“iTunes could not connect to this iPhone because an unknown error occurred (0xE8000065)”

Ahhh! That’s the message I got earlier when trying to connect my iPhone to my iMac, something I haven’t seen before. I searched around a bit online and found out that this is not a Mac OS X specific problem, many people running Windows XP and Windows 7 encounter the same error. While I couldn’t find a definitive answer as to what causes it, I have my own speculation: power issues.

Many of the complaints and descriptions regarding the error describe swapping around USB connections and ports to resolve the issue, and I think this helps to corroborate my suspicion with power management. With this is mind, here’s how I got the ‘unknown error’ to go away and finally connect my iMac to my iPhone again: I just let the iPhone charge more. The battery had been very low, and I have auto-sync enabled, so I imagine the iPhone just didn’t have an adequate charge to maintain a connection.

Now again, all of this is just pure speculation based on my experience and reading other peoples encounters with the same problem. So if you’re running into this “0xE8000065″ error with iTunes and your iPhone (also some people report problems on their iPod Touch…) try the following to troubleshoot:

* Change the USB port the iPhone is connected to the computer with
* Let the iPhone charge sufficiently before trying to access it through iTunes
* Turn the iPhone on and off

If it’s persistant, you could even try resetting the PMU/SMC controller on the Mac.

Anyway, if you encounter this error hopefully these tips work to resolve it for you as well, let me know!

If you haven’t backed up with Time Machine in a while, the latest backup status will change to ‘Delayed’ and the menubar icon will have an exclamation mark in it reminding you to backup soon. Resolving the backup delay is easy to do, just pull down the Time Machine menu and select ‘Backup Now’, as long as you have the Time Machine drive attached, your backup will go as usual.

Common reasons to have the ‘Time Machine Backup Delayed’ message:
* You have manually stopped the Time Machine backup process several times
* You have detached the external device that Time Machine was backing up to
* You have recently changed the Time Machine backup drive

If you have recently changed the Time Machine device, make sure Time Machine is aware of the new disk location by checking out the Time Machine preferences within System Preferences > Time Machine. The name of the backup disk will be listed, if it’s an old drive or you want to switch it, just hit the ‘Select Disk’ button and select your new backup disk.

I recommend to just let Time Machine run on it’s regular backup schedule so you can prevent delays and keep your Mac backups as accurate and relevant as possible. You may not need them often, but when you do, you’ll be glad you have a recent Time Machine snapshot to revert back to.

Recently Preview.app was refusing to open some image files for what seemed like no reason, I wasn’t even able to drag the image file onto the Preview icon to open it. I know the images are fine because they open fine in Windows and even in Photoshop, so how can I force Preview to open the images? Pretty easy really: hold down Command+Option keys while dragging a file onto the Preview icon, this will force any file to open through Preview (you could force a text file into preview if you wanted with this, but obviously preview will only render compatible files).

Using this method, the images worked fine, I was able to resave them, and now they’re back to opening in Preview as usual. I’m not sure what the cause of this problem is, perhaps the image EXIF or meta data was corrupted. I remembered this trick from a post a few years back by our very own David Mendez, how to force open a file in Mac OS X, and this actually will work with nearly every application and file, so if you want to force an image file into TextWrangler, you could do that too.

Gone are the days of Mac OS System 9 where all startup items were sitting nicely in a system folder labeled ‘Startup’, now with the Unix undercore of Mac OS X things are a bit more complicated beyond the easily accessible ‘Login Items’ preference pane.

Average Users: Startup & Login items in Mac OS X

For the average end user, most apps they want to configure to launch (or not) on boot are actually handled with a login event that’s easily controlled through something like the Dock with a right-click or the “Login Items” listed under user accounts, if that’s what you’re looking for then the average user can see how to launch an application on system start in Mac OS X (which is actually upon user login) and that will likely cover their needs.

Advanced Users: Startup & Login items, apps, and scripts in Mac OS X

This part of the article isn’t for most users! If you’re an advanced user or a systems administrator, that aforementioned preference pane is rarely the end of your hunt to track down startup and login items in Mac OS X. I recently was on a wild goose chase trying to find a rather obnoxious script a user had accidentally installed on a network machine, and this post from SuperUser made my job significantly easier, so for that reason I provide the list to you:

Applications that run on Startup:
/Library/StartupItems

plist items running on startup:
/Library/LaunchDaemons
/System/Library/LaunchDaemons

Applications that launch on User Login:
* First check your “Login Items” for that user account within the Account settings of System Preferences
~/Library/LaunchAgents
/Library/LaunchAgents/
/System/Library/LaunchAgents/

Applications that run on a set schedule:
Check your crontab with crontab -e

Check Kernel Extensions:
In the command line: kextstat

Check Login and Logout Hooks
defaults read com.apple.loginwindow LoginHook for Login
defaults read com.apple.loginwindow LogoutHook for Logout
or see both with:
/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c Print

If you don’t know what you’re doing, please don’t mess around in the above directories or commands, you can easily cause more harm than good! These locations serve the core functionality of Mac OS and should only be altered by advanced Mac users and Systems Administrators.

[ via SuperUser ]

The application Finder.app can’t be opened. -10810

I ran into the unpleasant 10810 error code recently and couldn’t find any workaround without a reboot. From what I’ve gathered by searching around on the web, Error 10810 occurs when the Launch Services framework has some sort of meltdown, causing the Mac OS X Kernel to run out of available threads for anymore processes to launch. In the event that some process has got errant and is in some infinite loop of launching and hoarding threads, this will cause a rather lovely barrage of error dialog boxes (see screenshot below).

If you start getting Error 10810, you likely won’t be able to launch any other application (Finder included) and so the best thing you can do is to reboot your Mac. If you are continuously plagued by this error, then you may be using some buggy software that is launching itself into a gazillion threads causing Mac OS X to freak out.

If anyone has additional information or troubleshooting tips regarding this error, feel free to chime in.

Tye Campbell wrote to us with the following question: “Do you guys know how to take apart an iPhone? Specifically the 3G model, I can’t find any way to get to the display and I’d like to do my own screen replacement since mine is cracked but I have another one available to me from a water-damaged iPhone. I’m pretty patient and don’t mind learning, but I don’t even know where to begin, any tips or starting points?”

Good question! I had to take apart an iPhone 3GS recently to replace the back case, I used the guides offered by iFixIt, they are comprehensive and really walk you through accessing various parts of the iPhone including the display. The key is to have the right tools at your disposal before disassembly, otherwise you can end up in a really frustrating situation. Also be sure to track each individual iPhone part and where it comes from inside the device so that when you reassemble it you won’t have any extra pieces laying around! These guides will help you with selecting the right tools and staying organized during the iPhone repair, follow it carefully and you should have no problems. If you’re wondering how to take apart an iPhone, I would go this route:

iFixIt: iPhone 3G Guide

iFixIt: iPhone 3GS Guide

iFixIt: iPhone 1st Gen Guide

I love my iPhone but it’s had it’s share of quirks, and one of them is the seemingly random ability to access the cellular data network. I don’t know if this is an AT&T problem or an iPhone problem, but it’s really annoying to not be able to use 3G service when I need to. I went looking for a solution for the problem and came across a pretty simple and straightforward fix on TUAW. They suggest resetting your iPhone Network Settings:

To reset your iPhone’s network settings, tap your way to Settings > General > Reset > Reset Network Settings.

The only downside to this solution is that it also resets your remembered WiFi access points and their passwords, so be ready to re-enter a bunch of WEP/WPA keys!

Anyway, this solution worked for me, so thank you TUAW! And if you’re having problems with your iPhone cellular data connection, try resetting the network settings yourself, it might just work.

Have you ever gotten emails from someone that you really don’t want to get? Be it just plain spam or annoying messages from people you’d rather not hear from, you can reduce this unwanted email by using the Bounce feature of Apple’s Mail app. Bounce tells the message sender that your email address isn’t valid, which is very effective when dealing with real people, but less so when dealing with spammers.

How do I stop someone from emailing me?

The most effective way to reduce unwanted emails is to ‘Bounce’ a message back to the sender. Select the message you want bounced back to the sender and go to the “Message” menu and select “Bounce”, or after selecting the message you can hit the keyboard shortcut Command+Shift+B to achieve the same effect.

Is there anything else I can do to stop unwanted emails?

Yes, you can try labeling the message and sender as Spam and that will help to weed them out as well. For dealing with individual people I find that “Bounce” works the best to send a message to them, then marking any future emails from this individual as Spam.

If you’ve ever accidentally deleted pictures from your digital cameras memory card, you’re not alone. That feeling of dread when you forever lose photographic evidence of memories and experiences in digital form can sometimes be resolved though. Exif UnTrasher is a Mac OS X app that does exactly that, it will attempt to recover deleted images from your memory cards, and it works pretty well. Here’s the caveat though, you have to be able to mount the digital cameras memory card as a volume on your Mac, which some cameras can do but others can’t. If your camera doesn’t support mounting of media, you can always just use an external card reader which works just as well.

Exif UnTrasher is not a miracle worker but in our test it recovered all images that were taken before a ‘Quick Format’ on a Canon digital camera, so I imagine the success rate depends largely on how the images were deleted from your memory card. Try it out, it’s free, it certainly won’t hurt anything, and it’s got a pretty good chance of working to get your deleted images back!

Developer home
Download now

[ Carsten Blum via LifeHacker ]

Looking to repair your Mac? Troubleshooting hardware problems on your Mac? Planning a do-it-yourself battery replacement with a Unibody MacBook Pro? How do you change the harddrive on a 20″ aluminum iMac? If it involves dissembling a Mac and putting it back together, there is no better resource than iFixIt, who has the single most comprehensive list of free guides to take apart and rebuild nearly any Mac that is still in use. Every screw, tab, connector, and cable has been covered, if you follow these guides carefully you really can’t go wrong.

This site is absolutely fantastic and a must bookmark for any techy Mac user, Mac IT professional, or general enthusiasts who aren’t afraid to get their hands a little dirty. Do not miss it!

Mac Disassembly & Repair Guides

iFixIt Mac Guides – All Mac’s

iMac Repair Guides

MacBook Repair Guides

MacBook Pro Repair Guides

Mac Mini Repair Guides