I have a lot of desktop backgrounds (a.k.a. “wallpapers”) on my Mac.  I keep them all in one folder and set them to change every 15 minutes in random order (currently, this folder has 1,329 backgrounds in it).  Every once in a while I see a background that I either love and want to make it the permanent background for a few days, or hate and want to delete it.  The problem is there’s no quick and easy way in OS X to find out the exact path and file name of the currently used background, so browsing through all those files is a major time waster.

Luckily, though, there is one place that the current background file is listed, and it’s in ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.desktop.plist.  If you have the development tools installed, you can use the Property List Editor to look at the /Background/default/LastName value, which, along with the /Background/default/NewChangePath value, make up the full path and file name of the current desktop background that OS X has changed.  The value of /Background/default/NewImageFilePath is the full path and file name of the last manually set background, but I’m not interested in that right now.

The problem with the above solution is that it’s still not the most convenient solution for my problem.  What I really want is a quick way to get the path and file name without having to open a program and a file and plus out some values.  I guess I could just leave a Finder window open to ~/Library/Preferences with com.apple.desktop.plist selected and open it up each time I want to see the background’s name, but that isn’t a very elegant solution. What I really want is an AppleScript that could be quickly launched via Quicksilver or LaunchBar and display the path and file name in a dialog box.

I looked around for five minutes, couldn’t find one, so I decided to write it myself.  Presented below, in all it’s glory, is an AppleScript that will display the full path and file name of the currently used desktop background in a dialog box.

set plistFolderPath to path to preferences folder from user domain as string
set plistPath to plistFolderPath & "com.apple.desktop.plist"

tell application "System Events"
	tell property list file plistPath
		tell contents
			set theResult to value of property list item "NewChangePath" of property list item "default" of property list item "Background" & "/" & value of property list item "LastName" of property list item "default" of property list item "Background"
		end tell
	end tell
end tell

display dialog theResult buttons {"Done"} default button 1

There are a few minor catches…it will only work if the current desktop background was automatically changed by OS X using the “Change picture” setting in the Desktop & Screen Saver preference pane.  Additionally, it doesn’t work for the first desktop background displayed after you set the check box…it actually has to be changed by the OS.

I have not tested it when the background is changed upon logging in or waking from sleep mostly because I don’t care since I’m very happy with it changing every 15 minutes. I’ve also only tested this on OS X 10.5.6.

When I got a new MacBook Pro I also ordered VMWare Fusion at the same time so I could run Windows and play around with a linux installation or two.  It works great, but I ran into a problem trying to install Solaris 10.

Windows XP, Vista, and Ubuntu all installed without issue, but the installation of Solaris, both graphical and text-based would hang at various points.  When I finally got it installed, it would hang on running, never even making it to the login screen. The problem was that even though I was specifying a 32-bit VM in VMWare, the Solaris installation was still identifying the Penryn chip as supporting 64-bit, so Solaris would install the 64-bit version. I wasn’t sure that was the whole problem, but I knew that was the first troubleshooting step.  After a doing a little exploration around the interwebs, I found a very simple solution to that problem.

Continue reading . . . 

This evening I was copying a large video file from my desktop “server” to my Mac laptop over wireless.  During the transfer, my wireless router conked out, as it does once in a while.  When it conks out in the particular fashion that it did this evening, it generally takes about 20 minutes for it to recover, and all wireless networking is useless during this time.  Because this “conk out” happened in the middle of a file transfer, Finder became hopelessly confused, even after the wireless connection was reestablished.  As I tried to get Finder to behave correctly, it became clear to me that I was going to have to restart it.

How you normally quit a misbehaving application

In the past, when I’ve needed to quit a misbehaving application, I click on the little blue Apple logo in the menu bar, click on the “Force Quit…” menu item, and the “Force Quit Applications” window would open.  I couldn’t do that this evening since Finder is the application responsible for making the little blue Apple logo in the menu bar function.  Since I couldn’t use the mouse to accomplish what I wanted, I had to use the keyboard, but as I reached for the keys to bring up the “Force Quit Applications” window, it hit me that I have no clue what key combination to use.

In Windows, it’s the ubiquitous Ctrl-Alt-Del...a combination that’s been drilled into my head since the days of PC-DOS 1.0.  MS wisely continued to use it in Windows for the same general purpose, and everyone, even my mother, knows to try it when things start behaving badly. Because my Mac hardly ever crashes, I have really never needed to use the combination of keys, and therefore hadn’t memorized them.  It happens to be Option-Command-Esc, but it took me a few minutes using my iPhone browser to find them.

One of the good things about the Mac being so stable is that you don’t need the emergency key combinations often.  The bad thing, is that when you do, you probably don’t remember them.  I think I’m going to print out this list of keyboard shortcuts and store it somewhere.

The new danger is that I won’t remember where I put it.

I found something the other day that’s a little annoying about the Mac.  Since I only reboot once in a great while, usually when a security update forces me to, which isn’t very often, upon each reboot I am usually confronted by a lot of my software notifying me that updates are available, which causes me to spend the next little while downloading and installing said updates.

I’ve gone weeks, even months between reboots and also between application launches, and am annoyed when some applications have gone through five or more updates, mostly bug related updates, that I was not aware of.

This is not a problem with the Mac, per se, but rather with some of the automatic software checking libraries that are used.  In fact, I blame lazy developers.  There is a free, open source, library out there called Sparkle that a developer can add to their application to accomplish update checking, and many do.  From a quick scan of the documentation, I gleamed that, by default, Sparkle checks for updates on application launch.  Upon further quick glances, I further gleamed that it seems to be relatively easy for a developer to implement periodic checks, and that said periodic checks could be user configurable.  The fact that some developers do not do this is just lazy.

Well, I’ve spent one year using a Mac as my main home computer.  It’s been a learning experience for me and I wrote about it here.

The bottom line?  I’m still using it, and will continue to do so.

I’ve been very happy using Safari most of the time.  When designing web pages, it does a very good job of rendering the layout (after all, it is Acid 2 compliant, but only in a every specific sort of way).  I have only one complaint.

The built-it pop-up blocker is actually quite good.  It does a good job of blocking unwanted pop-ups and allowing the wanted ones (the one’s you click on something to launch them).  The thing that kills me about it is that it doesn’t give any feedback when it blocks a pop-up.

Both IE and Firefox put a bar at the top of the page that alerts you that a pop-up was blocked.  This is a nice feature so that you know when you click something and nothing happens, you can see that a pop-up was supposed to open, but the browser blocked it.  Safari does not offer this.

This has only really been seen when a site uses Flash and launches a pop-up through a Flash link.  Some sort of visual evidence that a pop-up was blocked would be most welcome.

I use a program called TreeSize Pro at work to show me how a directory is being used.  It’s really useful when I ask a user to clean up their home drive and they come back and say, “I need everything that’s in there and it’s all work related!”.  After using the program and showing them that 90% of the space is taken up by MP3 and MPEG files, they generally change their tune (no pun intended).

I found a program for my Mac that’s even better.  Disk Inventory X inventories your hard drive and shows you a map that shows you relative file sizes and sort of groups them based on the type and location of the files.  Using it’s map, I was able to clean up about 15GB of unneeded data in about 5 minutes (damn GarageBand loops!).

Over the past few days there have been two updates to OS X 10.4.  10.4.3 came out on Monday and included a whole bunch of updates.  I normally do not update any software with patches until a few days/weeks have passed because usually something breaks as a result of the update, and I don’t like being a guinea pig.  That philosophy only works when I’m not waiting for the patch to fix something that isn’t working for me, as is the case with my AirPort problem.

I checked the Apple discussion to see what other people’s experiences were and if the update fixed their problem.  There were reports of it fixing the problem for some people and not fixing the problem for others, so I decided to give it a go.

Continue reading . . . 

About three weeks ago I upgraded the RAM in my iBook to the maximum 1.5GB.  I had 768MB but I noticed that when I ran Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Safari, Firefox, Mail, iCal, Adium and another app or two, there was a five second “pinwheel” when switching apps, and i figured that upgrading the RAM was a pretty cheap way to increase performance.  Every since then, every few days, I encountered a weird problem.

The problem happens without any clear event to trigger it, and happens every few days for me.  The symptoms are as follows:

• The mouse response to the trackpad starts to jump around.  It is as if the mouse on the screen freezes for a moment, then jumps across the screen in an attempt to catch up with the trackpad.  This makes using the mouse very difficult.
• The kernal_task process starts taking up about 65% of the processor.
• The AirPort indicator in the menu bar loses at least one level of reception.

The only way to completely solve the problem, for the moment, is with a reboot.  Stopping the AirPort does fix the kernal_task issue and mouse movement issue, but they both come right back as soon as you turn it back on.  Also, when you turn the AirPort off and turn it back on, it may not reconnect to the wireless network.

I did a whole bunch of research and found quite a few threads in various forums that others were having a similar problem.

Continue reading . . .