Simply Random

I just installed Ubuntu on my mac so I had to repartition my hard drive. This means I had to reinstall my mac OSX (Tiger) as well (because I didn’t use 3rd-party application to resize the partition). But there was one problem when I tried to install mac OSX. After the installation was finished, it kept asking for the second disc which it was not supposed to but my first impression was the second disc was needed for the installation as well. The drive kept spitting out the installation DVD everytime I put it in. Well, I was stuck with it and it made me think that my dvd drive was malfunctioning because it had problems playing DVDs lately. But I was lucky enough to find a solution on macfixit forum posted by DonKelley.
Here’s his solution. Boot into single user mode (Command-s at the startup) and then type the following commands:

[or

for journaled file system]
[repeat until it no longer says that the Filesystem was modified]

and then reboot. that’s all.

A huge thanks to DonKelley on MacFixIt.

Last night, I spent almost 3 hours fixing my mac! It was the very first time after 3 years that I’ve encountered any problems. After I restarted my machine, the finder went funny. It kept restarting every 2 minutes. It didn’t cause any serious problems though- It was just that any program I was working on lost its focus every time the finder restarted. The very first thing that came into my mind was the software update (v 10.4.10) so I googled it and found out that people had different problems with the update 10.4.10. But there was no good solution to it besides reinstalling mac. Well I definitely can’t at this stage. Then I thought of downgrading the update but it turned out that I couldn’t do that either. And then again I thought of asking Google  a more generic question like “mac finder keeps restarting”. I found a few sites with the same answers. They suggested to delete these files (finder preferences),

and

. After deleting them, I logged out and logged in but the problem didn’t go away. By the file path, I knew that those preferences only belonged to this current account that I was in. So I gave it a try by logging in to my other account to see whether the problem occurred or not in the other account. Read the rest of this entry →

I love mighty mouse for the fact that it’s simplistically beautiful and highly functional. But i guess there’s no such thing as perfect. The drawback of mighty mouse is the scroll ball traps dirt and grease easily and after sometime it doesn’t work at all when you scroll downward. I was trying to clean the dirt and stuff that was trapped inside the mouse by following official instruction from Apple but it didn’t work at all. I’ve googled and found out that many people have the same problem. Some said the official instruction worked, some took a step further by applying alcohol to the ball, and other went to the extreme by disassembling it. Well, I’ve tried them all except the last option. I left it unused for months now and thought well I don’t do anything about it I won’t be able to use it anyways so I rather get it fixed or chuck it in the bin. I was in dilemma because if I was to take it apart then it had to break it because it has a ring that keep top part and second part of the mouse together and Apple attaches the ring to the mouse by gluing. If it used clips or things like that I would have done it ages ago. Yeah, finally it disassembled it and found out there were big chunks of dirt and lint on the wheels driven by the scroll ball and I was amazed by the simplicity of the design and yet it works like magic. But i had to glued them back together and it is the worst thing Ok, I have a question. Why don’t they use clips (I wouldn’t want screws though) instead of glue? Or do they encourage us to buy a new one every now and then?

The top part, the bottom part and the ring

The scroll ball compartment (there are 4 other wheels in it)

The wheels attached the compartment

The wheels driven by the scroll ball

Put them back after cleaning

It works now

Drag-and-Drop is the beauty of the GUI but sometimes other thing gets in the way that makes it useless. The most annoying drag-and-drop I have ever come across is when I try to drag the address of a website (by dragging the icon) from the firefox address box and place it on the bookmark toolbar folder but before I drop it in the folder a tooltip with a message “drag and drop this icon to create a link to this page”. It sounds good, right? The folder I wanna place a bookmark is under that tooltip. After I drop the link and I check the folder the link it’s not even there because that tooltip block it from going in. I was like grrrrrrr. I think this happens to mac version only. But lucky enough, firefox provides a way to turn it off. Go type “about:config” in the address box and hit the enter. It shows a list of configurable feature, find “browser.chrome.toolbar_tips” item and double-click to turn it value to false. That’s set.