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I recently got the latest 15" Retina MacBook Pro, and I've run into a problem when I try to use HDMI. As soon as I plug in the cable, the entire system freezes completely. The mouse won't move, no keyboard inputs seem to do anything. While this is going on, the TV keeps going between a black...

I'm still on Snow Leopard at home (Lion at work), and I'm not sure if I'll upgrade yet. It might sound silly, but honestly the thing holding me back most is the scroll bars. I don't care that they look bad, but the complete lack of scroll arrows is infuriating to me. I was hoping Apple would...

So, I'm finally upgrading to Lion (took me long enough!), and while overall I like it, there's one thing that's really bugging me: they really mucked up Spaces (or Mission Control as they call it now). The transition between spaces is slow, ugly, and weird. Three main problems: 1. The desktop...

I'm trying to write a script to take a snippet of foreign text and open it in Google Translate. This SHOULD be very simple: just escape the text, insert it into the URL, and load it in the browser. There's a problem, though. This is an example of a processed URL...

Is anyone using Google+ yet? I have an account, but haven't messed around with it too much yet. If anyone wants an invite, just PM me your email. I'm not 100% sure, but I think it needs to be a gmail address. Edit: Looks like I can't invite more people for now. Not sure why. *shrug* Personally...

I've been looking at the info Apple's posted on Lion. A few thoughts I have: I'm not looking forwards to a world of full-screen apps. I know Apple isn't forcing it on anyone, but they have a way of marginalizing and neglecting the "old way" of doing things so much as to effectively force the...

I just noticed that Apple has changed how it measures megabytes in OS X. Now it calculates 1MB as 10^6 bytes, not 2^20 like it's been for the past 30 years. Apparently they changed it in Snow Leopard. I think this is kind of annoying. I kept thinking Handbrake was screwing up my file sizes...

I have a USB flash drive I've been using for about a year. It's an 8GB PNY model. Recently it stopped working in my MacBook Pro. The flash drive works fine in other computers, and the MacBook's USB ports work fine with other devices, so I'm not sure what the problem is. When I plug in the...

Along with the release of iPhone 4, AT&T changed their service plan. Now instead of unlimited data, they offer either 200MB/month or 2GB/month. I heard a lot about this directly after the announcement, but I'm wondering now that it's been out for a while how real users feel about it. I'm...

I like iPhoto's Facebook photo exporter, but I don't like the way it captions every photo with the file name. The file names are always worthless for me, since I upload them straight from my camera with the default "IMG_####" naming scheme. Now, you might think it's a minor issue, but it bugged...

I just bought a MacBook Pro, my first laptop. I was planning to enable FilaVault on it, since theft and snoopery are bigger concerns with portables. I've heard horror stories of the entire encrypted disk image becoming unreadable with FileVault, but I figured Hey, that's what backups are for...

Are there any good Linux LiveCDs for PowerPC? I know Ubuntu used to have one, but the PPC version isn't officially supported anymore, and even the community-supported PPC version doesn't have a LiveCD for the more recent versions. I'm also looking for something lightweight enough to run on a...

Apple released the first beta of Safari 4 today. http://www.apple.com/safari/ http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/15675/apple-safari I figured I might as well give Safari 4 a spin, since I use Camino primarily these days and don't rely on Safari. I had a bad experience. The installer...

I'm having a little trouble with XCode's snapshots feature, and I'm wondering if it's normal or if something is going wrong for me. Earlier today I noticed Time Machine backing up almost 200MB. I found this very strange, because I had not installed anything in the past hour. Turns out it was...

For the past day I've been wringing my hands trying to figure out the best way to pass a string variable in Python as an argument to a shell command. I can't just do this:input, output, error = os.popen3("echo " + my_var) Because if my_var contains, let's say, "'Lala-la'; rm -rf /", then it...

I have a large text file, and I'd like to turn each page of the text file into a slide in a presentation (PowerPoint, I guess, though I'm open to alternatives as long as they're cross-platform and idiot-proof). Is there any way to do this using OpenOffice or NeoOffice? The text file is currently...

The Script menu is a standard option in OS X that lets you easily execute AppleScripts from any application. You can set it up so that certain scripts will only appear in the menu when certain applications are loaded. For example, I have it set up so that when I'm using the Finder, the Script...

I recently got a Windows PC for free, and I want to hook it up to the Internet, but I'd like to isolate it from the rest of my local network. (For the security of my Macs, I do not want a Windows PC running wild and free behind my firewall!) I have a cable modem, and I currently share the...

I want to make a simple shell script that I can easily run as root WITHOUT needing to enter my password every time. I've heard that you can set an executable file to run as its owner all the time, so if you make its owner root, you're in business. I've done this like so, following...

I'm writing a program that processes data in Time Machine's Backups.backupsdb folder. The important thing is that there's no reason for me to process the same file twice, and Time Machine stores multiple links to the same files — one in every single incremental backup. I can test whether a...