Me and my Mac

Posts Tagged ‘broken’

i can haz blootooth mouze?

Why are they extinct? It’s so unfair! i don’t want a RF dongle on my precious laptop!!
Give me back my Logitech MX1000 Bluetooth!

GRRRR!

so yea… The damn thing finally broke last night. I tossed it of the table and wouldn’t lit it’s led or charge. That combined with the lousy charger which almost never worked i decided not even to bother and throw the mouse away, it was aging anyway. And went on to buy a new Bluetooth mouse today. No such luck would come to me.

People seem to be obsessed with RF and it’s stupid sluggish slow way of working. RF is sooooo 1991. Why not use a proper Bluetooth connection. Something a computer actually has built-in these days, well macs anyway, and some PC laptops do, sometimes…

The only bluetooth mouse i found was one from Trust. A cheap brand i won’t even touch the packaging of. It was a whopping 29 euros and has “laser technology with precision pointing array for extra high definition positioning” or some other high tech rubbish. Also it was very small, not even covering the palm of my hand…

All other mice were just “wireless” which practically means RF on “fast 2.4Ghz frequencies for noise free connections”. I don’t know about you, but 2.4Ghz is bound the be trouble… Wifi uses it, DECT phones do too, Wireless TV receivers and even Microwaves all mess about with that frequency and thus most likely will interfere with each other at some point. Especially since everyone uses it…

My search continues!
Any “formed-to-your-hand” Bluetooth mouse that is larger than average. Like the Logitech MX1000 or MX510 is good to consider i guess.

The forums

As many of you have seen i have a forum for general support and random topics (if you want).

Obviously there are some hitches in usage, some have notified me that the registration mail is not arriving or very slow. Please if you run into trouble… do not hesitate to contact me about it. If i don’t know the problem i cannot fix it… So contact me!

The register email should work now… this was caused by a plugin.

Is MacHeist screwing me over?

Be sure never to buy anything from them… It’s a scam and they kick you in the shin if something goes wrong!

I bought the Macheist bundle last sunday. All seemed well, i waited patiently for the licenses to be send which would be done within 24 hours. After a few hours i noticed that on the receipt all of my licenses were wrong. Where it should say my name it says “your name” and my email was wrong too, saying “your email”.

As you can see in the image it’s supposed to send me the license later, this will never work if it thinks my email address is “your mail” so therefor the license is wrong and i will never receive it.

I quickly emailed support. Told them the issue, included the paypal receipt and the macheist receipt where all licenses are listed. And they mailed me, very short and unfriendly, the next day that “they would look into it”.
Fine, results! After a day i send a short email asking if there was a sollution yet because i wanted to get started with VectorDesigner, which is an awesome application. After another day i received a link for a license retrieval page from VectorDesigner and was told to retrieve the license from there.

I tried it ofcourse… But to no avail since it wouldn’t recognize my email address, which i believe was set to “your mail”. I replied to the Macheist guy asking that this was not the sollution and asked how this was gonna solve the other 13 licenses. And again explained what went wrong and if i could receive a new set of licenses or a refund. We’re 2 days further now and i haven’t heard the slightest… This so-called deal is turning out to be a $47 heist or at least a waste of money. And on top of that a real rip-off! So beware not to buy anything from them!

Printing via Airport Extreme, Extremely hard?

So i wanted to print something, small page of text… But the printer is a complete bitch about it. Or is the driver?
I’m using the open source Hewlett Packard driver for my HP PSC1315 printer since HP doesn’t make a good driver for Leopard and i’m too lazy to give up on this printer yet.
The printer is hooked up to the Airport Extreme and i never really installed or tested it. So i did now. Installed the drivers, hooked everything up and started to print. Or so i thought. The printer stops in the middle of the first line of printing and the printer is halted by the software for a unspecified reason. When it’s hooked up to the local USB port it works fine.

Ok, stubborn… Dove into /Library/Printers and removed everything there. Re-installed the drivers and tried again. No dice… New drivers needed maybe. But no updates were there. Re-read the manual from the Linux Foundation (where the driver comes from). But everything seems alright.

Blah!

Why is it so hard to create a good driver/software for network printing for OS X? Or is Apple to blame because they’re ditching the Carbon system in favor of Cups? I would think Cups is widely supported though. Since it’s used in Linux for years. Or is the Airport Extreme to blame. I do remember printing via that thing though. However, when i connect the printer to my iMac and share it and then install it on my Macbook Pro it works fine and even assigns the right icon to it. All with the same drivers.
Would this mean the driver is fine? Network printing is network printing. So logically the Airport Extreme would be the culprit here? Bummer if it is!

Any ideas? Thoughts?

Death by headphone

So i unplug my headphones from my Macbook Pro and now my sound port is broken on it… Nuts!
Well the sound port isn’t broken… It works when the headphones are connected and when disconnected it’s convinced i’m using some optical device… completely insane.
So our magical tech guy ripped the machine apart and replaced some part to test and it worked again.

Getting a replacement tomorrow…

Google hates me!

So they won’t give me a job… Fine, their loss!
But to mark my website as a harmful and potential danger is just not true, unfair and childish!

Ofcourse i filed a complaint and put in a request to reverify my website to get this fixed. But those urls they complain about don’t even exist anymore! And even when they were online they only had a bunch of posts in them which did not offer malicious downloads or any download other than the occasional update to one of my plugins for wordpress… So this bollocks is completely uncalled for! Which is also wrote to Google.

To serve or not to serve… Not to server!

So last thursday a small disaster happened in what later turned out an epic week of failure.
I lost communication with my server. Fearing the worst i called my mom, if she could see if the server was powered and perhaps reboot the thing.

She restarted the thing and all seemed well. The monitor wasn’t connected so there wasn’t much else she could do. But me from work could ping the machine again so i assumed it was ok. My mom went on downstairs, still on the phone, to test the internet connection. Nothing worked.

We then proceeded to bypass the server, which handled DNS and DHCP to set things manually and use openDNS. This did not work either. Frustrated we ended the conversation. I had to rush home after work to fix things.

Because the server seemed messed up i started there, rebooted. Found out the network cable wasn’t connected. Or so did OS X Server tell me. Ofcourse it was connected just fine. While pondering what would be wrong then i noticed my switch acted weird. All 8 ports were blinking in a rapid pace. “oh hell! it’s buffer messed up” i thought and went on to pull the power from it to reboot the switch. Which seemed well, the leds went as normal, for 5 seconds then they started blinking again. So i disconnected all Ethernet cables, restarted it again and noticed it was good. Then i connected all cabling one by one noting it went crazy at cable 2, which is going to my Lacie Etherdisk. Leaving that one out things went normal, but nothing could connect. I also noted the switch made a high pitched hissing noise that shouldn’t be there. I then declared the switch dead and angrily thought about a sollution. Which turns out to be a 3Com switch and my Airport Extreme. Hooked everything up… and voila. My LAN was working again. Mom rejoiced, she could read her email. I was more or less happy because the LAN was online and i could read my mail and chat with Catarina again. Life was good!

The next day, the server hung, and after a reboot no-one could connect to it. Remote desktop wasn’t working, shares seemed unreachable. Yet the machine seemed online as it responded to PINGs normally. GRRR! Climbing the stairs to the attic to go local on the monster it quickly turned out the LDAP database was gone. Which means that all users and access rights are either deleted or revoked. Thus no one could login. Luckily Root (admin) isn’t stored there so i could save all files and move them to my Lacie Etherdisk. Again, very angry and frustrated i decided for now i would use the Etherdisk and declared the server an unreliable piece of crap. Worst server OS ever!! Being completely through with OSX Server i decided i would reinstate the Lacie Etherdisk as the main data storage thing and my router would handle DNS and DHCP from here on in.

No more iCal server and no more LDAP hassle. I was so ready to throw it out the window as this was the 3rd or 4th time it lost its LDAP stuff in less than 6 months. With no direct access or a backup present this means i have to re-install the whole thing, set everything up again with only a backupped config file to go on. Lots of time would be lost, AGAIN!

OSX Leopard Server is stupid and sucks and is completely crap and even more unreliable… Aaand i dunno, some other nasty words!

I’m still not sure if i’m going to reinstall the server or not, probably not… maybe a Tiger server or even Linux PPC… We’ll see!