QuickFind 1.3

Just released QuickFind 1.3. Now includes the ability to set the window transparency.

Cheers,

Kev.

The VT lives again ...

I got my VT500 back from the bike shop (Tilleys in Weymouth) today. They'd had it for a fortnight and hadn't solved the problem. Basically, the bike had suddenly started running really badly, wouldn't idle and died when I opened the throttle. It had been going like that for a couple of days. Before I took it to the bike shop I checked the oil – the crankcase was completely full of petrol! The guys in the bike shop changed the oil and filters, put in new plugs, checked the carbs, faffed about with the petrol tap, and eventually gave up on the problem yesterday.

I managed to get it home today (at an average speed of about 5 miles an hour) £250 lighter. Gutted. I thought I'd have to put the bike on ebay for parts, mabey get about £50.

As a last resort, I decided to try cleaning up the ignition components, to see it they were the problem. Half an hour with some contact cleaner on the leads to the coils and the major loom connectors, and wow! It's running fine!

Wish I'd tried that in the first place ...

Cheers,

Kev.

10.4.10 problems

Like a lot of people, I have experienced some problems after installing this update. Although the installation went OK on my imac G5, on my ibook G4 things were not so straightforward. Immediately after the update, I experienced a kernel panic (grey screen, with a window in the centre instructing me to restart my machine). I booted from the OSX installation disk and ran Disk Utility, which reported that everything was fine with my drive. When I restarted, the ibook seemed OK. However, when I restarted again later, there was another kernel panic. Ran Disk Utility again, all fine, restarted again, all fine, then when I'd restarted another time, kernel panic. This seemed to be a pattern.

I decided at this point to install the combo update, but as this had no effect, I decided to do an archive and install. However, I immediately ran into a problem with this in that the installer coudn't 'see' my drive! Eeeeek!

Anyway, to cut a long (nearly 2 hours messing around with this) story short, Disc Warrior sorted things out.

If you have similar problems with this update I'd recommend having a look at these articles (particularly the second one which has a good set of guidelines for installing updates generally):

http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=20070628105254900
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1014792&tstart=0

All the best,

Kev.

the importance of OS9 system discs

I've just finished working on a Power Mac G4 which wouldn't boot up. I could have just wiped the drive and reinstalled OSX, but the client wanted to recover a lot of data off the drive first (Disc Warrior had been running for three days and found 294474 overlapped files, but got stuck at that point!). The drive was so corrupted that it wouldn't even boot in Target Firewire Mode (TFM). I tried a lot of things to get this machine booting up again (Disc Utility, Techtool Pro, Disc Warrior) all with no luck.

The solution? First I booted the G4 up using an OS9.2.1 disc, then connected an iBook in TFM mode. The thing about booting from OS9 discs is that you still have access to the desktop. This meant that I could just copy the data from the G4's drive to my iBook, which appeared on the G4's desktop, whilst all the time booted from the OS9 disc.

I'd really like to know why Apple has removed this functionality from its OSX install discs.

Cheers,

Kev.

new website!

Hi,

Just finished updating my new website – http://www.themacguy.co.uk. Content is much the same as before, but the look is much better (I think). Changed to a new web host as well, so there may be a few teething problems.

Anyway, have a look.

Cheers,

Kev.

Quickfind 1.2

Just released a new version of QuickFind (1.2). New features include:

• Completely redesigned interface
• Much smaller footprint
• New icon
• New search options (thesaurus, news)

Cheers,

Kev

Can't access Adobe.com!

I found the answer to this problem on the Apple/Support/Safari forum, and thought it was useful enough to share here. For ages I haven't been able to get onto Adobe.com to access any of the forums there, or download anything; Safari just sat there trying for a while then timed out. The problem it seems was down to my DNS addresses (System Preferences/Network). I replaced the ones I'd got from my ISP with two from Opendns.com (208.67.222.222 & 208.67.220.220) and everything seems to be working fine now! I'd recommend you take a note of your old dns addresses before you replace them, and even mention this to your ISP.

Cheers.

Kev