I tried to format a Buffalo 1TB external hard drive on my Mac today, to HFS+ (journalled). But it failed, over and over again with the error “Volume Erase Failed with the error: The underlying task reported failure on exit”. It was a brand new drive, already formatted as FAT, so I assumed it was faulty. Turns out, however, there’s a simple reason for it not working: you can’t format HFS+ partitions on certain external hard drives if the boot …
I had an unusual query this week. A member of staff wanted to create a line graph that showed the chart position of a song over a number of weeks.¬¨‚Ć It’s an easy thing to do – two columns in the spreadsheet, one for “Week” and one for “Position”. Problem is, in a chart, the low numbers are at the top and the high numbers are at the bottom, so the graph comes out upside-down. You can’t just make the …
Over the summer at work, we changed the way staff profiles are stored on the network. Having finally got around the “redirected Application Data breaks Internet Explorer” problem (see here for my fix) in Windows XP, we rolled it out to all users. And all was well. Until they brought their laptops back from the break, and we found they then can’t run various programs or access certain things when not connected to the network. This is because the laptop …
After what seems like a year of aborted attempts, this week I’ve made a concerted effort to deploy Adobe CS3 Design Premium on our XP network. This morning, I was successful! There were several problems to overcome, including lack of MSIs, inability to “roll your own” MSI due to the Adobe Licencing Service throwing a wobbly if you do, inserting the serial number, forcing it to install on machines with under a gig of RAM, coping with the sheer size …
This was useful to me recently. I thought I’d post it here in case I forget how to do it in the future! It’s a way of letting you run sshd on a port other than 22, or in addition to 22. Be sure to read the comments on how to do the latter easily. Note that although the instructions are for Tiger, it works fine on Leopard too. macosxhints.com – 10.4: Change the default sshd port
I finally figured out how to fix Pine on my Leopard box! For, well, ever, it hasn’t let me post any news messages to my local leafnode server. Every time I tried, I’d get an error stating my post was rejected due to error 441, which is an invalid error. I eventually tracked down that the actual invalid header was the message-id header, which was being generated as something like: Message-ID: Pine.OSX.4.64.098263998623986.75543@myimac Which is wrong. The bit after the @ …
Thanks to the mysterious (and sexy) The Goat Keeper, I’m now the not-so-proud owner of a US version of the Wii stinker “Heatseeker”. Of course, I knew it was going to be rubbish, but that wasn’t the point. No – I needed something to test if my UK Wii could play imports. And, of course, it can: I show that the disc isn’t recognised by the Wii, then fire up the Homebrew Channel and from there load Gecko OS. One …
I’ve recently started using Acrobat (yeah, about 14 years late) to annotate PDF files, and it has been irritating me that whenever I highlight something, Acrobat decides to add my Windows logon name as the “author” of the highlight. Since this logon name has no resemblance to my actual name, it’s effectively useless. Helpfully, Adobe don’t make it easy for you to change it to read something else. After much playing about, however, I figured it out: Firstly, you need …
The time came to finally trial redirecting user Application Data folders to a network share, rather than have them roam on the network. I knew how to do it, but it never seemed to work properly, so I’d not done it previously. This week, I gave it another crack. And it works! Sort of. Unfortunately, although it correctly maps Application Data back to the server, all the settings in Internet Explorer (like the branding and, most importantly, proxy stuff) fail …
A couple of days ago, I was asked, again, to download more Teachers TV programmes for staff at work. I don’t mind doing it, and it doesn’t take long, but I did wonder if there was a way of automatically downloading them.¬¨‚Ć Looking on the site, it seems they publish all new videos in a podcast. You can find out more about that here. So I fired up iTunes, and subscribed to the new videos RSS feed. And then the …
I went to use my 360 this evening, and as soon as it powered on and logged in, it froze. Restarted it, and the same happened again. Zomoniac off of ugvm reported similar problems yesterday. After some faffing around, I tried disconnecting my network cable and starting the 360 up again – and this worked. Plug in the cable, connect to Live, and it freezes. Naturally, and following the problems with Live all week, I assumed that it was Microsoft’s …
For the last couple of days, Outlook has been throwing up the following error: Task ‘Microsoft Exchange Server’ reported error (0x8004010F): ‘The operation failed. An object could not be found.’ Googling it wasn’t much help, as there seemed to be more than 20 reasons for the fault. Emails were syncing OK, and everything else appeared to be normal. However, checking the Exchange (2003) server, and looking at the Offline Address List settings (alluded to in the majority of the search …
Please note: this fix requires doing things to your iPod that you wouldn’t normally do. Even though I’m certain they’re safe, I can’t be held responsible if you knacker it following these instructions! How frustrating. After almost a year’s loyal service, I went to charge up my 3G iPod nano before a trip, only to find it wasn’t working. It would turn on, but after about 5 seconds of showing the menu, it would reset itself. Over and over again. …
Fo some reason, my XP Pro install in Parallels on my iMac lost internet access a few weeks ago. I wasn’t bothered as I hardly use it for anything. Today, however, I needed it as part of the install of Amiga Forever 2008, which only really works in Windows due to there not being a decent Intel port of UAE for the Mac. But I digress. Having tried all the settings in Parallels, resinstalling the Parallels Tools in Windows, rebooting …
I’ve had a HP laptop in several times in the last week, suffering from severe audio stuttering – in Media Player, VLC, when playing DVDs, and even just playing the Windows start-up jingle. It’s almost like when I had a nasty 16-bit ISA soundcard in my ancient PC and tried to play Half-Life. We tried all sorts – scanning for viruses, defragging, reinstalling drivers, reducing the hardware acceleration, adding more memory, changing the volume… everything. But it still kept doing …