I received an email from someone who purchased (or in some other way acquired) my book who seemed distressed that spaces was not working correctly. Specifically, she had Mail set in the Spaces preferences (in the System Preferences) to open in Space #2, and it didn’t! After some back and forth emailing, we found that removing Mail from the “Application Assignments” section of the Preference and re-adding it seemed to fix the problem. Not sure what bugged this up in the first place (though I could offer guesses), however if you find yourself in a similar situation you may try this to see if it fixes your problem.
It seems there is a glitch in the AirPort connection dialog (or underling software) in Leopard that will occasionally prevent you from connecting to a wireless access point with a “Connection Timeout” message (usually involving WEP, which is yet another reason to upgrade to WPA). While frustrating, if you find yourself in this situation there is a solution: open up Safari and click your way through the the Network Diagnostics Utility (a button to launch this appears when you launch Safari and it can’t connect to the internet). This will successfully allow you to connect to the wireless access point (provided something else isn’t wrong anyway). As usual, I’d assume that there will be permanent fix for this soon, but at least for now there is a work around.
I just had to take my MacBook Pro in for service, and here are a couple of hints to help you if you ever have to do this.
- If you live near an Apple Store, don’t bother calling the Apple Care “hot line,” they have a string of things they’ll ask you to go through to rule out ‘human error’ (i.e. you) as the problem, and after all that they’ll more likely these days send you to the Apple Store anyway (or at least encourage it). They’ll still send you a box to send in a portable if you are insistent, but it’s not like the good ol’ days of AppleCare.
- If the Apple Store close to you is a particularly busy one (and they all tend to be especially this time of year), go online and schedules you appointment with an Apple Genius ahead of time. This will save lot’s of time.
- Create a dummy admin account if possible before you go, and lock your keychain. When they ask for the admin password , give them the info for the dummy account. It will allow them all the access they need, without easily allowing them to poke through your files. (Though if they really wanted to they could at this point, but this makes it inconvenient). They can use this info if they need to send you computer in as well.
- Make sure you back up everything before you take your computer in. I’ve never lost any info during a repair (…knock on wood…) but I know people it’s happened to. Time Machine provides a valid backup for those using Leopard.
- Prepare to be without your computer for a week or so. This sucks I know, but it’s a small price to pay for a healthy working computer. Often the repairs only take a few days, but occasionally they need to order parts or they could be particularly busy, and this will take some time.
You can add a very useful stack to your dock that can display a variety of you recent or favorite items. Do do this simply enter the following commands in the terminal:
defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-others -array-add '{ "tile-data" = { "list-type" = 1; }; "tile-type" = "recents-tile"; }'
killall Dock
You can then select what items you want this item to display from the stacks contextual menu.
Personally I like to leave it on “Favorite Items” which correspond to the user selectable locations under “PLACES” in the Finders side bar.
Another way to launch Time Machine Manually (expanding on this post) is a nice new Time Machine Launcher Dashboard Widget. This will allow you to manually launch Time Machine without having the Time Machine icon taking up space in your dock.
Ok, [cmd]+[space] (by default) opens the spotlight search field. But [opt]+[cmd]+[space] will go beyond that and open up a Spotlight Window listing all the contents of your mac listed in by the time they were last opened. This list includes Applications, files, safari history, and more. This shortcut it listed under the Spotlight section of Keyboard Shortcuts tab in the Keyboard & Mouse System Preferences pane as “Show Spotlight Window” so it can be remapped. It sort of makes the whole “Recent Items” item the Apple menu seem somewhat inadequate.
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