Thanks for pretending that I eagerly signed up to get email about the iPhone. This is, of course, a lie.

From: News@InsideApple.Apple.com
Subject: Thank you for your interest in iPhone.
Date: May 16, 2007 3:06:48 PM PDT

Talk to you soon.

Thanks for signing up. You'll be the first to hear the latest about iPhone--coming this June. That gives you just enough time to think of ways to break the news to your current phone.

...

Slot-loading optical drives suck, especially when they refuse to eject a disc that shouldn’t be allowed into the hands of J Random Technician down at the Apple Store (or anywhere else, really).

For future reference, if you really, really need to crack open a MacBook Pro and peel the optical drive open, the nice folks at Other World Computing have you covered.

Be sure to pick up a Torx size 7 and a Philips size 000 before starting, and keep very careful track of which screws came from where. And don’t forget to plug the keyboard back in before you seal it back up.

I needed to put a Mac Mini in someone’s house.

But it had to run Windows XP.

Headless.

And restart automatically after losing power.

The headless part was handled by our master solderer, following the instructions from the nice folks at Mythic Beasts. They also explain the power-on problem, but don’t provide a direct Windows solution.

To make a long google short, download WPCRS120.EXE from Japan, run it, run the included installer, reboot, run wpcrset.exe, set {Bus 0, Device 31, Function 0, Register A4} to 0, and reboot again.

Before each of the required reboots, you’ll see this:

more...

Lots of Mac users seem to like Quicksilver. I figured I’d give it a try.

…

Okay, that was enough. For application launching, I’m much happier with Overflow, and even after overriding the automatic “you stopped typing for two seconds so I’ll start a new search” behavior, it’s not terribly useful to me, because it bypasses input managers and assumes that all the world’s in ASCII.

This, despite the pretentious preciousness of quoting the Tao Te Ching as their design philosophy.

Why did Spotlight suddenly stop indexing my email, and completely lose track of all previously indexed email?

… mdfind, mdutil, …

Ah, I see; it spontaneously disabled indexing on the entire drive, and masked this by continuing to report file-name matches. That’s nice.

I had a downright peculiar problem. Any Java app I ran on my Mac apparently painted the window in the wrong order, so that the content was overwritten by the canvas. In some cases I could drag or tab through and get to see the fields, but not reliably.

I tried logging in as another user, and it worked fine, but deleting every preference and cache file that mentioned “java” in the name didn’t help a bit. And so, the search began.

Binary search, that is, where I started by moving my entire home directory out of the way without rebooting, tested (worked!), and gradually narrowed it down. To make a long story short, it was ~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist, specifically the AppleDisplayScaleFactor key, which was set to “1”. [note: use plutil to convert plist files back into the old XML format]

Why? Because long ago and far away, I once played with the under-development GUI scaling feature in Tiger. It wasn’t ready then, still isn’t ready now, and setting the value back to “1” is supposed to be the same as never having set it in the first place. One of the recent Java updates disagrees.

Nuke that pref, and instantly every Java app paints correctly.

I just burned a DVD from Disk Utility. It was automatically ejected when the burn finished successfully. I wanted to verify it, so I closed the drive and let it start up in DVD Player.

DVD Player launched, but didn’t start the movie. I hit the play button, and it complained about no supported disc being present. Why? Because I’d switched windows during the burn, and hadn’t come back to Disk Utility and clicked “OK” on the little dialog box that said the burn was successful. Adding insult to injury, when I switched back to Disk Utility, the confirmation dialog box was now under the main window, so I initially didn’t realize that it remained unclicked.

Sadly, clicking it afterwards didn’t help. Apparently I have to reboot to unconfuse the driver. I count at least three bugs here.

So there’s a new player in the Mac backup business, Decimus. Their product is called Synk Backup.

So when your synk backs up, your office is decimused. No doubt they’ve outsourced their tech support to Plumbr.