Mac Problems

[Rob_P]

Every time I quit CS3 i get the message, "photoshop unexpectedly quit"

NO it didn't, I closed it by the only way I know how. Not even force quitting it :@

[Janson]

Every time I quit CS3 i get the message, "photoshop unexpectedly quit"

NO it didn't, I closed it by the only way I know how. Not even force quitting it :@

haha, this happens to me in vlc.

why won't vlc suddenly play videos in full screen on my telly? i have the 2 screen setup and it's been mint for ages, and last night it just decided to shit the bed. i reinstalled vlc and everything, no luck.

[Tomm]

I just found the best piece of software ever! I might even pay the $20 for it. Basically it keeps the same clipboard between all your computers on a network. It's one of the most annoying things for me - if I'm on my PC and I need to copy a URL/email address over to my laptop it's annoyingly hard to do.

http://www.stretchedout.com/products/crossclip/crossclip.php

It works perfectly - I just press Ctrl+C on my PC, and then Cmd+V on my Mac and I have copied and pasted from the PC to the Mac. There's a 14 day free trial on the website, not sure what I'll do when that runs out.

[Bondy]

I want to partition an external hard drive that i have so that one partition can be used for putting on random crap and the other can be used to work with time machine

If i partition the drive im assuming it will erase all of the data that is currently on the drive?

If so then is there a way of instead setting time machine to only use up a specific amount of hard drive space, otherwise it just happily uses up the whole hard drive over time which is annoying when you need some more space to find you need to go through and delete some backups.

Or is there just another piece of software that does the same and allows for a size limit.

[Tomm]

Time Machine is a bit complicated unless you just give it free reign, but I think there's a way of setting a maximum size in the setup. You CAN create your own "sparse image bundle" using disk utility and set a max size, then get it to backup onto that. Then you could just bung that on your external drive and it'll only expand to the max size you've chosen. I had to do that for my wireless backups to work on a non-timecapsule drive.

Or just create a Time Machine partition on your external drive (using the HFS file system) and use that. Something like Partition Magic should be able to resize your main partition on the external drive without losing all the data (assuming there's enough free space). But it's probably simpler just to wipe it and start again - if you have backups elsewhere obviously.

The simplest thing is actually probably just to buy another external hard drive. Depending on the hard drive in your mac, 250Gb will be plenty and drives are dirt cheap now.

Automatic wireless backups on Time Machine rock my world though.

[*PHIL*]

can you defrag a mac?

[Bondy]

The mac should automatically defrag files within a specific file limit so you dont have to manually do it, although i think there is software out there that can do it aswell.

[James]

Time Machine is a bit complicated unless you just give it free reign, but I think there's a way of setting a maximum size in the setup. You CAN create your own "sparse image bundle" using disk utility and set a max size, then get it to backup onto that. Then you could just bung that on your external drive and it'll only expand to the max size you've chosen. I had to do that for my wireless backups to work on a non-timecapsule drive.

Or just create a Time Machine partition on your external drive (using the HFS file system) and use that. Something like Partition Magic should be able to resize your main partition on the external drive without losing all the data (assuming there's enough free space). But it's probably simpler just to wipe it and start again - if you have backups elsewhere obviously.

The simplest thing is actually probably just to buy another external hard drive. Depending on the hard drive in your mac, 250Gb will be plenty and drives are dirt cheap now.

Automatic wireless backups on Time Machine rock my world though.

Theres an interesting article about time machine in the April edition of Macworld Magazine. Some of the points it brought up have dissuaded me from using it. Anyway, worth a read if anyone can get hold of the mag.

J

[Tomm]

Theres an interesting article about time machine in the April edition of Macworld Magazine. Some of the points it brought up have dissuaded me from using it. Anyway, worth a read if anyone can get hold of the mag.

J

It's not working flawlessly with me. It does hourly backups and they only succeed maybe 50% of the time. It's not a huge problem at all - If I wasn't using time machine I probably wouldn't do backups, certainly not every hour or two! Why were they saying it was a bad idea?

In other news, I was just trying to format my external drive (250Gb) to Fat32 again so I could use it on mac. Windows doesn't let you do it, so I tried via the command line. It took over an hour, then told me it couldn't do it. I then tried partition magic which would only let me do a partition up to 190Gb ish. I then had the idea of formatting it on my mac using disk utility. It did it in 10 seconds flat, works perfectly.

I my Mac.

[JonMack]

It's not working flawlessly with me. It does hourly backups and they only succeed maybe 50% of the time. It's not a huge problem at all - If I wasn't using time machine I probably wouldn't do backups, certainly not every hour or two! Why were they saying it was a bad idea?

In other news, I was just trying to format my external drive (250Gb) to Fat32 again so I could use it on mac. Windows doesn't let you do it, so I tried via the command line. It took over an hour, then told me it couldn't do it. I then tried partition magic which would only let me do a partition up to 190Gb ish. I then had the idea of formatting it on my mac using disk utility. It did it in 10 seconds flat, works perfectly.

I my Mac.

Hourly?! I used to do nightly, and that was way too often than I needed.

[Tomm]

Hourly?! I used to do nightly, and that was way too often than I needed.

Time Machine defaults, innit?

[James]

It's not working flawlessly with me. It does hourly backups and they only succeed maybe 50% of the time. It's not a huge problem at all - If I wasn't using time machine I probably wouldn't do backups, certainly not every hour or two! Why were they saying it was a bad idea?

Well, long story short is that that TM Can't - Create Bootable duplicates, so if your HDD is damaged or corrupted, you'll have to spend hours restoring your data before you can get back to work. It doesn't give you much control when it comes to choosing which files you do and don't want to back up etc.. Time Machine also doesn't compress files so takes up alot of space, and it doesn't use encryption either.

It had alot of good points aswell however.

QUOTE (JonMack @ Apr 2 2008, 02:04 PM)

Hourly?! I used to do nightly, and that was way too often than I needed.

Time Machine defaults, innit?

Time Machine does default with hourly, daily and weekly back-ups. You can however adjust the back-up schedule with a command line hack or third-party software, such as Stefan Klieme's free TimeMachineScheduler. Available here.

J

[JonMack]

Fair enough, I don't use Time Machine...

[Tomm]

Time Machine does default with hourly, daily and weekly back-ups. You can however adjust the back-up schedule with a command line hack or third-party software, such as Stefan Klieme's free TimeMachineScheduler. Available here.

J

Thanks for that link.

To be honest, TM is made to be useable by stupid people. It is retardedly simple and that makes it quite uncustomiseable (without hacks). I'm pretty sure you CAN boot from a Time Machine USB drive, just not from a network drive. But apparently if you copy the sparsebundle onto a USB drive from the network drive, you can restore from that. Dunno.

Bearing in mind that I wouldn't be doing any regular backups without TM, I think it's great.

[Bondy]

Quick question about Ipods

Basically i have an ipod touch and an ipod classic, what do i need to be able to connect them to a T.V so i can watch movies off of them?

Ive looked on the apple website and ive found an have composite cable, but its £35 and it seems waaay overpriced for my liking, just wondering if anyone else does this and what they use, or can recommend one to use?

Also, whats the difference between composite and component inputs i dont have a clue

Edited April 2, 2008 by Bondy

[nc7r]

Quick question about Ipods

Basically i have an ipod touch and an ipod classic, what do i need to be able to connect them to a T.V so i can watch movies off of them?

Ive looked on the apple website and ive found an have composite cable, but its £35 and it seems waaay overpriced for my liking, just wondering if anyone else does this and what they use, or can recommend one to use?

Also, whats the difference between composite and component inputs i dont have a clue

Composite is your typical run of the mill inputs which are Yellow for video, then red and white for audio (left/right) channels.

Component is higher quality especially when watching wide screen videos. It's most noticeable on large TV's however you do need to check the inputs. if you can, get component.

[Fish-Finger-er]

used to be able to do it with a sony video camera lead (in fact any 3.5mm stereo to red,yellow white connector)

but with the classics etc, it has to be an apple approved product and has to go through the dock connector to work.

[Dan Clark]

Ok, big problem.

I was using my Macbook Pro quite merrily on the train between Leeds and Peterbrough Monday evening, then all of a sudden the screen goes really dark.

The screen still works, its just as if the screen brightness has been set to minimum, turning up the screen brightness doesn't solve anything. Battery still has 83% charge.

Any chance of fixing this without sending it away to somewhere? It's out of warranty and I'm poor

[JonMack]

Sounds like your backlight has gone...

Might be worth PMing Nick seeing what kinda price it would cost to get it replaced, if it's just the backlight that's gone and the screen is okay, I can't see it costing that much.

[Dan Clark]

I'll try get him on msn or something.

Sucks majorly though, I suspected it was that.

[Bondy]

Hey guys cheers for the info with the have cables, i just got the totally overpriced apple cable today and im pretty pissed with apple, basically everything that ive bought off of itunes does not work and i cannot play it on the t.v, now unless im doing something wrong, then why the hell would they sell something which cant play music and music videos that you have legally bought off of itunes?

When playing music videos i just get the message "This video cannot be played" and when playing music, i just get nothing, it says its playing on the ipod yet no sound.

Any ideas if im doing anything wrong

Edited April 3, 2008 by Bondy

[Thom]

Hey guys, I've got a word document that I've typed up on a PC and I want to take it to school to print which are using the new Imacs.

Would that work or is the PC file not compatible with macs ?

any help would be great thanks !

[JonMack]

If it's a .docx file i think there are some compatibility issues but if it's a .doc it will open fine.

[Thom]

Great, cheers for that

[James]

Hey guys cheers for the info with the have cables, i just got the totally overpriced apple cable today and im pretty pissed with apple, basically everything that ive bought off of itunes does not work and i cannot play it on the t.v, now unless im doing something wrong, then why the hell would they sell something which cant play music and music videos that you have legally bought off of itunes?

When playing music videos i just get the message "This video cannot be played" and when playing music, i just get nothing, it says its playing on the ipod yet no sound.

Any ideas if im doing anything wrong

Hey, I had a scan around the 'reviews' bit on the apple site for some more info about your problem. I'm not sure if any of the info here relates directly, but it's worth a shot;

and I quote..

"USED WITH CLASSIC IPOD THIS CABLE IS ONLY COMPATIBLE WITH DIGITAL TVS.

I have a classic ipod and when i purchased this cable I discovered it only works with a digital TV. It will NOT work with a traditional red, white, yellow analogue T.V. The documentation that comes with the Ipod does not state this. The information on the Apple website does not state this. I rang support and they suggested that I try to purchase and additional adaptor to convert from digital to analogue. "

You could give this a try, but then there was a bit from a guy saying that he used this on an old 32" CRT tv so I'm confused.

Don't mean to sound condescending, but have you made sure your on the right have input on your tv??

J