Mac Smarts

Version 9 of Adobe Reader for Macintosh has a quirk whereby if you attempt to use it when you’re logged into a network-based account (rather than a local account on the computer in front of you) it just quits.

It turns out though that even if you are working on a network-home-folder, you can re-direct some Acrobat Reader files to your local drive. After doing this, Reader will launch and behave normally.

Here’s how to make it work:

1. Log in to your network-user account
2. In your hard disk, double click on “Users”, and then “Shared”
3. Create a new folder here. The name of this folder will differ, depending upon which type of processor your Mac has. If you have an Intel-based Mac, name the folder “9.0_x86″. If you have a PowerPC based Mac, name the folder “9.0_ppc”.
4. Go to your home folder, then double-click on “Library”, then “Application Support”, then “Adobe”, then “Acrobat”.  Inside “Acrobat” you’ll find either a folder named “9.0_x86″ or “9.0_ppc”. Trash this folder.
5. Inside your drive, double click on “Applications”, then “Utilities”, then “Terminal”.
6. Again depending on what type of Mac you have, enter one of the following:
   ln -s /Users/Shared/9.0_x86 ~/Library/Application\ Support/Adobe/Acrobat/9.0_x86
or
ln -s /Users/Shared/9.0_ppc ~/Library/Application\ Support/Adobe/Acrobat/9.0_ppc
7. Launch Acrobat 9, and it should work properly.

What’s happening: Acrobat Reader has difficulty reading and writing to a folder across the network, and if you’re using a network-based home folder, that’s where your home folder is. This set of steps tells Reader to write all of its files to the local drive instead.

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If you use the utility KeyRemap4Macbook, you can change the way certain keys on your keyboard work. It works with both 10.4 “Tiger” and 10.5 “Leopard”, with the MacBook, MacBook Pro, iMac, and Mac mini.

One helpful idea is to change (that is, to “re-map”) the Fn key on your laptop keyboard to another ‘control’ key. This improved layout mimics the way desktop computer keyboards are layed out, so that your fingers don’t have to remember a different movement when you move over to your laptop.

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I guess you could call this an update to some recent MacSmarts posts.

Firefox 3.5 is out now, but if you’re making use of the amazing DragDropUpload plugin, you already know that they just don’t get along.

It’s a double-whammy if you’re in an environment with network-home-folders (which are common in mid-size and large companies).  Why?  The newest version prior to the 3.5 release was 3.0.11, which was incompatible with network homes.

Yes, if you work from a network based home folder, and you like to use the DragDropUpload Firefox plugin, you have to stick with good ol’ release 3.0.10, which is difficult to find. All of the ‘previous version’ links at mozilla.org seemed to point to 3.0.11 — not what I was looking for.

I spent 20 minutes trying to track this down today, so I thought I’d post the link here in case anyone else was trying to track it down. The sensibly-named OldApps.com had a direct link for FireFox 3.0.10.

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If you’re using FireFox to read your GMail, you know this all too well. Any time you compose a new message, you have to click the ‘attach a file’ link, then burrow down into your computer, pick one file, and click ’select’.  Yuck — and if you want to attach multiple files, you have to do the same attachment-dance for each one. If you send attached files often, this is annoying and inefficient.

What most people don’t know about Firefox is that you can install plugins to change the way Firefox works. Plugins do little jobs that FireFox doesn’t know how to do on its own.

For GMail users, the DragDropUpload plugin for FireFox lets you drag the files you want to attach to your message, rather than using that “browse” button and tracking down the file. Just drag in the file and it will start uploading automatically! Not only that, but you can drag multiple files and upload them all at once!

Just drag in the file...

...and Firefox will upload it to GMail. I know there isn't much to show you, but this book review is uploading...

...and when it's done, it looks like this.

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If you want to find out which parts of your PDF document are printed with a specific CMYK or spot color, use this tip with Adobe’s Acrobat Pro.

Inside Acrobat Pro, head to Advanced > Print Production > Output Preview… to produce this window:

Acrobat Pro's Output Preview Window

From here, you can enable and disable the visibility of individual colors from your PDF document. This is very useful to isolate specific elements and determine what spot color they are. This is a simple way to use Acrobat Pro rather than expensive pre-flighting software before sending your press-ready PDF to your printing vendor.

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Hey iTunes! How exactly do you determine how long ‘recently’ is? I’m subscribed to more than twenty podcasts… you know it is possible that I might not get to them all immediately. That doesn’t mean that I want you to stop downloading them though! My iPod has 80 GB of space, and podcasts are generally quite small.

The worst part of this is that it happens no matter how I’ve adjusted the settings for the podcast. That is, even if I specify “When new episodes are available: Download the most recent one” and “Episodes to keep: All episodes”, iTunes ignores these settings.

iTunes, you could fix this entirely by giving me a preference setting like “Stop downloading new episodes if the past N episodes are still unlistened to.”

UPDATE: According to Apple’s Support articles, specifically #23353:

You’ve subscribed to a podcast but have more than five unplayed episodes. iTunes will stop automatically downloading newer episodes. You may get the following message:

iTunes has stopped updating this podcast because you have not listened to any episodes recently. Would you like to resume updating this podcast?You can click Yes to continue downloading additional episodes. Or you can just listen to any part of any episode and a new episode will download at the next update.

I’m still not happy, but at least now I know the magic is just apple looking for podcasts with five unheard episodes.

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GMail is a great web platform. Once you’ve signed up, you can access your email from any web browser, no matter where it is. You can have GMail pick up messages from all of your other accounts too, and centralize all of your mail (minus any spam) lives in one convenient place.

Your mail appears on a web page and you can organize, reply, or compose new messages easily. You’re interacting directly with Google’s GMail servers. Click a new message’s subject line, and your web browser fetches the contents of the message.

But having the contents of your messages zipping across the internet makes some people nervous. What if I’m reading something that’s sensitive? Business plans, proposals, online log-in credentials, banking information… these are important!

Google agrees, and that’s why they offer the option of encrypting the traffic between your web browser and their servers. They use something called “HTTP-Secure” to scramble the traffic before it’s sent, and unscramble it when it’s received at the other end.  That way, even if someone was listening in on the network traffic, they wouldn’t get any useful information. It would look like gibberish to them.

It’s easy to turn on ‘https’ encryption at GMail, and I recommend it.

But recently I had a client who was having trouble with their company’s Google Apps accounts. They’re all GMail users, but they were having trouble attaching files to messages. Specifically, whenever they’d select a file to attach, they’d get an error message in red text that read “Attachment failed. This may be due to a proxy or firewall.”

This GMail error appeared when attempting to upload an attachment.

They were very annoyed. Google suggested using their “classic uploader” rather than their fancier advanced uploader. We gave that a try, but ended up with the same issue.

I did a quick Google search to see if anyone else may have been having the problem, and I found this discussion at Google’s help site. One method that seemed to work for most of the people was to disable the https requirement.

I was not happy about the prospect of essentially disabling the encryption, but I presented it as an option to test. It hadn’t worked for everyone in that discussion, but at least it was something to try.  We used the administrative control panel to visit Domain Settings > SSL  and uncheck the ‘require https connections’ checkbox.

Uncheck the "Enable SSL" box in the Domain Settings > General > SSL section of your Google Apps administration pages. You won't be as secure, but your attachments will upload properly.

Then for each user who was having trouble, we disabled https in their GMail settings.

Disable the https requirement here and save your changes. (If the radio button is disabled, log out of your GMail account and log back in.)

Our quick tests proved to be successful, attaching messages now worked just as it ought to, even with the advanced uploader.

I’ve since filed a support issue with Google, complete with screenshot and steps to reproduce. I really don’t like to compromise security in order to make GMail work as it should, so I’m monitoring this situation closely.

UPDATE: Enterprise Support was able to tell us a few days ago that they had resolved the problem.  What did they fix? They weren’t saying. So I went back to the admin panel and re-enabled the forcing of https connections.  We’ve found that our functionality is back! We can now attach files to messages without error messages.  While I’m happy that things are back to normal, I would have appreciated a faster turnaround time from Enterprise Support.

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With apologies to Mr. Gruber…

Time Warner Cable customers,

We have heard a lot of feedback and commentary about our upcoming expanded consumption-based billing trials in Texas, North Carolina and New York state. Some accounts have even characterized our plans as punitive. Nothing could be further from the truth.

ZOMG! The cellphone people have this pricing thing figured out!

We continue to make improvements to the infrastructure which will allow us to offer the following new services in the tiered broadband test markets:

1) Wideband service (DOCSIS 3.0) — speeds up to 100mbps, as available

2) Higher speeds for existing standard and turbo services

3) Powerboost to all standard customers

You’ll be able to hit the caps sooner than ever! Beep Beep!

With regard to consumption-based billing, we have determined that as broadband usage and penetration grow, there are increasing differences in the amount of bandwidth our customers consume. Our current pricing plans require all users to pay the same amount, whether they check email once a month or download six movies a day. As the amount of usage has dramatically diverged among users, this is becoming inherently unfair and not the way most consumers want to pay for goods they consume.

When you want to charge tiers, it’s all about ‘fairness, choices, and control’; When you want to roll services together, it’s all about ’simplicity’.

We are developing a “super – tier” now that allows for up to 100 GB of broadband usage per month in all of our test markets. We haven’t confirmed pricing details as of this moment, but you have my word as Chief Operating Officer of Time Warner Cable that we will make this tier available to our customers.

There, that ought to shut them up.

We’re also providing a “gas gauge” tool to our customers so they can see how much bandwidth they’re using as they go along, and to make it easier for them to move to the tiers that best serve their needs.

Just pick a tier, and start payin’, will ya?

Please bear in mind that this is still a test. We are approaching this as a test because broadband consumption and the internet itself continue to evolve rapidly and in ways no one can foresee.

Who knew this Hulu/Netflix/Boxee/YouTube/iTunes thing would get so popular?

As we continue to hear from our customers — and as broadband consumption continues to change — we will adjust our tiers to make sure that we offer something for every family. We want to allow households to pick the data plan that works the best for them.

We don’t say ‘improve’ around here, we say ‘adjust’.

Furthermore, I am convening a series of meetings this week to develop plans that will allow customers to choose among tiers that provide tradeoffs between speed and consumption. If one family prefers to have lower download speeds but a higher data tier, or vice-versa, we want them to be able to make that choice.

Dial-up speeds, all month long, for exactly the same price you were paying a few months ago. Try your P2P now, mammajammas!

We’d like to make enough speed and data tiers available so that it’s possible for customers to reduce their monthly Internet bill based on the choices they make. Obviously this is still in the planning stages and details are fuzzy, but this is a priority for me this week.

Math is tough.

I think that such pricing options are not only fair, but also will actually encourage more use of broadband overall.

Because more people using less broadband is better than less people using more broadband — duh!

Your feedback is important to us during these tests, too. We encourage you to email your reactions and comments to us at [realideas@twcable.com ].

We dream it, you pay it. That’s the deal, people.

We can’t respond to everyone individually, but we will review your thoughts and comments internally and use them to try to improve our services and options going forward.

We care what you think, but we don’t care what you think.

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EDIT 6/4/2009: This incompatibility has been completely resolved. I’m happily using Gears to create a local cache of my GMail.

After installing Google Gears three times now, and still having Gmail say back to me “This page does not have permission to use Gears.”, I went in search of more information.

First I started with Console, looking for recent messages from Safari. Luckily, I found this entry:

It seems that Safari and Google Gears aren’t getting along.

Then I took the key phrase from the error message (”Gears InputManager failed to load Gears, exiting…”) and searched for other folks who might be having the same problem. I found the bug report database for Google Gears, where I unearthed this gem.

It looks like Google Gears isn’t compatible with a case-sensitive version of HFS Extended, but their next release will rectify the situation.  I hope they roll out that change soon!

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It’s my wife’s primary computer, and I do my best to keep it running in tip-top shape. We’ve replaced parts that have worn out (a power cord and a keyboard so far…) and it’s the battery that’s got my attention now.

Lately, the battery just doesn’t hold the charge that it used to. Runtimes are down to 20 minutes where they used to be hours. I learned about Coconut Battery, a great utility that can reveal the actual data about your battery.

Just launch the app and immediately get information about your current battery charge, how many times the battery has been charged, how old your Mac is, and how much of your battery’s original capacity to hold a charge remains.

Here’s what Coconut Battery reports for our iBook’s battery:

Coconut Battery breaks the bad news. This battery is toast.

So now that I know the battery is nearly useless, what next?  Where can I get a replacement?

After a bit of googling, I was able to find a few retailers who still make replacement batteries for this aging 12″ iBook.

Other World Computing had a nice unit for $119, One amazon seller had another unit with high reviews for  $108, and a third had one for significantly less at $68.50, so shop around! Even the cheapest aftermarket battery I found has more capacity than a stock Apple battery.

So with a handy tool and a little detective-work, your laptop can be running like new!

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