Scritchy Scritch Scritch

Today I started recording a screencast in ScreenFlow for a demo on how a software product works. I went back to edit and heard static all throughout the mic track. I started doing tests in Wiretap Studio, changing headsets and iMics and all kinds of things trying to get a handle on what the issue was.

Finally, I started poking around in the Audio/Midi setup utility (found at /Applications/Utilities/Audio MIDI Setup.app) and noticed something. The Audio input settings for the iMic USB audio system were set to 48kHz 1 channel 8-bit. I changed them to 44.1kHz 1 channel 16-bit, and the recordings were crystal clear again.

The settings causing the problems:

The settings that fixed the static issue:

I’m not sure what changed them, but some app that uses audio did something and it resulted in static-filled recordings. There was a constant background noise regardless of whether I was speaking or not. If you find your recordings suddenly sounding really bad and you’re sure you haven’t done anything obvious, check the Audio Midi Setup utility and make sure things look right. Make sure in the “Properties For:” dropdown you select the input device you’re using.

Update: In retrospect, I guess I should have set it for 2 channel 16-bit.

Hackers Like Pipes

Peter Nikolaidis of the Fresh Ubuntu podcast and I recently did an episode for Hacker Public Radio on Yahoo! Pipes, which I’ve mentioned here before. We had a lot of fun, and we’ll definitely be doing it again.

As for HPR itself, I haven’t listened a whole lot yet, but it seems kind of formal, all things considered, from the opening music to the tone adopted by those I’ve listened to so far. I’m more of a “vary your tone and have some fun” kind of listener myself. But we’ll see. Like I said, I’m only about 3 episodes into it.

For some reason, putting the link to embed the second youtube video (the embed link constructed by YouTube, no less) makes weird things happen to this post, so screw it. Sometimes it’s not worth fighting wordpress to figure out what it’s attitude problem is. Here’s part one, and a link to part two.

Find Part 2 of this screencast here.

Launch Services Database, redux

Awhile back I posted about the Launch Services Database in OS X and how to reset this in Leopard. The problem is that sometimes it gets confused, and certain apps such as parallels do not help this at all. Parallels is a huge offender at whacking this out, regardless of if you have Smart App Select enabled or not.

The command line way is an excellent and free way of doing this, and if you don’t ever use your command line, you should start. It’s never a bad thing to learn a little about unix operating systems. Just don’t blame me if you hose up your system, please. But if you happen to own Cocktail, as I do, you can also use that application to do it. It’s even got an Automator action it installs for doing this. Below i’ll show you both methods of using Cocktail to reset the launch services database.

Note: please read the end of this post for an interesting counterpoint regarding Cocktail.

The automator way. Fire up automator using spotlight to search for automator. Yes, in Leopard spotlight really can be used this way, thanks to its speed and its method of highlighting app matches for you.

Find the action with the cocktail icon and the name “Rebuild Launch Services Database.” (obviously you won’t have it if you don’t have cocktail installed). it’s easiest to find if you’ve first clicked on “Utilities” in the left “Library” pane. Run it.

Really there’s no benefit in this method over the following, except that with an automator action available, you can include this action in some other automator script of your own, if you want. It’s there for the using.

The Cocktail way. Launch Cocktail directly. It comes up with the following window.

Click the “System” icon and then the “Databases” tab to see the following.

Without changing any of the default options, just click “Rebuild” and enjoy.

Ok, now some words about cocktail. When trying to remember where the web site was, I cam across this article by the guys at Rixstep which had some pretty unkind things to say about Cocktail. A couple things to bear in mind: they make a competing product, apparently, called “Clix,” and they start off by disparaging the neighborhood that the developer of Cocktail lives in. Just keep that in mind as you ponder motivation.

Motivation aside, they raise some issues which should be looked at. Some of them are related to security, some of them are related to competency and wasted disk space, and some of them are related to complaints about the way the author of Cocktail overwrote a previous free version with an updated, trial version of a for pay version of the product without informing people first.

Anyway, read the article. I’ve been poking around in the package contents and the command line and so far I haven’t found anything in this article that I can say is wrong, but I haven’t investigated very far yet. It’s worth of note that a lot of prominent Mac magazines/sites seem to recommend Cocktail, but of course that in and of itself doesn’t mean that Cocktail doesn’t have some issues. I’m not sure. I’ll update you if I have time to really poke at this thing some more.

Leopard LaunchServices Database - How do I rebuild it?

The LaunchServices database, among other things, associates file types with the apps used to open them. If you right-click on a file and choose “open witih”, this database determines what options show up. Yay! Unfortunately sometimes it gets hosed.. under Tiger i used to get a lot of duplicate entries or whatever.

My problem now is due to Parallels and its SmartSelect feature. it allows you to have OS X show you options for Windows or OS X apps to open files with - something I really didn’t want. I do not WANT visual studio even KNOWN about by the leopard LaunchServices database, for example. Or IE 7. Or notepad. Or whatever. Unfortunately for Parallels (and me), disabling this did not rebuild my launchservices db. But eventually I got to the point of clean up where the following terminal command to rebuild the launchservices db did the trick (note: this needs to be all one online with no returns):

Update: Joe points out in the comments he found my path to the command didn’t work. I checked on the Apple site and also in my own terminal window, and here’s the command with the path I see to lsregister (for Leopard, different for Tiger):

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A
/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support
/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user

Again, all on one line with no spaces except where obvious in the command above.

I’m really only putting this here so I can easily find it again, but I hope it benefits a lot of you. Hehe.

PS. The Tiger way of doing this is detailed here.

And btw, I’ve now switched to VMWare Fusion.

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Lost in Space(s)

I’ve heard a couple people mention they wish you could have a different background set for each “space” in Apple’s spaces feature in OS X 10.5 so that you could tell what space you were in at all times. While this would be great, here’s another way to never be lost in space(s).

Open the Expose & Spaces preference pane in System Preferences and make sure the “Show Spaces in Menu Bar” option is enabled.

Now look at the menu bar - you’ll see a little divided square icon with a number in it. The number is the number of the space you are currently in, and it changes as you switch spaces.

In addition, you can switch spaces directly though the drop down menu when you click this icon, and also launch the expose and spaces preference pane from here.

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Easy OS X Encryption

Ok, this is a really basic tip, but, as a switcher in the past couple years, there’s still a lot I haven’t learned, especially things that don’t fall in my personal “need” realm. When my dad asked me about encrypting stuff on his new Macbook Pro, I wasn’t sure how to natively do it in OS X. Well, now I know.

1. Open Disk Utility. Here I’m launching it with Leopard’s hugely improved Spotlight.

2. While in Disk Utility, go to File -> New - > Blank Disk Image to create a dmg.

3. In “Save As”, put the name you want the dmg filename to be. For Example, in this case the filename would be Personal Secrets.dmg.

4. For Volume Name, put what you want the dmg to show when it’s mounted.

5. For encryption, choose 128-bit AES.

6. Leave Volume Format, Partitions, and Image Format at the defaults. Volume Size set according to needs.

Click “Create”.

Enter a password for the dmg file, and do NOT have “remember password in my keychain” enabled. Remember, you are trying to keep people out.

The new dmg file will be mounted. Also it will be wherever you told it to be created.

After the first time, you’ll be prompted for your password to open the dmg. Then just move files in as you want. Since it’s a disk image, your files will be copied in unless you hold the command key while you drag them in. You don’t want to leave originals unencrypted on the hard drive elsewhere - presumably you are encrypting them for a reason. Again, don’t check any boxes that let you save the password into your keychain.

And that’s it - a very basic function but one that I wasn’t aware of how worked the first time my dad asked me to help him figure out how to encrypt some business files. Have fun!

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Stack that Leopard

Stacks were a highly touted feature of Leopard, and they are somewhat useful. Here’s a couple things that make them 1) look nicer, and 2) more useful.

1. Look Nicer

If you don’t like the look of the stacks in Leopard, the easiest way to change the icons is to get a little utility called Palette, which will let you customize them as well as configure your dock settings to make it look however you want. Here’s how it works:

Fire up Palette. The main screen looks like this below, it comes up on the Dock settings pane.

Click on the stacks pane button to see the options for stacks. Predictably, you can change the documents and downloads stacks icons.

To change the Documents stack icon, for example, click “Documents”, and find an image to drag into the window.

Now click the “set image” button.

And your changes have been applied as seen below.

Note: After I posted this, I figured out how Palette is doing this: It simply places the icon image of choice IN the folder the stack is pointing to (downloads or documents) with the same name as the folder. That means you can probably do the same thing without this app and get the same results. However, for being able to do this easily, AND the dock tweaks and menubar tweaks, all from one app, it’s probably worth the $10.

2. More Useful

You might notice the palette app icon to the right of the download stack icon, and to the left of the trash can. This is not the running apps icon… this is a “recent items” stack that can show me recently used apps, recent documents, recent servers, favorite volumes, and favorite items. It’s slick… check it out! You can add it with a simple terminal command. Below, I’m clicking on it in the “recent apps” mode to show me a quick list of apps I’ve used recently for quick and easy re-launching.

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Time Machine and You - What Hard Drives Can I Back Up?

One of the huge amazing features of Leopard that people won’t shut up about is Time Machine. And, ok, it is really cool, and hopefully it will get people backing up their systems who never have before.

On episode 98 of the Macworld Podcast, one of the guests/hosts made the comment that Time Machine would not back up their external hard drives along with the internal one.

It will, you just have to set some preferences. I found that on my system, Time Machine put all my external drives in a list of disks NOT to back up.

Here’s how to change that. Open system Preferences.

Click on the Time Machine Icon to get the Time Machine Preferences.

Click the Options button. You’ll see a list of drives NOT to back up. Highlight the drive(s) you DO want to back up, and click the minus sign at the bottom of the list. Woohoo!

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Search Your Menus (Leopard)

I heard a great tip on the Mac Geek Gab Podcast ep #125 about one of the new spotlight changes in Leopard.

The Help menu now includes a search bar at the top, and it looks like a little spotlight search bar.

Start typing something into this that matches an entry on the menu bar menus, and see what happens:

Highlight the result for the menu entry, and check it out… it points out WHERE in the menu bar menus this can be found.

Pretty cool.. a minor but interesting leopard feature that helps you find what you are looking for.

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