Knock on wood, my Snow Leopard problems are largely behind me. There is no replacement for hiring outside expertise.
Steve Sorbo. aka MacS.O.S., came by and fixed a ton of issues in an hour and a half. Here's the list.
The disk permissions: there's a checkbox under "Get Info" to "Ignore ownership on this volume." In this case, ignoring the problem makes it go away.
Gave me the clearest explanation I've ever had on how the Mac OS stores information, and the secret lairs for settings. It would have made my life easier (maybe--one goal was to purge my system of errant app settings) had I known to just drag over my home folder to the new disk, but who knew? Not me.
Restored my missing junk mail folder in iMail.
Transferred my iPhone apps from the laptop to the desktop. I have always been furious at Apple and iTunes about this persnickety monogamy of iPhone to a single iTunes, and the casual neutron bomb explosion it sets off when I try to sync to the wrong machine.
He fixed my network! No one ever believed me when I said that networking never worked for me. I always got the "Macs don't do that" response, which settled it. He immediately figured out that my Airport and my DSL were two separate networks. I had no idea, and I would never have known how to know. Networks are one of those dark arts that require incantations and spells. But now I can full access to both computers.
Remote access will have to wait. My Netgear router apparently is the blocking agent. I'll have him back soon to cast more spells.
Found my Transmit settings so I can upload to my ISP again. I put that stuff in there once. I have no idea what any of those setting mean, so I couldn't just re-enter the information.
He couldn't fix the Snow Leopard bug that reverts the Line Out sound setting to Internal Speakers when rebooting. Same behavior in a pristine user account, so it's nothing I did. Nor could he keep Photo Mechanic from opening when I plug my iPhone in. "Well, it is a camera," he said. Fair enough.
I made him make one change that drove him nuts. Change Command-Spacebar so that it doesn't open up Spotlight. My muscle memory reserves that combo for zooming in my photo and video editing. Apparently, that keeps me out of the Mac geek club.
That masked man again? Steve Sorbo. www.seattlemacsos.com.
Great to hear Steve got you working again! Two things:
- I also remap Spotlight (to Command-Option-spacebar) because I use LaunchBar, which is activated by Command-spacebar (that's configurable, too, but it's my muscle-memory combination).
- One suggestion for Photo Mechanic opening: Plug in your iPhone, and then open the Image Capture application. Select the phone in Image Capture's sidebar; you should also see some options at the bottom of the sidebar. (If not, click the Show Device Settings button at the lower-left corner of the window.) Finally, set the popup menu there to "No application."
Posted by: Jeff Carlson | September 17, 2009 at 12:29 PM
Glad I could be of service Doug! A few comments:
• I Don't want to give the impression that dragging over the User act. en masse would have been the way to go. While technically there is a way to do this, it's better to create a fresh User Account, *then* drag various bits over from the old account into the new one.
• As I mentioned there are reason for Apple creating a "monogamy" between an iPhone and one Mac. If you want to experience a neutron bomb explosion then try and tether/sync an iPhone to more than one Mac. Also the RIAA was responsible for some of this forced monogamy until DRM was removed.
• For those who are curious. Doug's networking problem was fixed by putting the Airport Extreme into Bridge mode. This allowed the Netgear router to control handing out IP addresses. The tip off of where the problems lies is by going to the network System Pref for both machines. They both have to have IP addresses within the same IP range. In Doug's case one was in the 192. range (the netgear controlled Mac) and the laptop was in the 10.0 range (the Airport Extreme controlled Mac) When troubleshooting networking issues, ALWAYS check the IP addresses for the affected machines before you do anything else. Doing this step first will save you a lot of potentially needless troubleshooting down the road.
• I have a fix ready to go Doug for the remote access. We need to enable a geeky feature within the Netgear called UPnP (Universal Plug and Play). No Spells required, though sacrificing an old version of Windows Me or even better BOB wouldn't hurt! HA.
• This Line Out issues seems to be a rather annoying bug. I went to the Apple Store today, and recreated the issue on one of their Snow Leopard Macs as well.
• And I concur with Jeff's suggestions. :-)
Posted by: twitter.com/macsosguy | September 17, 2009 at 10:54 PM
Does anyone understand what that man just said?
You want one of these on your side. thanks again Steve.
Posted by: Doug Plummer | September 18, 2009 at 07:29 AM
Jeff,
Thanks, you fixed my iPhone connection issue. What a great thing.
Posted by: Doug Plummer | September 18, 2009 at 03:31 PM