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This is a follow up to my previous post about locking the system out of itself by trying to set “Everyone”’s priveledges to “no access” via get info and locking Leopard out of its own system.
I recently discovered that my file sharing is not behaving like it is supposed to. “Everyone” having “read only” access indeed SHARES ALL OF MY FILES with read only access and no password required. If you try and set “Everyone” to “no access” via get info like I previously described, when you reboot Leopard fails to launch and the Leopard install disk cannot repair the permissions. (See my previous post for my fix).
But when I try and change the read only access for Everyone, “no access” is greyed out:

This is a huge bug apple!! Leopard has downgraded the ability to share files with a password.

For several months I have been trying to stream my iTunes library from my iMac to my wireless laptop in the living room on the same network. I’ve streamed iTunes with various software to other devices (other PCs, Windows Mobile phone, iPhone) using SlimServer, Simplify Media and Mojo, but for some reason it would not stream over the network.
I tried updating iTunes on both machines but had no luck. I tried using Simplify Media to share instead but that didn’t work either. I double checked the preferences on both machines. I disabled the firewall and AVG antivirus. Still no luck.
Finally, I solved it: I opened up Apple Software Update and installed the Bonjour update for Windows. So it was Apple’s fault but I couldn’t find any documentation anywhere. Oh well, it’s fixed now. Hurray!

One thing I miss in Safari was if you held down command when you were clicking submit in a form (such as a google search), it would open the results in a new tab.

One thing I like about Firefox is it’s super extensible. I found a decent replacement here:
Submit to Tab
Hold down control on PC or command on mac and click Submit and voila. I wish that command return worked for forms, and that it worked with the google search bar, but meh, it works well enough.

I’ve always wanted a Firefox add on that would send me a list of my open tabs in an email so I could look at them later. No, I don’t want these bookmarked, I just want to read them later. Read it Later comes close, but I’m finding myself never actually coming back to read those later.

I thought of this again tonight when I had a zillion tabs open for a research paper and thought I’d do some googling. Ideally I wanted to export a list of tabs with both the URLs and titles of the pages so I could list them in my bibliography. In the past I’ve had to re-google the pages I used to reference them.

I did find what looks to be an awesome citation management add on for firefox called Zotero. This add on has many features but was overkill for my needs - it stores PDFs and documents, attempts to capture citation information from web pages, and lets you take notes. But as far as I can tell it does not just save the title and URL of the web page you’re browsing, and instead tries to parse that page itself for citations.

Finally, a search for ‘firefox tabs urls titles’ did it: I found Send Tab URLs 2.0 for firefox which is freaking perfect. You can get a plain, numbered, or bulleted list and send it to yourself via your OS’s email or gmail. Even better, you can just send it to the clipboard. So simple and yet I’ve been longing for this for so long. It works perfectly, I paste it into Word and voila, I have a bibliography. Thanks, Alex Eng!!!

For a couple weeks now I’ve been wanting to create a Pandora station specifically for Bartók’s String Quartet No. 4 in C Major. I want to find more classical music that sounds like this. Now that Pandora supports classical music, I would try typing in “Bartok” into the search function, but I would get Bartok’s symphonies. I tried typing in “String Quartet bartok” but got no results because that is neither just a name of a song nor just an artist. “String Quartet No” got me intresting results, but the autosuggest listings did not give me Bartok.
Finally I figured it out: While listening to the Bartók station, I clicked on “about this artist” to go to Bartók’s page. From there I could navigate to the specific album and track I wanted, and then do “Create a Station” based on that track. Now I’m finding all sorts of cool string quartets.

Try it, it’s awesome.

Based on this URL hack to sort google results by date, I made a bookmarklet:
javascript:location.href =location.href + '&as_qdr=d';
Now if you google search and then click this button, it will sort your results by the newest date. Works in FF and Safari.

If you’re as obsessed as I am about tracking some packages, you’ll get sick of typing in your tracking number and submitting the form over and over. But if you go to:
http://trkcnfrm1.smi.usps.com/PTSInternetWeb/InterLabelInquiry.do
it doesn’t work because the form used a POST method.
Well, on the previous page, the form input field was called strOrigTrackNum. Some sites let you post a form via the GET method, so let’s see if this works:
http://trkcnfrm1.smi.usps.com/PTSInternetWeb/InterLabelInquiry.do?strOrigTrackNum=[your tracking number]
Yup! Worked fine. Now you have a URL that you can bookmark to quickly track your shipment.

For a while I was getting a maddening “The iPhone cannot be synced. An unknown error occurred (13213)” error every time I would try and sync my iPhone. No amount of iphone resetting or iTunes restarting would solve my problem. Finally this apple disccusion solved my problem - I had to turn off iTunes Genius and then it worked fine.
But that sucks, I liked Genius, and iTunes stupidly got rid of the mini store so now I can’t see any reviews or album information of the tracks I’m listening to. (Genius isn’t much better actually, it shows you artists’ top albums by default instead of information on the one you’re listening to. Bring back the mini store!)
Anyway, the solution was to upgrade quicktime, which I had been avoiding because it requires a reboot. Actually my 10.5.5 update crashed and almost hosed my machine so I had to use the 10.5.5 Combo Update (which I highly recommend, as you still have Finder and activity monitor control as it works) to upgrade and then upgrade quicktime.
Anyway, after I installed the quicktime update and reinstalled Genius, my iPhone sync worked fine.

I’ve used parallels for years and never noticed the “Use Multiple Displays” option of Coherence mode. It’s accessible via the Edit > Virtual Machine settings when you shut down your VM, but it’s also hidden away in View > Customize… which you can access during runtime.

Now I can finally drag that word requirements doc or release note onto my second monitor while I code in the first. Sweet! It’s something I’ve missed without realizing I was missing it.

There are some bugs though. My second monitor is taller than the first because I have it rotated 90 degrees; that means the task bar mounts to the bottom of the second monitor and doesn’t display on the first, so I can’t see the start menu. I can click on the parallels icon in the dock to see the start menu, but I still can’t see quick launch. I can turn on “Exclude Dock” for usable work area, but then the task bar floats across the middle of my second monitor and applications cannot be resized past it. My solution in the mean time is to relocate my task bar and start menu to the top of the screen, where it more or less runs along the top of both of my monitors. This is a strange new workflow but I think I like it!

I have my iTunes music library, samples, video files, and more on an external drive, and the 5 second delay of my drive spinning up is annoying at best and prevents me from working at worst. I finally just found the menu that disables the external drive from spinning down. I don’t know how this affects the drive life but it’s worth it for me.

System Preferences > Energy Saver > uncheck Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible