can't use it

I got this tiny flash drive from Amazon a couple of months ago and I really grew to like it. Something peculiar happened with it, Windows wouldn’t recognize the FAT partition that I had created using Mac OS X and re-formatting it with Windows reduced the capacity of the disk to 200mb.

Solution is to use HP’s flash drive format tool under Windows, it recognizes the full capacity.

http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file/fid,64963-page,1/descr­iption.html

Keywords: flash disk, flash drive, usb drive, thumb drive (we really need a standardized name :), 200 mb, 200mb, partition, format

I coded some javascript to emulate css transitions for older browsers. It works by parsing the CSS of the page, determining rules which also have a :hover state, then attaching itself to onmouseover/onmouseout events and animating according to the hovered definition in CSS.

Here’s the quirky proof of concept and you can read the source to look at the code as well. It’s quite a dirty solution:

• IE has different ways of accessing the stylesheet, didn’t implement that
• It’s probably very inefficient to iterate over all styles to get the hovered rules. Moreover, for each hovered rule, I search through the style rules again to find the un-hovered rule (O(n²) :)). Probably indexing all rules in a JS array would make things faster because of direct access? Another good idea if making the user provide all selectors which should be hover-animated.
• It goes wonky if attributes that can’t be animated are defined (like font-family). I should probably make a list of all “animatable” attributes and only work on them.
• It doesn’t account for default styles defined with a browser style-sheet (doesn’t restore them on mouseout)
• For some reason margin-left and margin-right aren’t read in Firefox?

Anyway here’s the thing: Automatic transition animation for CSS hovers with jQuery.

BetterTouchTool is a more advanced  version of MultiClutch that I talked about a month ago. It allows to customize the gestures of both Magic Mouse and the multi touch touchpad. It also incorporates functionality similar to “MiddleClick”.

Get it here: http://blog.boastr.net/

From http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20060906153448633

Convert Real audio and video into MP3 and AVI files
Authored by: straniero on Wed, Jan 17 2007 at 1:47AM PST

I want to thank the person who started this thread! I’ve been trying for years to convert my South Park Real Movie collection to Quicktime and have finally managed thanks to them!

But… The instructions are not real clear! Here’s plain and clearly what you need to do to convert .rm video to Quicktime….

1) Download ffmpegX.dmg, mencoder and mplayer from ffmegx.com/download.html
mencoder and mplayer are zipped together as “ffmpegXbinaries20060307.zip”
Unzip them after downloading or FFMPEGX can’t find them while it’s installing (D’uh!)
Run FFMPEGX so that it can complete the installation!!!!!

2) Download and install Real Player 10 (not 9 or any other version!) from real.com
I tried it with 9 and realized that these people who are saying that they couldn’t find the “codecs” folder in the right place were doing the same thing, and it doesn’t work! (I did only find 12 codecs and not 14, but it works!)

3) Control-click on the Realplayer icon and “open package contents”. Navigate to Contents -> Frameworks -> HXClientKit.framework -> Helix Plugins -> Codecs. Take all of the files in the “codecs” folder and copy them to a new folder that you create inside of /Library/Application Support/ffmpegX and name the folder “reallib”.

4)That’s it! Open FFMPEGX and convert your Realplayer media to Quicktime! For some reason though, you must use the DivX Mencoder preset or it won’t work, (So, export it again when you’re done!)

Other tips….
FFPEGX just has stripes on the progress bar while it’s doing this conversion, it’s normal.
If you do a “get info” while you’re converting, you’ll see millions of “1 Dupicate frame(s)!” messages. It’s not stuck in a loop! I think what it should say is “1 Frame has been duplicated!”. These messages just mean that it is working!

I also found that by putting the 3ivx codec into FFMPEGX in the same way as the Real codecs I could convert videos that I could get to run in Quicktime before! Who knows the possibilities?

Happy encoding!
The Straniero

In Europe, to get ADSL working, you plug the router in, and usually the first page you open asks for your username and password. You enter them, you get going. The most you do is opening 192.168.1.1 and putting down some info.

In the US, you are forced to download and install an installer, which will take a couple of hours out of your life, doing essentially nothing but setting up your username and password (and maybe a few router settings, but since they ship the router themselves they can preset them already). There is no option to skip the screens which tell you how to plug an electric adapter into the wall socket! And every screen loads in a few seconds meaning you can’t just press next next next and keep going.

And their installer refuses to run on Mac OS Snow Leopard, saying that the system I use is too old. Luckily I had a spare Windows laptop! Otherwise no internet for me.

You wait, going through tons of unnecessary screens, agreeing to unnecessary agreements, getting installed SH*T on your computer! I was baffled to see Verizon actually FORCES you to install the Yahoo stuff! If you deselect both the Messenger and the Toolbar, you can’t continue!

If they would rape my main computer this way, instead of the Windows partition of my old MacBook, I’d be very annoyed.

Why couldn’t I just plug my router in like elsewhere in the world!?

http://clement.beffa.org/labs/projects/middleclick/

Three finger tap becomes middle click. This, added to MultiClutch that I previously mentioned, boosts my web surfing productivity tenfold. I can open pages in new tabs, browse between tabs and close tabs without using the keyboard at all, just with finger strokes. It’s very nice, I must tell you :)

Here’s what I had been looking for some time, surely it would be of use to everybody.

Multiclutch lets you assign shortcut keys to some multi-touch gestures in applications, so let’s say in Safari when you put 3 fingers and swipe left, instead of going back-forward, you could configure it to switch tabs. Similarly you can configure rotate gesture to for example implement back-forward.

It’s a bit tricky to configure it on Snow Leopard, here’s how it works:

http://blog.prashantv.com/2009/multiclutch-fixes-instructions/

Don’t forget the last step, if you don’t do it, Firefox and some other apps might crash.

Lets you move objects not in whole pixels but in sub-pixels, great for making Apple-style indent or emboss effects.

http://johndunning.com/fireworks/about/CustomNudge

I installed Wireshark for my Networking course on Snow Leopard and had some difficulties.

After copying the command line utilities, if the folder you copied into wasn’t there before, it’s probably not in the include path. To edit the include path:

1. Open Terminal
2. sudo nano ~/.bash_profile
3. Add such a line:
   export PATH=/opt/wireshark/bin/:$PATH
   adjust name of the folder according to where you copied the files.

Secondly, I was instructed to put ChmodBPF in StartupItems, but got the following error when I restarted:

“/Library/StartupItems/ChmodBPF” has not been started because it does not have the proper security settings.

I observed that there was something wrong with the ownership of those files. To solve it,

1. Open Terminal
2. Go to /Library/StartupItems/
3. chown -R root:wheel

This will fix the problem.

Then I got the following errors when I ran Wireshark:

The following errors were found while loading the MIBS:
-:0 1 module-not-found failed to locate MIB module `IP-MIB’
-:0 1 module-not-found failed to locate MIB module `IF-MIB’
-:0 1 module-not-found failed to locate MIB module `TCP-MIB’
-:0 1 module-not-found failed to locate MIB module `UDP-MIB’
-:0 1 module-not-found failed to locate MIB module `SNMPv2-MIB’
-:0 1 module-not-found failed to locate MIB module `RFC1213-MIB’
-:0 1 module-not-found failed to locate MIB module `IPV6-ICMP-MIB’
-:0 1 module-not-found failed to locate MIB module `IPV6-MIB’
-:0 1 module-not-found failed to locate MIB module `SNMP-COMMUNITY-MIB’
-:0 1 module-not-found failed to locate MIB module `SNMP-FRAMEWORK-MIB’
-:0 1 module-not-found failed to locate MIB module `SNMP-MPD-MIB’
-:0 1 module-not-found failed to locate MIB module `SNMP-NOTIFICATION-MIB’
-:0 1 module-not-found failed to locate MIB module `SNMP-PROXY-MIB’
-:0 1 module-not-found failed to locate MIB module `SNMP-TARGET-MIB’
-:0 1 module-not-found failed to locate MIB module `SNMP-USER-BASED-SM-MIB’
-:0 1 module-not-found failed to locate MIB module `SNMP-USM-DH-OBJECTS-MIB’
-:0 1 module-not-found failed to locate MIB module `SNMP-VIEW-BASED-ACM-MIB’

Apparently there is a problem with include paths. Solution:

1. Click OK on error message.
2. In Wireshark window Edit > Preferences > Name Resolution.
3. Click SMI (MIB and PIB) paths edit button
4. Click New
5. Add the path /usr/share/snmp/mibs/
6. OK and close Wireshark, also close X11.
7. Restart Wireshark

Two things to do after upgrading:

1. Upgrade your Flash player because the one that comes with Snow Leopard is old. It gets choppy with HD videos, for example.
   Flash Player update and Snow Leopard
2. Follow the instructions on this forum post to clean caches
   http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=778819

UPDATE: I found out that the real problem was caused by extensions that weren’t compatible with Snow Leopard thus were giving errors and re-launching every few minutes (thus the beachballing). So open the Console and check your logs. When you identify the offending extensions from the Log, uninstall them if possible.

If you see launchd complaining that it can’t find something,  a handy script called “Consultant’s Canary” may help you see where they are configured so you can go ahead and delete the launcher scripts.