Blogger lives - mobile templates in draft

Last June I put Google's Blogger on the Dead list, in part because of the lack of a mobile template. This morning Blogger in draft offered me a mobile template.

Blogger isn't dead after all.

Google apps for our family: now with email monitoring (delegation)

It wasn't designed to support parental control and supervision, but Google's new email delegation function is very helpful (emphases mine) ...

Google Apps update alerts: Email delegation now available for all Google Apps customers

.... Administrators must first enable mail delegation by checking the 'Mail Delegation' checkbox under 'Email Settings' in the administrator control panel.

To enter a delegate, users can select the 'Accounts' tab under 'Settings' in Gmail and click 'Add another account' to enter their delegate's email address.

Once the delegate is signed into their own own Gmail account, they can then access the other person's account from the account selection menu at the top of Gmail....

You can only add delegation accounts that are a part of the Google Apps domain, you can't add external Gmail accounts.

It takes a while for the "account selection" menu to appear. About fifteen minutes after I set up delegation on my son's account a small arrow appeared to the right of my bold email address on the top right of my Google Apps Gmail page.

In fact currently my son does not directly use Gmail, it's just an IMAP service for OS X Mail.app. Only I know his Gmail password. So this doesn't let me do anything I couldn't already do, but it's much easier to monitor his account.

Troubleshooting MacBook wake from sleep problems

Our 3 yo Dual USB MacBook (Intel dual core) is having intermittent wake from sleep problems. It's on a WiFi network and running Leopard - 10.5. On lifting the lid it spins up then hangs with a faint blue screen. There's no cursor.

I haven't found a fix yet, but here's a list of what I've tried [4]. They're listed in the order I'd suggest. Of course the first thing to do with any ill-behaved machine is to check that your backups are good...

1. Run Safe Mode start, (aka Safe Boot) then restart [2]
2. Remove share mounts
3. Login items - remove all
4. Clean out list of remembered WiFi networks - Network:AirPort:Advanced. [5]
5. Do not inactivate the ethernet port - even if you don't use it. Delete all Locales. [6]
6. Disable Bluetooth
7. Update Flash (or consider removing it forever)
8. Input Managers - remove all. They are Satan's tool.
9. StartupItems - remove all from Library\StartupItems and ~\Library\StartupItems if it exists. Do not mess with System\Library.
10. Onyx: check corrupted preferences, check disk, delete caches including font caches
11. Onyx: Repair Permissions :-) [1]
12. Install disk, run disk utility check disk
13. Reset SMC [3]
14. Zap PRAM [2]
15. Run hardware test in loop mode on install DVD
16. Remove or update any low level software
    1. Look in /System/Library/Extensions for ideas, but dont' mess with /System. Look in Library/Extensions.
    2. Cisco VPN for example - uninstall requires terminal
    3. Retrospect Client [7]
    4. Fusion is another - it loads early. Update it.
17. Console.app: Look for messages on startup. Unfortunately Console captures a vast number of warnings and error messages even in a "healthy" system.
18. Disable Safe Sleep (more a Leopard than Snow Leopard option?)
19. Look for more ideas here: Tutorial: Dealing with Wake-from-sleep issues | MacFixIt - 2006
20. Reinstall OS X (desperation move). If you're on Leopard, might as well upgrade to Snow Leopard.
21. Send out for repairs - likely a hardware issue. Bad memory can do this and problems may not show up in the hardware test.

I'll update this post with the eventual outcome. As of this moment I'm trying Permissions [1] and SMC reset (more likely to help) and I'll try run the hardware test tonight in loop mode.

Update 12/18/10: The hardware test worked. The problem is much better. I wouldn't say it is perfect, but clearly some of the above measures helped. The two I'd most favor are "clean out list of remembered WiFi networks" and "reset SMC". I suspect this problem is less common with 10.6 and that, at least with 10.5, there are many contributing factors to "wake from sleep" failure. The fixes I made reduced the frequency, but it will still occur.

By way of comparison, there were NEVER any issues with the pre-hibernate sleep mode of 10.3 and MacOS Classic, but XP sleep mode is completely unusable. (I've no experience with Win 7 sleep.)

Update 6/17/11: This problem resolved. I think it was finally fixed in 10.6

See also:

• Gordon's Tech: Things to do if your Mac doesn't boot (2/2005)
• Gordon's Tech: My 10.6 iMac is crashing - a debugging exercise (2/2010)
• Inquirer confirms apple macbook pros have nvidia bad bump material (12/9/2008)
• Can’t Wake MacBook Pro from Sleep (5/2008)
• How to Turn Off Safe Sleep
• Set newer portable Macs' sleep mode (return to the good old days - 10/2006)
• Tutorial: Dealing with Wake-from-sleep issues | MacFixIt - CNET Reviews (3/2005 - problems were more common then)
• Solving Macbook Wake from Sleep issue | Tancredi
• Computer sleep vs hibernate | Scott Gruby’s Blog 12/13/10

-- footnotes

[1] OS X has reams of permission related issues. I have never, however, seen repair permissions help with any of them, much less anything else. It always finds things to "repair", but the "repairs" fix nothing. Repair Permissions is the OS X equivalent of a disconnected thermostat. It's there to distract the customer. Still, when all else fails, I suppose it's worth trying. Onyx will conveniently run Repair Permissions.

[2] Safe Boot, loop mode hardware test and zap PRAM all need a wired keyboard. There are terminal workarounds for Safe Boot.

[3] An Apple identified cause of wake from sleep issues - Intel-based Macs: Resetting the System Management Controller (SMC): "A portable Mac doesn't appear to respond properly when you close or open the lid." I have noted that sometimes the green light on my magsafe connector doesn't come on ...

[4] An infamous Discussion thread on MacBook Pro problems is a good source of ideas.

[5] I had at least 20-30 in my machine. I removed every one.

[6] I have done this in the past, but not on this machine.

[7] I had a leftover version from when I used a Win XP Retrospect Pro backup server. I had to find an old installer to safely uninstall this low level app that runs on startup.

Picasa web uploader - Google Data Freedom scores

Credit to the data freedom team at Google - the new OS X web uploader can also download albums and even ALL albums - including video.

Does any other free image service allow such easy download of "all albums"? (I pay for extended storage, but most don't)

Onyx finds a directory problem

Joel Barriere's Onyx troubleshooting utility for OS X is free. It comes well recommended, so when my main machine was misbehaving I tried it again.

This time the Onyx startup test told me I had a drive directory structure problem. I was a bit surprised; It's been years since I ran into something like that. Onyx recommended I run disk utility from my 10.6.2 installer disk.

I was lazy, so I tried safe boot instead. Safe boot won't work with a wireless kb, so I plugged in a wired kb and held the shift key down on restart. Surprised again -- it didn't work! I thought safe boot would run fdisk if it found an error, but I guess not.

So I gave in, found my OS X installer disk, and ran Disk Utility from there. It found a missing directory item and fixed it. The behavior has changed over the years, now if Disk utiliy fixes an error it runs a second time to look for uncovered problems. It was fine, but I ran it a third time because I'm that kind of geek.

I don't know if this had any relationship to my problems. My iMac's screensaver uses images hosted on a Time Capsule external share; for some reason it's been dropping the wireless share and failing to reconnect. This is a pain to debug, because there could be multiple causes and because, even at the best of times, OS X doesn't recover from dropped shares very well.

Still, I'm glad to have found something fixable. I made a donation to Titanium Software. I meant to give $10, but I didn't pay attention to the denomination so I gave 10 Euro (about $13 or so).

I wonder if Onyx will be sold in the OS X App store come January. Since it's always been donation-ware (free) that would probably cause some complaints, but this is a venerable and well regarded utility. Barriere surely deserves some revenue.

Aperture Projects descriptions and iPhoto Event descriptions - what happens on iPhoto migration?

One of the problems with migrating from iPhoto to Aperture has been that all of the descriptions associated with iPhoto events and albums are lost.

In Aperture 3, however, projects now have descriptions ...

Working With the Project Info Window | Aperture Users Network

The Enter description field is a place to add descriptive text to add to your Project. This is a great concept, which we’ll talk about more in other tutorials, but essentially it’s designed to hold text to describe a whole Project as opposed to individual images in the Project. You can include any information you’d like here, and it’s searchable. For example, let’s say that you were doing a shoot for a client, but you didn’t want to add the client’s name to the metadata of your photos. You could add that to the Project description field and search for that later on.

Aperture 3 projects now behave like iPhoto events, they can be created automatically (fixed 1 day interval, less flexible than iPhoto). There's a good description of the project description field in this support thread. Along the way rwboyer mentions using a one page book template with a large text area for notes associated with project.

This is encouraging. So has Apple finally addressed a major issue with migrating from iPhoto to Aperture? Will event descriptions be saved in project descriptions?

I couldn't find any documentation on this, but it was easy to experiment. I created an iPhoto 8.1.2 Library with an annotated Event and imported that Library into Aperture. The iPhoto Library became an Aperture folder, and the iPhoto Event became an Aperture Project.

After I did this, the Aperture Project description field was ...

...

empty.

I would love to see Apple sued for false advertising when they claim Aperture 3 is a natural migration path for iPhoto users.

Why can't OS X restore dropped network shares?

This was written in 2004 ...

Dropping Network Connection In Sleep Mode - Mac-Forums.com

... I am running OSX 10.3.4 and really want to know if there is any way to put my computer to sleep without dropping the network connection"...

Actually, I remember that 10.3 wasn't too bad at holding onto network connections. 10.6.5, on the other hand, couldn't hold onto a network share if its life depended on it.

It's been such a longstanding problem few geeks have the energy to complain about it any more.

Maybe the OS X network team should study how Windows 95 did things ....