macbook

Thanks Apple. I'm one of those people who actually use keyboard autorepeat!

Open a Terminal session (from Launchpad of course..!) and test that autorepeat isn't working by holding down a key... See!? Bet you'd not even noticed that subtle change. Here's how to re-enable it on Lion. In your terminal session:


defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false


That's it. No reboot or anything sinister like that.

It's rare, but as I've discovered when using Microsoft products on a Mac, it is possible to crash parts of the OS. I've written a quick tech note on the command line way to recover without a reboot. (After all, OSX is UNIX!)...

If Finder crashed, giving you a beach ball over a disk window:
sudo killall -KILL Finder

If the dock crashed:
sudo killall -KILL Dock

The menubar (where the clock, batter indicator, and so on live) crashed:
killall -KILL SystemUIServer

In a previous article, I talked about how easy it is to stream iTunes music (and movies) about the network using AirPlay. I didn't cover mobile devices such as the iPad or iPhone, and I'll be dealing with them in a third article. They're good as remotes and we need to talk about AirPlay with those devices as a source of media. Before we cover that, I wanted to explain how you can stream Spotify and other non-iTunes music around the network too.

I've used SlimDevices (Now Logitech) Squeezeboxes for years, which is why I'd previously had very little interest in the Apple alternative. Since getting an AppleTV, I've become more interested in the wireless streaming of music about the house using AirPlay. The technology is built into iTunes, the Airport Express WiFi base station and, of course, the AppleTV itself. It's so simple and flexible to use that I'm regretting messing about with the Squeezeboxes previously.

In this article, we're going to look configuring access to an iSCSI server from Mac OS X. In particular, this will be useful for Time Machine backups; this is what I do at home for my macs.

The OVF Tool is included as part of the 'Full' sized Fusion 3.1 installer. I've recently written a brief article on how to make sure that it is installed for you when you first install Fusion. This article shows how to convert a virtual machine into an OVF template using this command line tool.

I have a template virtual machine created in Fusion that I'd like to share with a colleague. If this was an ESX virtual machine, I'd probably export it as an OVF file. In Fusion, it has been a tricky thing to do. Until now. Version 3.1 includes the OVF Tool if you know now to install it.

Yesterday, I upgraded to Fusion 3.1 on my MacBook. The upgrade was easy and painless. When I started up my Windows VM this morning, as expected VMware Tools began to automatically update itself.

This article describes how to install ESX4i onto a USB 'Pen' drive using a Mac. I found this article which is very useful if you are unfortunate enough to have a PC.