It’s Just Poison…

This was a first for me, but today when I turned my computer on and opened up Mail, I received some error about the it being messed up and something had to be rebuilt. Don’t remember exactly, cuz I just hit OK and then Mail closed.

When I reopened Mail, all my “mail” was gone! Crap…

I checked the actual mail to see if it was still there: /Users/Me/Library/Mail, and it was all still there. So, Mail the program was messed up somewhere.

A little bit of messing around, and I figured it out.

There’s a file called “Envelope Index” I noticed that there was one a lot larger called “Envelope Index-1″, so I backed up the original and renamed “Envelope Index-1″ to “Envelope Index”. Started Mail back up, and all my mail was back =)

.: Adam

Tags: Hacks, OS X by .: Adam
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Last night I spent some time rewiring my entire sound system so that I could do something pretty awesome. I live in a duplex (2 story apartment) and I throw parties every once in a while at my place. Something that’s always bothered me was that I didn’t have a solid way to get the same music playing on both floors. I know I could just run speaker wire, but I have two separate stereos (1 for each floor). So how do I get them to play the same music in sync?

I ran across This Article on LifeHacker.com and it made my day. I was so giddy that I immediately started working on it when I got home from work.

In essence, it not only allows me to have the same music playing through both stereos, but I can also control the whole thing with my iPhone! How bad ass is that?! (oh, and I already had all the required pieces, so it cost me nothing =)

In the end, here’s what I did:

First I flashed my Linksys router with the Tomato firmware and set it up as a distributed wireless router (I also boosted the signal strength from 45mw to 100 =). Next, I found my Airport Express and configured that to link to my router. This stuff was pretty simple and worked the first time through.

To get the music to my stereo upstairs (where the airport express is), I was going to have my old Powerbook stream music through iTunes to the Airport Express router, which is hooked up to the stereo. iTunes allows you to connect to multiple “speakers”, so I streamed it, and I also plugged in a cable to the headphone jack of the laptop. This cord then connected to the stereo downstairs.

This took me a bit to get working (couple of hours), because the HDD on the Powerbook was fried and wouldn’t book. To get around this problem, I disassembled the casing of the laptop and disconnected the HDD. Put it all back together and then install OS X on an external HDD. BTW, to install OS X on an external HDD, it has to be connected via FireWire. USB will NOT work. I had an old 80gb external FireWire drive, so I just used that. Once OS X was installed I copied the contents of my iPod to the HDD so all my MP3’s were on the laptop. Should I want to upgrade later, all I have to do is copy over the OS to a new, larger FireWire HDD. Man I love OS X!

The last step was to hook my iPhone up to the iTunes on the Powerbook to control it wirelessly over the WLAN. Super easy with the Remote app.

That’s all there was to it! Now I can choose songs / playlists, skip through songs, control volume to both stereos with one fader… all from the phone in my pocket! ROCK!

Tags: Hacks, OS X, Tech by .: Adam
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While playing with the iPhone and all of the third party apps, there have been numerious occasions where either the app dumps or the phone does.

FYI: when I went to publish this blog with the Wordpress app, the app took a shit =)

With some of the developers, they got a little whitty with there error controlls. Here’s a couple that I liked:

Tags: OS X, Rants, Tech by .: Adam
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After I jailbroke my iPhone, my Push Mail, Calendar, Contacts and Bookmarks stopped syncing. The reason was because all my mail settings were reset. So I simply switched them all to sync. Didn’t work. I tried all kinds of stuff to try and get my accounts to sync from me.com, but nothing worked. Rebooted, toggled the switches a few more times… nothing.

What finally did it was to delete the MobileMe account completely, power the device off, power it on, and then re-add the MobileMe account. Sure enough, my iPhone was once again in sync with me.com. =)

.: Adam

Tags: OS X, Rants by .: Adam
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Now that the new iPhone has been jailbroken, I’ve been messing around with all the images and icon, trying to customize the hell out of it. The first thing that I found out how to change was the background image for the dock (that metallic looking thing). The next thing that I learned was how to change individual application icons. (Within each app is a file ‘icon.png’, you just edit that)

Well, I came up with a new way to use the dock. I made all the app icons that are store in the dock blank PNG files (essentially no icon), and then made the background file one image with a bunch of stuff going on. All the notifications still appear where the icons were, and so do the text labels. For the text, I just made a black bar at the bottom faded out so that the text could be read.

Here’s a screen shot so you can see what I mean. My Apps at the bottom are: Phone, SMS, Safari, Mail.

I’m sure you could come up with a lot cooler ideas with this, but it should get the ball rolling =)

.: Adam

Tags: Hacks, OS X by .: Adam
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You know the little slider blocks with the arrows on them on the iPhone? The most common is the one you slide to unlock the phone. I’m going to show you how to make your own custom ones =).

PreReq: Jailbroken iPhone v2.0 (May work on older versions, no clue. I only have a 2.0 iPhone 3g)

PreReq: OpenSSH installed and setup (Use Cydia… has a great set of setup instructions once it’s installed)

Download This Slider PSD Template and use it to make your own sliders. There’s a couple layers in there to help you out for the sizes, tints, and such.

The one on the lock page is called: bottombarknobgray.png
The one on the lock page during Sync is: bottombarknobgreen.png
The one that’s used to turn off the phone is: bottombarknobred.png

When you save them, make sure you save them as 24-bit alpha PNG files. You can just do the Save For Web tool and select the preset.

Now you have to upload them to your phone via SSH here:
(You can get the IP from either the network setup in Settings, or what I do is open the Terminal app and run ‘ifconfig’ =)

/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/TelephonyUI.framework/bottombarknobgray.png
/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/TelephonyUI.framework/bottombarknobred.png
/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/TelephonyUI.framework/bottombarknobgreen.png

Reboot your phone (Hold Lock and Home buttons for around 10 sec to turn off / Hold Lock button to turn on).

You’re done and have some fancy new sliders =)

.: Adam

Tags: Hacks, OS X by .: Adam
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Apple just released the WordPress app into the App store today. Looks pretty cool so far. Will definately help in my mobile blogging effort

Tags: General, OS X, Tech, Web Sites by .: Adam
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Tags: Humor, OS X, Rants, Tech by .: Adam
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After writing about Candybar and icons, I thought I’d share a quick little tip on how to change an applications icon in os x.

Step 1: Select the icon or application with an icon you like.
Step 2: Press Command+I to bring up the info screen.
Step 3: Click on the little icon in the top-left corner and press Command+C (standard copy command). You should see a little blue halo around the icon when doing this.

Step 4: Select the app you want to change the icon on and press Command+I to bring up the info window on that one.
Step 5: Click on the icon in the top-left and press Command+V (standard paste command). BAM! yer done. =)

.: Adam

Tags: OS X by .: Adam
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If you’re a web/app designer (or just crazy about icons) and you’re on a mac, you need Candybar. This app was originally designed to replace icons on your mac with custom ones. So if you wanted to swap out your finder icon for something a little cooler, this was the GUI tool that made it all easier. In the newest release, they also handle swapping of Dock images (the actual Dock itself). What they also added in this release was icon management. It stores all your icons into folders and groups. Allows for quick browsing and size checks. This is that feature that I love. It makes my life so much easier when looking for an icon that’s “just right” for what I’m working on. It also allows me to download crap-loads of icons and just throw them in Candybar to use later if i need to.

It even has Quickview build right into it. So when you highlight an icon and hit the spacebar, a HUD will popup with all available sizes of that icon.

The other nifty feature that I like a lot is the exporting ability of icons. You can turn an icon into an image, or an image into an icon. It supports: Icon, ICNS, ICO, TIFF, PNG, GIF, JPEG.

And of course it still swaps out application icons and mac icons really well. Here’s a snippit of my dock with a couple custom icons (Finder, Mail, Firefox) and a custom dock image:

That’s all i got to say about that =)

.: Adam

Tags: OS X by .: Adam
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