Sometimes it happens to my MBP late 2008 that the hot corners stop working. If this happens also the menu bar is not showing when trying to open it during the fullscreen mode of an app (e.g. Safari, Aperture).
If this happens, then also dragging of files (in the finder, sometimes also objects within applications) is not working as expected any more – they stick to the mouse pointer and can’t be released anymore.
This behavior is really annoying – but fortunately very seldom.
When googeling for the description of the issue you can find many entries about that – but no real solution is there.
To solve the hot-corner issue you can stop the task ‘mdworker’ task by opening the activity monitor and stop the task. The mdworker is related to the spotlight search and is restarted automatically by initiating a spotlight search.
But this won’t bring back the menu bar in fullscreen mode or solve the dragging issue.
What I found now by ‘try and error’ seeking was, that the issues also stop when activating the standy-mode of the MBP (e.g. by closing the shell). After reactivating the MBP everything works as normal.
What not worked for me:
- Upgrading to the latest OS version (currently: Mountain Lion 10.8.2)
- Restart in safe-mode and repair Disk-Permissions
- Restart in safe-mode and repair Permissions of Users Homedirectory
Has anyone a better solution? Please comment…
Since a couple of months I was now struggling around with my MBP Battery – sometimes it showed me to get it serviced. Mostly after re-calibrating it then showed up ok… but now since two weeks I saw it dramatically underperforming. So after 1 1/2 hour it now went to sleep – the battery indicator showed up 40% left.
So after all I decided now to get a new one – and found it at amazon for only 49€. Nice price and immediately purchased 🙂
Today I’ll got it and now i’m charging the new one. Currently it shows 94% capacity and 8 full charging-laps… let’s see how the new battery performs over the next view days. Hopefully better than the old one…
BTW: a battery (copy, not original) for my old Vaio showed up more expensive than the Apple one (a original one) – more than twice the price as for the Apple battery.
From now on I’ll post on a not regular basis a short description about apps I like to use.
Today I want to show you the most used app on my devices – iPhone4, iPhone3, iPad and on my MacBook Pro – even on my USB-Sticks and the cloud: 1Password
Purpose of the app:
1Password stores your account / license / access informations;
Costs:
Mac & Windows: € 39.99
iPhone & iPad: € 11.99
In the past – well, in the very past 😉 I was using PCs to shrink my DVDs so that I could put them onto my PS3. As an tool I used the popular Windows app called ‘SHRINK’ to get this job done.
Nowadays I’m back on a Mac (MacBook Pro) and I was searching for a tool similar to ‘SHRINK’. It didn’t took me that long to find some – but the best choice for me was clearly ‘HandBrake’ – a very powerful tool.
The problem I always had was that my PS3 stick to the codecs SONY provides… so no MKV e.g.
Shrinking the vids with other codecs than AVI always ended in the problem that there was no 5.1 surround sound afterwards. So I always had to move with AVI containers. Then – some time ago – the guys of ‘HandBrake’ decided to get rid of the AVI container because it’s not state of the art any more… toooo old format.
That meant for me to stick to an old version of HandBrake which was able to convert the DVDs to an AVI file with 5.1 sound.
Read more…
First of all – i’m editing this post with my MB Pro. I tried to do it with the iPad… but the article was too long and there are issues. Issues like the keyboard… read more:
The beginning:
Unboxing was a little bit suprising because the box was much bigger than the iPad itself. Unlike for Apple because they try to avoid too much packaging material these a days. In the box there’s of course the iPad itself and a little paper wallet containing the warrenty certificate and a sheet with infos how to proceed. And there’s the charger with the USB connection cable… But the charger wasn’t needed because of the fact that the iPad was charged fully.
Next step:
Contacting iTunes – so i had to startup my MB pro and connect my iPad via the USB-cable.
Setup:
Setting up the iPad is easy at all. After connection iTunes automatically starts up and the first backup of the device takes place. Select the content you want (don’t forget to get iBooks from the iTunes store!) and organize the apps with the designated tool in iTunes. Really easy – and for those of us already owning a iPhone / iPod – nothing new.
Content:
Yes – that’s the point i stick to. iBooks only shows up FREE books which are Project Gutenberg related – nothing else. But I’ve heard that ‘Random House’ already has a signed up contract with Apple for their books to be available within the Austrian Apple-Store. We’ll have to wait..
Movies? – No movies there, no TV-series. Only podcasts.
Alternative contents:
You are able to put your own videos into iTunes – this is what I’ve done before the iPad – this is what I’ll do now 🙂
Books? Well – use Stanza – this app allows you to add ePub documents which are available through the internet. And of course PDFs. But PDFs are not so nice to be handled within the iPad as eBooks are.
Differences to the iPhone:
There are differences.
Safari. There’s no ‘Search within this page’ feature as you have on the MB Pro. I’m missing it really.
But:
I – and my family – love the iPad. For reading. Surfing. Watching movies. Using Apps.
It’s so easy to browse the content you want. Flash? Not missing at all. Most of the internet sites I’m used to visit already switched to HTML5. Videos are available… Ads are not missed.
You’re able to write emails – if they aren’t too long. You’re able to post on your blog – if the article isn’t too long. There are things you can do with the iPad perfectly – others are… well – not horrible… but simply not convenient.
Give it away again? No. Never. 🙂
Update:
All the issues I had are solved by giving the iPad settings a closer look. Settings I’ve done month’s ago on the iPhone 🙂
Apple started to seed now the new Mac OS 10.6.3 update to their customers. One of the mentioned issues is maybe solving my ongoing troubles with my TimeMachine / Drobo setup:
Time Machine fixes and improvements provided for:
- reliability from Time Machine-to-Time Capsule backups, including multiple computers.
- an issue with Time Machine in which system backups could be restored onto unsupported Mac configurations.
I’ll keep you updated 😉
Cool add-on for your MacBook Pro…
And they have much more stuff like this in their online shop – take a look!
The drobo dashboard told me today that there’s a update available for the dashboard itself – but not for the drobo. Johannes told me these days that there’s a new version 1.3.4 available for the drobo’s firmware… and he was right.
But the dashboard is not recognizing it automtically – so I had to install it manually. Not the first time, yes.
I downloaded the firmware, started the install process and seconds later the installation finished… without errors 🙂
After a reboot the new version was shown up in the drobo dashboard:
First impressions:
Nothing special occured after the installation up to now. So now let’s see what happens during the next days…
Don’t expect that the drobo will go into standby now when connected to the AirPort Extreme via USB – nothing changed on this side.
Apple starts to ship Mac OS X Snow Leopard beginning with August, 28th.
And yes – I’ve ordered the update version vor only € 29,– – we’ll see when it arrives at my little flying circus here 🙂
I also ordered a new sensor for my Nike+ Kit – seems that the old one ran out of power…
I shortly thought of buying the Mac Box Set with Snow Leopard, iLife & iWorks – pricing is really great for this bundle (€ 169,–)… but I’ve bought some weeks ago the MS Office bundle under a very special condition so that it makes no sense for me. But if you need such a package it would really be a great deal!
This yesterday released update should also solve some connection issues with the AirPort network.
The issues with lost connection / rebooting to and with the DROBO I’ve experienced over the last weeks seems to be related to a problem with the connection to the AirPort and the latest update versions of MacOS X (10.5.7) and a firmware update of the AirPort Extreme installed lately.
Here you can get details on the update…
