Silvermac

Google has finally fixed something I was looking for for quite some time, adding multiple attachments in one go. Say you want to email 5 photos to someone, you have to click on “Attach a file” navigate through your file manager to find the file, select it and click OK. And repeat this four more times.

Now when you click on “Attach a file” you can select multiple files and click OK. The next you will see is a list of files being attached and the upload progress bar for each.It works with both Gmail and Google Apps (GAFYD).

One of the new functions of iPhoto 09 are Faces. When you select the Faces in the menu bar on the left you will see a cork board with the thumbnails of faces that iPhoto has identified in your library. The default thumbnail photo, or the key photo, is not always the best choice, so you’d like to change it.

There are two ways of doing this. Firstly, you can click on a little “i” icon in the bottom right corner of the photo, then skim through the photos until you find the one you like. Click on it and your new key photo will be set.

The other and easier way of doing this is simply to skim through the images (slide your mouse pointer over the thumbnail) while on the cork board, and once you see the photo you’d like to set as a key, just hit space bar. The new key photo is set. The same applies for the Events view thumbnails.

An extra tip – if you are skimming through the Faces, hold down the Option button, this will show you the entire photo, not only the face.

You can change your display contrast by using a simple keyboard shortcut:
Ctrl + Option + Cmnd + period (or >) to increase the contrast, or
Ctrl + Option + Cmnd + comma (or <) to decrease it.

If you are one of a numerous victims of MacBook and MacBook Pro hard drive failures, there is a glimpse of hope that you can still have your data recovered. It involves removing the hard drive from its enclosure, from the computer in this case.

Removing the hard drive from a MacBook is a breeze, it takes good part of a few minutes.  However, MacBook Pro owners will need some bravery, surgical precision and, of course, lots of time. Be aware that opening the MacBook Pro will definitely void your warranty.

Sometimes the drive heads get stuck in a parking bay and consequently your hard drive fails to read or boot. There is no clear indication that would help distinguish between this and the genuinely dead hard drive, but since it’s not working anyway, you can still give it a try. Often this fixes the issue.

Remove the hard drive from your computer and hold it on the palm of one hand. Give it one flat-handed brisk slap on the top of the drive. Just one. Then place it back into your computer and see if it worked.

If it’s still dead then it’s bad news. If it works – you have a decision to make; leave it as it is, and continue with your life like nothing ever happened, or get the data off the drive as soon as possible and get a replacement drive. It’s really up to you.

You’ve also learned about the benefits of backing up, so go on and get that external drive, they’re cheap as chips now, and back-up, back-up, back-up …

Referer spam is a technique that involves making repeated web site requests using a fake referer url that points to the site the spammer wishes to advertise. Sites that publicize their access logs, including referer statistics, will then end up linking to the spammer’s site, which will in turn be indexed by the search engines as they crawl the access logs.

This benefits the spammer because of the free link, and also gives the spammer’s site improved search engine placement due to link-counting algorithms that search engines use. [Wikipedia]

I have tried using several WordPress plugins but without much luck. However blocking the referer in the htaccess file has surely done the trick.

I have added the following to the .htacess file

SetEnvIfNoCase Via pinappleproxy spammer=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer doobu.com spammer=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer poker spammer=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer casino spammer=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer cazino spammer=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer kasino spammer=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer medici spammer=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer medica spammer=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer insur spammer=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer roulet spammer=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer virtuel spammer=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer pharma spammer=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer adult spammer=yes

Order allow,deny
allow from all
deny from env=spammer

… and the amount of referer spam has gone from several hundred hits per day to zero in three days. Fingers crossed.

Boy, can it be frustrating when your wireless network starts dropping every few minutes!

First it works fine, then the traffic stops even though the Airport indicator shows the full signal. When I click on it, the status shows as “Airport: Scanning” then after a few seconds it’s “On” and the traffic goes fine. Minute later it stalls again.

Endless reboots, change from Airport Extreme base station back to my old WGR614 Netgear router, changes and tweaks at both ends, dozens of tips and tricks in different forums, all tried, and nothing helps.

Then a friend of mine suggested to delete a few preference files and the things are working perfectly fine now.

Here is what to do: go to your user preferences folder (~/Library/Preferences) and delete all files containing com.apple.internet… I found only two files – com.apple.internetconfig.plist and com.apple.internetconfigpriv.plist, backed them up and then deleted both.

The wireless connection works like a charm now.