Silvermac

When you buy Western Digital external hard drive it is very likely that it will come preinstalled with the WD Smartware. What this means is that when you connect the drive to your Mac the software will run automatically, mounting WD Smartware drive and placing an icon on your desktop. If you try removing the icon from your Desktop or ejecting the drive through Finder you’ll find that it comes back after 2-3 seconds.

Some have tried reformatting the drive, but this won’t help either, the partition with a number of WD folders keeps coming back. Frustrating …

This is because a Virtual CD (VCD) has been installed on the drive. The VCD mounts every time you connect the drive. To prevent this you’ll need to disable the VCD.  Once you have disabled it you can either leave it as it is (it won’t mount again) in case you think you may want to install it in future, or you can repartition and reformat your drive from Disk Utility without any restrictions.

To disable VCD you need to download Virtual CD Manager from WD website and run it off your Desktop.

The best thing about Microsoft are their mice (mouses), I love them. The tracking acceleration seems so natural while Apple’s is rubbish, for me at least. That’s why I use the Microsoft Wireless Mobile Mouse 3500. Cheap as chips and works perfectly in every way … but one. Scrolling is way too fast.

No matter how much adjustment I did it’s still way too fast. I set the Vertical Scrolling Speed in System Preferences (under Microsoft Mouse) to a minimum but it still scrolls like 15 lines with one wheel click (those little clicks while scrolling the mouse wheel).

Lucky I had a spare wired MS mouse to compare them. The wireless mouse USB dongle is plugged in one USB port on my external monitor (Dell U-2410), the Apple wired aluminium keyboard into another one while third one is free for my camera’s cable when needed. The monitor’s internal USB hub is then connected to the computer (MBP) via another USB cable.

I plugged the wired USB mouse into the USB port on my keyboard and the scroll on that mouse worked fine, slow as. I took it out and plugged into the spare USB port on the monitor and the scroll went crazy. I thought it might be conflicting with the dongle, so I took the wireless mouse dongle out, but the wired one still acted crazy. The last option was to plug in the dongle into the keyboard’s USB port and guess what – it works perfectly fine.

So if I plug the dongle into the USB port on the monitor – the scrolling is super-fast. If I plug it into the keyboard, which is connected through the monitor anyway, the scrolling is perfectly fine. I have no idea why, but it works.

I was considering getting an EF 70-200mm F/4 L IS USM and weighing up my options whether to go for it or not. Considering the price the only option would be to sell my 100mm macro to free up some funds … you know how it all works.

So I took a little test today, just to see how good 100mm macro lens actually is and whether it would be worth selling it or is it just too good to kiss it goodbye.

I also have EF 24-105mm F/4 L and decided to compare the two lenses in identical conditions.

I asked my wife and two daughters if any of them would like to help being a model, but since they were preoccupied with watching some Gossip Girl rubbish on TV I had to find another girl. She was incredibly co-operative, didn’t complain, didn’t say a word and didn’t even blink. I can’t thank her enough!

I was actually quite amazed when I saw the difference … continue reading…

If you are annoyed by the vertical placement of the red, yellow and green (close-minimise-zoom) buttons in iTunes 10 like I am, you can change them back to horizontal with a simple terminal command.

Open Terminal (Applications/Utilities/Terminal) and type (or copy and paste) the following command:

defaults write com.apple.itunes full-window -1

Press return, relaunch the iTunes and – enjoy!

To go back to the traffic-light look just replace -1 with -0 in the command above.

Digiarty is running Halloween promotion by offering MacX DVD Ripper Pro FREE download until 28 Oct 2010. Both Mac and Windows versions are available.

The MacX DVD ripper for Mac software allows you to rip DVD to MP4, H.264, MOV, FLV, MPEG, M4V, AVI, QT(QuickTime) with high quality video/audio. The New-DVD-Backup feature lets you copy DVD to a single video file with the original video quality and 5.1-channel AC3/DTS Dolby audio.

Mac users can download the full version of MacX DVD Ripper Pro by clicking ”Download for Mac” button, and use the license code BD-TGTXUVYO-OONQRP.  Windows users, just click “Download for Windows” button, download and decompress the zip file and use the license code in the file to activate.  Download page is here.

You already know how to use the QuickView in OS X, select the document or image and either click the QuickView icon in Finder or press the space bar.

However, once the file is displayed you can either view it in the default size (fit to window) or in full screen view.

There is another way to zoom the view, though. Once the file is displayed hold the Option key on your keyboard to display magnifier pointer and click somewhere on the displayed file. The file will zoom-in to where you just clicked.

You can click 10 times to zoom in 10% increments to a maximum 200% magnification. At any stage you can let go off the Option key and move the image around within the window.

To zoom out simply hold Option+Shift and click on the file, again in 10 steps.