Troubleshooting

If you’re having Synergy ‘cannot read configuration’ error problems, try the following: * Get the latest version of Synergy KM from SourceForge * Be sure the clients have the latest version of Synergy installed too (it’s pretty old for Windows clients, but works) * Create a new ‘Location’ and re-add your server, screens, clients, in … Read More

Growl is a desktop notification system that allows applications to publish updates and items to floating windows on your desktop. This allows you to see things like updates, information, and status changes to whatever application is publishing the Growl notification. The advantage to Growl is that regardless of what application has the focus, you’ll see … Read More

“Close Firefox – A copy of Firefox is already open. Only one copy of Firefox can be open at a time.” You may have gotten this message if Firefox has recently crashed or you killed the process. The reason this error is appearing is likely because there is a lock file on your Firefox profile. … Read More

“The operation can’t be completed because an unexpected error occured (error code 0).” You’re likely to see this error when you are attempting to copy files to an external hard drive that is formatted as FAT. FAT32 is a Windows file system that can be read and written to by Mac OS X. The problem … Read More

From time to time iTunes can take a very long time to open, typically because it is looking for the music library. If you find iTunes to be taking a long time to launch, you might try this simple fix seems to resolve the slow application launch issues: * Launch iTunes * Immediately hit and … Read More

Upgrading to Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.3 was a painless procedure until I tried to access some SMB mounts… suddenly I had no write access to my samba drives! I was presented with this error message: The operation can’t be completed because you don’t have permission to access some of the items. Thankfully there’s … Read More

Booting into safe mode in Mac OS X is a troubleshooting trick that can help to diagnose many common system problems, and even some more obscure issues with Mac OS X. While safe mode is considered an advanced troubleshooting technique, it’s easy to use and easy to exit out of, meaning just about any experience … Read More

So you called Apple’s main number at 1-800-692-7753 (1-800-MY-APPLE) and you’re getting lost in a maze of automated menus with a robot who attempts to direct your call, sometimes successfully and sometimes not. Wouldn’t it be nice to talk to a real human being who can help, rather than a phone robot? If you’re frustrated … Read More

If your Mac has a SuperDrive or Disc drive, you can boot the Mac from any bootable DVD or CD by using a special keyboard shortcut. The bootable disc can be an OS X system restore disc, an OS X installation disc, or even a third party OS disc like Linux.

Is a DVD or CD stuck in your MacBook or MacBook Pro? Having a disk jammed in your Mac is really frustrating, but you can usually get it out by using a few different tricks. The methods outlined below are for when a disc is truly stuck in the Mac. Eject a stuck CD/DVD from … Read More

Target Disk Mode is a very handy feature available to use with Mac’s that have Thunderbolt or Firewire ports, and it allows you to use one Mac as an external drive on another host machine. This incredibly useful feature makes troubleshooting, installations, large file transfers, and critical backups extremely easy and very fast. Before beginning, … Read More

The recent 10.6.3 update is said to include a few Airport/wireless updates that improve reliability: * general reliability for wireless connections. * improvements to 802.1X reliability, including closed network connections, and WPA2. Unfortunately that wasn’t the case with the update on my machine, my wireless connection started having problems immediately after the 10.6.3 update. If … Read More

This is an unusual iTunes error that you shouldn’t see too often: The update “iTunes” can’t be saved. The file “iTunesAccess.tar” couldn’t be found on the server “swcdn.apple.com”.

I was recently asked to do some maintenance work on a relatives iMac, and one of their chief complaints was the speed of Photo Booth, the fun application that takes pictures and distorts them with your iSight. Upon inspection of the machine, I found that Photo Booth was running extremely slow, launching the application would … Read More

“Ahhhh my Mac isn’t working! I need to reset the SMC!” You have tried rebooting, you’ve reset the PRAM, you’ve done it all, but your Mac is still behaving strangely. What next? In certain circumstances, resetting your Mac System Management Controller (SMC) can be a solution. This is sometimes necessary to restore normal lower level … Read More

It’s tax time in the USA, which means everyone is either going to be happy with a refund or sad when they owe. Many people use online tax filing software to make the job a bit easier since they can do it themselves from home.

“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 … Read More

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. There can be a variety of reasons the backups become delayed, and if you’re curious why this happens we’ll go … Read More