Leopard woes

I don't regret switching to Leopard. I do like Spaces and the redone finder. I wish I could play around with TimeMachine, but I don't have another external drive. The upgrade forced me to start fresh and clean things up... but I've run into some problems like many with this new version of the Mac OS.

• Kernel Panics & bittorrent client
  
• Dock Problems
  
• EyeTV issues
  
• keyboard/trackpad lock-ups

Unfortunately for me, those are things I'm using all the time now. I hope Apple and developers get some patches out soon.

Leopard Crashes: Kernel Panic

I woke up this morning to find this lovely screen on my Mac. Actually this was the second screen. I can't take a snapshot of the first screen cuz the whole darn thing is frozen. Yesterday my computer choked maybe four times and this morning makes five. I've never had my Mac crash on me... I'm not using any applications I didn't use with Tiger, so it must have been something with Leopard.

I thought I found some good information on Hoopla! posted by LCO, but my computer crashed after making the suggested changes:

- Try disabling IPv6 in your Airport System Preferences
- In Azureus preferences, expand Connection -> Advanced Networking Settings, and make sure “Prefer IPv6 addresses when both are avail” and “Enable experimental extension…” are UNTICKED.

There's also a good website that has kept tabs on which applications are not compatible with Leopard. This would have been nice to know before I upgraded.

UPDATE: After making the changes LCO mentioned above... I only had one more crash, but it was after I set Azureus back to "Simple" mode or whatever. Once I returned it back to "Advanced", I haven't had any problems again.

UPDATE: Still crashing under Azureus. Transmission isn't any better while running a large torrent. Tomato - I'm not even going to go there.

Test Bubbleshare Album

Please click on slideshow to view a larger version or to download.

How Mac & PC can Share an iTunes Network Library

I thought I had started another post on this... I'm trying to find a way to share one iTunes 7.5 library, stored on a network drive, between my 10.5 Mac and her XP-PC. I want both of us to be able to play, add, and trash songs and video - it doesn't have to be simultaneously.

When you start up iTunes on a PC holding the "Shift" button down, it will ask you if you want to "Choose a Library..." or to create a new one. When you choose a library, the app looks for an ".itl" file. When I navigated to the network drive, it listed all of the directories, but no library file was apparent.

My Mac generated iTunes library file has no extension on it. Just for kicks, I added an ".itl" extension to the Mac file and it asked me if I really wanted to do it. I said yes and then I tried launching iTunes on the PC again.

This time it loaded the library up with out a problem. Then, iTunes began updating the library since I had just installed the newest version of 7.5 on the PC.

Now, my fear is that I won't be able to access the library file on the Mac. It's just a waiting game now.

UPDATE: It seems to work fine. I might not have even needed to add the ".itl" extension, but it doesn't seem to negatively effect the Mac version.

Garmin GPSMAP 60CSx

When I returned to America, I took the opportunity to buy an all-round GPS that would serve me equally well in the car as out and about. It wasn't that difficult of a decision. The 60CSx is one of the highest rated devices out there.

I bought an auto kit and a 2GB MicroSD card to go along with my hand held. The auto kit is essential for in-the-car use. It wasn't cheap, but worth every penny so far. I loaded the MapSource software into my Bootcamp partition and every thing is working out great.

I had troubles uploading the maps to the 2GB card initially, but it worked the second time around. I was a little worried there since it took about 3 hours the first time.

I love how I can create new waypoints, etc. on my computer or the 60CSx and sync them later. It's much more flexible than just a built-in system. The integration with GoogleEarth is fantastic. I've used the system to find wilderness POI's using the satellite imagery.

Unfortunately, I can't search for POI's by name and location on the road. If its not within a couple of miles here in the city, I have to know the address or approximate location and then search from there. That can make a huge difference. Last night, we were looking for a Thai restaurant, Kung Fu and if I didn't know the street, I wouldn't have found it. Thankfully that's not much of a problem because you can usually get an address or a general location. Still, it would be nice to have that extended search option.

I wish I could get a larger 4GB card and load up a full complement of topo maps as well, but that also makes map management difficult since map types can't be layered. Perhaps having two 2GB cards with different map sets is the best way for now, but it would be great to have other options like loading two cards and specifying which card you want to use.

No regrets here. A larger screen and something a little more compact would be great, but I'm not expecting perfection.

UPDATE 12/19/07: One of the things I mentioned earlier about searching for POI's... I found a very easy way to look for POI's outside of the 2 mile radius, without going to a different area with the pointer first:

If you want to find an "Old Navy" and there isn't one listed under "Shopping"... Hit the Menu button and select "Find the nearest containing..." (or something to that effect) and then type in "Old Navy" and it should begin to show you nearby stores in red in the search window.

I have City Navigator and Topo maps and two 2GB cards. I found that I could easily store all of my city maps (about 309 of them), but could only store a small amount of the topo maps (way less than 2gb worth). I realized that the limiting factor isn't the storage space... it's the NUMBER of maps (2025 is the max number of map sets). I can only store part (a pretty sizable chunk) of the US, but not the entire country. Kind of a bummer. I hope they offer a flash-firmware upgrade someday, but I'm not holding my breath. The 60CSx is probably limited by the amount of onboard memory to index all of the maps. Oh well.

Garmin for Mac?

Looks like Garmin is fooling around with a utility that only handles transferring maps from your PC to your Mac so that you can use your Mac to transfer maps to your GPS. I'm handling the process using Bootcamp. But for folks without a Windows license and wanting to go through the "hassle" of setting up Bootcamp just for Garmin, then this might be a good way to go.

Looks like the process requires software in Windows and (of course) Mac to complete the process:

Windows MapConverter

Mac MapInstall

My real question is whether or not it is possible to share maps from one unlocked MapSource set of maps to two or more Garmin units (i.e. Map60CSx and a nüvi 350).

Terminal to copy files

I was trying to copy an invisible file and found a link to FileBuddy, but I wasn't sure it was Leopard compatible. So, rather than installing another application to my pristine upgrade, I figured I'd look for an option using terminal.

MacDevCenter.com had a nice explanation.

I also found a nice reference on navigating directories in terminal.

Bootcamp and Parallels updating session

I don't know why I waited to update Parallels until now. I was running Build 3214 until yesterday evening and I just upgraded to Build 5582 - which is most noticeably the newest (I believe) version of Parallels 3.0. I backed up my 3214 version of course, but everything is running smoothly so far.

I was also still running Bootcamp 1.2 Beta even though I have the 1.3 Beta. I had to change my computer's date to install the update and run the driver burner application. I'll update my Bootcamp partition later. I still like Bootcamp because it allocates all resources to Windows apps which is useful when I'm playing around with digital video, Flash or Captivate projects. And until recently, it was the only way to run iSight - which I use for my online conferencing for EVO.

I was surprised that there didn't seem to be an easy way to install the iSight drivers. The folks on the Parallels forum kept saying to install the Bootcamp drivers, but I didn't want to install all of them, just the ones for the webcam. I copied three files out of my Bootcamp 1.2 partition and was able to manually install the drivers. I've uploaded the drivers for everyone to use:

http://www.mediafire.com/?5uyztqv9rbm

These drivers aren't based on the newest 1.3 Beta, but they worked just fine with Windows XP.

Playing DivX on Scott's DVD player

Scott has a Samsung HT-TQ85 DVD player. One of it's cool features is that it allows you to access media directly off a USB drive. On the downside, it's a bit finicky with DVD's. It doesn't like any blemishes on the disks.

I believe I'm going to have problems with a video I've found that features an odd audio codec "ms". I don't think it'll play on his DVD player.


The problem is that I can't play it through QT so I don't think I can convert it with a different audio codec.

UPDATE - Well, it seems that I can play this through his DVD player. In fact, the quality is awesome. Guess I had a different problem with it.