDC Keynote Address Steve showed how Leopard has Stacks, and how there is a new Download folder where items that you download from the internet will reside. Music to my ears, I to the same thing today without the assistance of having it setup by Apple, and without the fancy dock folder that Stacks / Downloads offer.

Running Tiger, I have my system setup with a similar function. This helps me to keep a [slightly] less cluttered desktop, and it allows me to have a single folder that I monitor for virus via ClamXav. (I don't feel the need to have ClamXav monitor everything - just things I download from the internet.)

I have a folder on my desktop named Web Downloads.

And I have also added this folder to the left bar in Finder for easy access:

At this point you may just want to wait for Leopard, but then again, in less time than it takes to read this article, you can setup a similar setup for yourself.

I've been on my iMac at home for almost a year and a half (after switching from the dark, evil, Windows XP world.)

Just this past week I realized that when I drag a URL from Camino's addressbar onto my desktop, that the resulting file is a Webloc file. On a Windows machine it would produce a URL file.

I realized when I send a URL file in an email to a friend and they said "what the hell is this Webloc file?"

Of course you can always paste a URL into an email or document, but there are times when you want or need a file. Luckily there is a great little utility, WeblocMaker, to convert URL files on your mac, you can put in the URL and a title and it will create it, or you can drop a Webloc file onto it, and it will read the URL.



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NeoOffice is a variant of OpenOffice (think a free Office Suite similar to Microsoft Office). The icon sets in both OpenOffice.org and NeoOffice leave a bit to be desired. I ran across an icon set today which is a great improvement over the stock offerings. My appologies to the people who are responsible for this great work, I just don't know who to credit. I do recall that these are the same icons for Ubunto OpenOffice.org but the Ubunto icons were going to be tinted a bit to match the theme of the OS.

To use this great icon set:
1) Download the icon set zip file: images_hicontrast.zip
2) Close NeoOffice
3) Navigate to your NeoOffice application file on your Mac.
4) Right click on NeoOffice and select: Show Package Contents
5) Navigate into the Config folder: Contents / Share / Config
6) Replace the old "images_hicontrast.zip" with the new file you downloaded.
(Note you can replace one of the other icon sets, I just found HiContrast to be the worst so I choose it to replace.)
7) Open NeoOffice, select TOOLS | OPTIONS | VIEW. In the drop down box select HiContrast as the style. (I prefer large icon in the other drop down box)


Note, you can use this same icon set file with OpenOffice for Mac or Windows, the folder is in a slightly different place, but search for the images_hicontrast.zip file and you'll locate it.



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When OS X 10.4.9 seeded the other day, my method of updating my iCal calendars to a standard web server broke. More specifically, a utility that made it possible was no longer compatible. Pygmy Software has just updated Scalp, and all is good again.

This is a terrific way to have read access to your iCal calendars when you're away, at work, or just not at your main computer. Here is the tutorial.

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Daniel has made some updates to WebExport, his already great export utility iPhoto.

WebExportWebExport is a universal exporter for iPhoto 5 and 6. It is geared for the production of low to high end photo galleries on any kind of website. I developed it to produce the galleries on my website, and in all likelihood, it will work on your site. It is a semi-derivative of CustomHTMLExport, with new features, a new look, and a redone basecode. Templates are not cross-compatible.

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iSync is fantastic. It allows you to keep your computer and mobile phone in syncronization. For example, you're out somewhere and manage to get the digits off somebody you're interested in, the next time you iSync your mobile with your computer your mobile will update your Mac's address book with the new number you added to your phone. And if you add any new contacts in your Mac's address book, they will auto-sync to your phone. This is a simple yet very powerful tool to help keep your computer and mobile phone in sync.

iBluetooth

The only thing that makes iSync even better is being able to perform the iSync wirelessly via Bluetooth and to automate the iSync so that it happens automatically without your having to initiate the process. This entry covers how to make this happen.

I was in need of a new mobile phone and as cool as the upcoming iPhone looks, I just want a basic phone. I don't have many requirements of a phone. I want a thin phone since I carry it in the front pocket of my pants. I also want a phone that is compatible with the Mac's iSync so that I can easily syncronize my contact information between my iMac and my phone.

Be sure to check to see if iSync supports your phone, or something new that you're considering. Here is Apple's iSync device compatibility list. There are also some modifications and third party solutions to make more phones work. Just google the phone model and isync to see if there are solutions if your device is not directly supported by iSync.

The Motorola Razr is the phone I picked, it is thin and it works with iSync over bluetooth - no cables needed! It is very easy to setup your new mobile device to talk with your Mac via Bluetooth. From your menu select the Bluetooth icon, select Set up Bluetooth Device... and follow the steps to pair the mobile device to your Mac.

I used to sync my previous phone, a Motorola V180, via a USB cable to my iMac which worked fine. But having to plug in the USB cable often meant that I didn't do it. When I received my new Razr I was excited, more than anything, to get it connected to my iMac via Bluetooth. After charging the phone, I went through the menu shown just above to set up the new bluetooth device. It takes less time to actually set up the device than it takes to read this paragraph talking about it. It is a nice and easy procedure.

The next step is to add the device to iSync. Launch iSync, select the Devices menu, and then Add Device... select your Bluetooth enabled phone, and then it will show up in the iSync application.

At this point, you can begin syncing your computer and your mobile device by launching the iSync application and pressing the Sync Devices button. That is all fine and good, but it works much better in my opinion if I can completely automate it. After a little searching, I found an AppleScript at MacOSXHints.com that would launch iSync, initiate the Sync Devices, and then exit iSync. Here is that script. There are several method you can then choose from to schedule this AppleScript. You can do a Cron entry via the terminal, you can use Lingon, or what I did was to just use iCal. I made a new iCal entry for iSync for each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 8PM, then in the Alarm settings for the event in iCal, I selected to Run Script and selected the script that I had got from MacOSXHints.com. I'm not so sure that I like seeing the iSync event in my iCal though, so I may just delete it and set a cron job via the terminal to run the script say every 48 hours.

By the way, if you do want the Applescript, you can download the actual script here.



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Some German guy figured out how to wire your won USB connector for the new iPod Shuffle for less than a dollar.

Nice going!

Here is the link to the instructions.

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For some unknown reason, every once in a while this glitch in OS X will happen to me. When I right click on a file and select Open With I will see all of the associated programs listed twice! Depending on the file type, it can sometimes be a very long list when duplicated.

You can easily use Onyx, a terrific free utility to correct this problem. Please note that Onyx is a very powerful system utility. Don't play around with features that you aren't sure about, there is the potential to mess things up if you don't know what you're doing.

Click on the images below for larger images.

The first image shows how all the apps are listed twice. The next image shows what to execute in Onyx to fix the problem, and the last image shows the Open With list corrected.

The thumbnail pictures below now link to the full size images.

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iCal is an application with Mac OS X that works really well. iCal is a simple to use Calendar with some powerful features. With iCal you can subscribe to Calendars over the internet from sites like iCalShare and Apple (Subscribing to calendars is a quick and easy way to bring events into iCal. For example if you follow a sports team you can subscribe to a calendar for them instead of manually setting up all the game days in iCal manually.)

Not only can you easily subscribe to Calendars, now you can publish your iCal to any website (not just to 'dot Mac' or a WebDav site.) The setup to do this could certainly be easier in my opinion, but it should only take about 10 to 15 minutes if you have web space and know how to use an ftp client, the software needed is free.

Here is a step by step guide to publishing your iCal Calendars to a web space.

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Occasionally I'll run an application or something from the web, usually something with both Audio and Video, and after playing it I no longer have audio on my Mac. I've heard others grumbling about this too.

What happens is that the 'offending' application is setting your Audio Output frequency to a higher frequency that other apps can playback with. In my case my frequency gets set to 96,000.0 Hz on occasion.

To reset your Audio settings so that you hear system and other audio events again you just need to open the app: Audio Mini Setup, make sure y