Colorsync support with Safari

MacInTouch Home Page: "[John Fieber] Safari and Omniweb support embedded ICC profiles. ColorSync is always enabled in Safari, and is a preferences option in Omniweb and Internet Explorer.

  A caveat about Safari ColorSync support is that it assumes Generic RGB for untagged images, not sRGB. I, and a lot of other folks on Apple's colorsync list, find this rather distressing since, for better or worse, sRGB is the standard for web graphics in the absence of explicit tags. I haven't checked what Omniweb and IE assume for untagged images.
  ICC Profiles in Images is a page to test colorsync support.
  ColorSync in Mozilla addresses the Mozilla family of browsers.

[Christer Olsson] There's actually no way to turn ColorSync off in Mac OS X 10.3. Safari (and Mail and Preview) is using ColorSync to match tagged images. More details can be found in the following document: Color_Management_in_Mac_OS_X.pdf"

Video out from Mac Mini analog VGA is underpowered?

Mac Mini (Part 7) - Macintouch: "About the 'dim-VGA-signal' symptom with the Mac Mini: Merman computer-magazine C't' has measured the analogue signal coming out of the Mac Mini. They wrote that the signal- level stays below 530mV and this clearly is out of the VESA- specs. Signal-strength is too low. Some monitors can handle the weak signal well, some don't. Better go with DVI."

Bad fan design is the bane of the iMac G5

iMac G5

A Mac user reverse engineers the iMac G5 fans. He identifies yet another flaw: lateral play in the bearings.

Bottom line, for many Mac users a major appeal of the G5 iMac is quiet operation. It doesn't deliver. In fact, it often generates more irritating noise than a typical desktop machine. (During the winter my homebuilt XP, with several thermally controlled fans, is almost silent.)

I'm already holding off on my iMac purchases because of the problems with iPhoto 5. If Apple doesn't fix the iMac I'll be looking at either a Mac Mini or a refurbished PowerMac.

iPhoto 5 is a turkey

Apple - Discussions - iPhoto 5

I've been following the Apple discussions for a while. Even with the 5.01 patch this iPhto release smells like week old fish. This is particularly disappointing since iPhoto 4 was clearly a performance and bug fix update, we thought iPhoto 5 would be a big improvement.

iPhoto 5 is so bad I'm holding off on buying a new Mac -- because that machine would ship with iPhoto 5 and it hard to switch back to iPhoto 4.

Things to do if your Mac doesn't boot

Apple - Discussions - List of things to do if your Mac doesn't boot

Modified from a post to Apple Discussions

Safe mode:
hold Shift while power on
use Disk utility to repair permission and Onyx to delete caches

Single user mode:
hold Command + S while power on
at the Unix command type fsck -fy
type again to make sure there is no error
type reboot and press Enter to get out of Single user mode

PRAM:
hold Command + Option + P + R while power on

OpenFirmware: hold Command + Option + O + F while power on
While in open firmware you can reset your video and pram settings with these commands
0 > reset-nvram
Press Return
0 > reset-all
Press Return

Installation disk one:
Put in Installation disk one
hold C while power on
Use Disk Utility to repair permission and repair disk

Target Disk mode:
user a Firewire cable to connect to another Mac that's on
hold T while power on, this will make the unbootable Mac act as an external hard drive
Back up files from there
Use Installation disk one to re-install OSX

Re-install OSX if you don't have access to another Mac:
Put in Installation disk one
hold C while power on
While selection target drive, go to Options and select Archive and install
The installation will keep all your files and settings
After installation is complete delete the Previous System on the hard drive.

Mac OS X Update troubleshooting

Macintouch Mac OS X 10.3.8

A set of useful troubleshooting tips. None of these should be needed of course.

Andreas Junghans In response to David Whitehead's network problems after the 10.3.8 update:

I've had network problems in the past after some OS X and security updates. Apple's Mail and Safari would not be able to connect to servers while Mozilla would continue to work just fine. What solved the problem every time was rebooting the machine (a second time after the mandatory reboot when the install is finished).

Regarding Tim Wojtyniak's question about the applications in the 'Open with ...' menu:

Each OS X application contains information about the file types it can work with. Whenever an application is launched or simply clicked on in the Finder, OS X updates the so-called 'LaunchServices database' with the new information. Among other things, this database is used for providing the 'Open With ...' entries (similar to the Windows registry, but only used for file associations).

As detailed here, you can completely rebuild the LaunchServices database using the following command in a Terminal:

/System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Frameworks/
LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local
-domain system -domain user

This command first flushes all entries and then rescans the usual folders that contain applications. For each application found, the corresponding file associations are added to the database. After this procedure, deleted apps should no longer appear in the 'Open With ...' menu. In case you have some applications stored in custom locations (e.g. '/Productivity Apps'), you have to launch them once to restore their file associations.

Panther Cache Cleaner Update

MacInTouch Home Page: "Panther Cache Cleaner 2.4.7 provides easy access to numerous Mac OS X maintenance and utility options through a graphical interface. This release has been updated for Mac OS X 10.3.8 and adds a screenshot helper and an option to remove unneeded language localizations. Panther Cache Cleaner is $8.95 for Mac OS X 10.1 and up."

I've avoided PCC since I removed it and seemed to resolve some serious stability issues. It used to install something deep in the OS.