Monday, January 5, 2009
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Updated current students calendar. Archived website data to 2.5-inch external hard drive. Verified offsite backup hard drive and Time Machine hard drive. Helped student AP with a question about setting up email for another student. Listserv maintenance. Prepped old laptop for surplus, migrated all data from it to the new laptop. New laptop new software installs and Microsoft updates. Temp Rebecca joins us again for another few weeks. "power policy manager unable to set policy, access is denied" error when attempting to set power settings for a non-admin user on the new laptop. Workaround: in the User Accounts control panel, add the user as a Power User. I learned today that it seems to be impossible to do certain mouse operations in Boot Camp using the built-in trackpad for the aluminum MacBook (December 2008)—e.g., right-click on a Quick Launch button, and right-click-and-drag anywhere (e.g., from a file in Windows Explorer to the desktop). Works with a real mouse. Doesn't work with the MacBook trackpad. I also learned today that Firefox 3.0.5 in OS X has hidden keyboard shortcuts. For example, if you visit a web page, right-click a link, and press the T key on your keyboard, the link opens in a new background tab. This mirrors keyboard shortcut behavior in Firefox for Windows, but on Mac you don't have any indication of the keyboard shortcut like you do in Windows (the underlined T in the popup menu). This is great for productivity, but only for people who happen to know about it. This shortcoming is likely not due to Mozilla but rather, I suspect, due to Apple because Apple hasn't been paying as much attention to keyboard shortcuts as Microsoft has. I discovered this keyboard shortcut feature only by accident. I was familiar with this behavior on Windows and had been switching to and away from my Vista VM and accidentally did a presumedly-Windows-only-action on the Mac side, and after I saw the resulting behavior on Mac I had to stop for a few seconds and ask myself, did that just work? Yes, it did! Sold an old graphics card of mine to Juan for $5. Thanks, Craig N! When attempting to open the Boot Camp control panel as a non-admin user, I received the following error message: "An error occurred while trying to access the startup disk settings. You may not have privileges to change the startup disk. Make sure you have administrator privileges and try again." I wanted to change the Fn key behavior. Workaround: temporarily change the user to have admin privileges (in the User Accounts control panel), log in as that user and change the Boot Camp control panel settings the way you want, log out, log in as admin, revert the user to have non-admin privileges, log in as that user, test function key behavior. Today when I ran Disk Verify in Apple Disk Utility on the drive that had my VMware virtual machines, Vista crashed in a way that also hung OS X. I guess you're not supposed to do that—I didn't know. Sold 2 old power supply units of mine to Charlie for $20 total. Thanks, Craig N! I received a new year's day card from Joel today which included a nice article about Sandra Bernhard. Thanks, JWG!