Chrome OSX authenticated proxy

If you feel like trying Chrome for OSX, and you are on a network that requires proxy authentication, well bad luck!

As of the time of writing, Chrome is at 3.0.195.1.

The way out is to use Authoxy. After installing, fill in the authentication details, and the parent server with port.

Then, change your system proxy settings to 127.0.0.1 port 8080, and Chrome should now be able to connect OK.

Google Apps, OpenID, Federated ID, Zoho

The announcement that Google Apps Premier can be used for OpenID logins is really interesting.

If you go to www.manymoon.com which is the example, you can use your Google Apps Email Address, but you need to enable the Federated Login Service on your Apps account first.

Go to https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/-domain-name-/SetupIdp and enable

I wasn't able to get Zoho working despite their blog post saying it does work, and a Google help article.

iTunes incorrectly puts EyeTV movies into TV shows

EyeTV recordings do not, as a rule, contain correct metadata, and this means that when you import the .m4v the recording goes into the wrong category eg The Cooler and Creep have gone into TV Shows, not movies.

You can manually change the category, but right / control clicking on the movie, selecting Get Info and changing the category to Movie.

In addition, EyeTV generally doesn't put in title and other metdata correctly either. Again you can fix this after doing Get Info by changing the fields on the other tabs, for example Info and Video.

Chrome for OSX

If you are feeling brave, and don't mind the various caveats, you can get a Google build of Chrome for OSX from http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/eula_dev.html?dl=mac. I find it fast, right up until it crashes.

So far, and I've been running it over a month, I've never had a crash notification, it just disappears.

Safari 4 - open windows in Tabs

If you use Google's Apps ie docs and gmail then you'll know that you click the link at the top of the page to open a new browser window for eg calendar, currently by default Safari open each instance in a new window, not a tab.

To change the behaviour, quir Safari, and run

defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool true

Restart Safari and now you get tabs by default.

Sync'ing a guest iPod / iPhone

If you have your own iPod / iPhone which you sync at home, you may still want to sync at work eg work calendar. So as to prevent auto-sync wiping existing information, there is an iTunes preference


Go to preferences > device and ensure 'disable automatic syncing for iPhones and iPods' is selected.

Extending an Apple Airport Network

There are two basic ways to extend an Apple Airport network. Formally known as a 'mesh' network, you can either create a roaming network, or a Wireless Distributed System (WDS).

You want to roam if you have an ethernet network to which you want to attach multiple Airport base stations ie your ethernet is your backbone.

You would use WDS if there's no ethernet backbone available. With WDS the wireless is used to both connect the clients and connect the base stations.

To create a roaming network, you simply configure your additional base stations with exactly the same details as the first: same SSID, same password. Except the channel. Airport Extremes set to auto will sort this out themselves.

To create a WDS, first use AirPort Utility and select the base station which connects to the internet.

1. Select Manual Setup, or double-click the device’s icon to open the configuration in a separate window. Enter the password if necessary.
2. Click the AirPort button, and then click Wireless.
3. Choose “Create a wireless network” from the Wireless Mode pop-up menu, and then select the “Allow this network to be extended” checkbox.

Click "update" and wait for the base station to restart.

Next move to the base station that will extend your network.

1. Click Manual Setup, or double-click the device’s icon to open its configuration in a separate window. Enter the password if necessary.
2. Choose “Extend a wireless network” from the Wireless Mode pop-up menu, and then choose the network you want to extend from the Network Name pop-up menu.
3. Enter the network name and password if necessary.

Click 'update', the Extreme restarts and its done.

Geo-tagging with iPhone and Trails

On a few occasions now I blogged about geo-tagging photos on OSX, uploading to Picasa etc.

I wanted to see if my iPhone can be used as a GPS data logger, and it can. Using the App Store and looking at reviews, I bought Trails. One of its feature is the ability to export the data, either by email, or to a desktop application called TrailRunnerX.

If you do it by email, the file is called "filename.gpx..xml", and will not import into GPSPhotoLinker. You need to remove the excess "..xml" so it becomes "filename.gpx" and then it will.

Update: turns out this is a gmail problem where is adds the bogus ..xml for some reason. Use IMAP to retrieve the email, and it works fine without further work.

If your iPhone and mac are on the same wireless network, there is a direct connection method where the data is sent direct to TrailRunnerX. In pratice I find this hit and miss. It could do with a manual connection method when the presumably broadcast method fails.

Unable to reconnect to AFP shares with 10.5.7

Curious problem with my new MacBook Pro 13". When it wakes from sleep it doesn't reconnect to logged in AFP shares.

After looking through console logs, and trying different things, it happens when I'm connected to the TimeCapsule. If I turn off the wireless on the TC and connect using another Airport Extreme, it reconnects fine.

It seems its to do with a 'reconnect key'

12/07/2009 14:09:25 kernel AFPSleepWakeHandler: waking up

...

12/07/2009 14:10:37 kernel AFP_VFS afpfs_DoReconnect: GetReconnectToken failed 32 /Volumes/home

while a successful re-connection looks like

12/07/2009 19:05:17 kernel AFP_VFS afpfs_DoReconnect: Restoring session /Volumes/Files

...

12/07/2009 19:05:17 kernel AFP_VFS afpfs_DoReconnect: get the reconnect token

Its bad news because to the AEBS over 'n' I only get 130.

More as I get it.

Update: spoke too soon... still getting this error even when connected the other AEBS.

Update 2: I didn't get to why this is. Eventually I installed from the supplied 10.5.7 DVDs onto an external firewire drive, and booted from that. I copied over my profile and wake works just fine. So I wiped the built-in drive, and Carbon Cloned the working one back over. I lost some things like printers and some other system settings, but these are easy to restore. And I'd rather have wake from sleep work properly.

OSX Leopard - unable to disable Root

Discovered a curious problem with OSX Leopard where I was unable to disable Root from the Directory Application (/Applications / Utilities / Directory Utility ---> Edit / Enable Root User).

What happened was that due to an error I needed to use the OSX 10.5 Leopard DVD to start and change the Root password, which had the effect of enabling Root. I logged in as Root from a normal start, got the problem fixed, and then needed to disabled root.

The Directory Utility never saw that Root was enabled.

The answer was to do it from the command line:

$ dsenableroot -d

this command does quite a bit so you can read about it from the man page:

$ man dsenableroot

Nokia Maps downloader for OSX using Bluetooth

Woohooo! OK its only beta, but I'll give it a go!

Start here, the download is here and you'll need the multimedia downloader as well.


After getting the 2 applications, launch Nokia Multimedia Transfer and you'll get the double headed arrow in the menu bar.


First use Multimedia Transfer to connect your phone. Click the Multimedia Transfer icon in the menu bar and select Connect

Then when the connect window comes up, click Bluetooth
You'll have needed to pair your Phone, and on the phone set as Authorised (Tools>Bluetooth>Paired Devices select laptop and press Options). A few seconds later the Nokia Map Loader comes up, looking similar to what you get on the PC.

Follow the instructions, and download a map. I chose Gibraltar as its quite small.


One nice thing is the history function, so you can see what you already downloaded. OK it doesn't actually poll the phone for what was there previously, but its a start.


Super!

If you cannot use Bluetooth for some reason, you still use USB. Connect your phone by USB, and put the phone into "PC Suite" mode. Then launch Nokia Map Loader.

Parallels - connect from iPhone - an unexpected error occurred

The new Parallels Desktop 4 has the feature that you can connect from your iPhone and iPod Touch (iPod Touch compatability is not mentioned anywhere, but it downloads and runs OK).

The setting to allow an iPhone to connect is in Parallels Desktop Preferences.


After downloading the applet from the Apple Store, I put in the host details (IP address), and credentials, but kept getting an error connecting "an unexpected error occurred".

After some trial and error, I found that the iPhone and iTouch rather helpfully capitalise the first letter of the username, which could be incorrect. When I changed the username on my iPhone to match exactly the machine's username, which is all lower case, it connected straight away.


To get an all lowercase username, you need to move to between the first and second letters, put in the first letter again, then move back a space and delete the first letter.




Now, if only Parallels allowed the screen to rotate to match the landscape of most computer screens!

Apple Aiport Extreme stops working

Got myself a second hand Apple Aiport Extreme and during configuration it stopped working. After A LOT of trial and error, discovered it was due to a setting, which is not properly explained.

On the back of the device are 4 ethernet ports, clearly marked differently. 3 with the usual <--> for ethernet and one with a kind O, which is for the internet, if you have a cable modem, or maybe a half bridge DSL router.

So we have a very clear paradigm of internet and LAN.

Right, here's the INTERNET tab of the Airport Utility. So I'm thinking this is where you configure INTERNET access. Right? Wrong! In fact this configures the LAN. So, turn off the ethernet WAN port at your peril, because if you do you'll fall off the LAN and you'll have to do a reset.



Grrrrr!