Tag: mac

Fixed iCal 24-hour input problem

Since the Leopard (OS 10.5) upgrade, and until yesterday, I was quite reluctant to use iCal, for at least two reasons. Adding a new event no longer made appear the box of options, and second, it was time-consuming, after double or triple clicking on the entry, to figure out how best to input a start and end time in the box of options. For example, typing 14 in the hour field would instantly transform into 16. The up and down arrows were what I ended up using most of the time, because extending the event box with the mouse was not exactly accurate.

The reason is that I’m using custom time and date settings, a recipe that is just right for me (living in France and using English as work language) and that I spent a fair amount of time crafting and refining several years ago. I was loathe to have to touch it so as to compensate that fact that Apple had coupled iCal with input from international/regions preferences.

How easy the solution was: Open the System Preferences, look for International, select the Formats tab, look for the Times section, click on the “customize…” button, click on the hour and select “0-23” from the drop down menu. OK. Quit System Preferences. That is it.

Attention Deficit (Hyperactivity) Disorder

I swear I knew what I was going to blog about, mere moments ago. I was only missing the title. I knew I had several things to list. /me scratches head, looks confused. Damn, I should make a better use of twitter.

I could blog about ADD, mind you. Note the absence of H; “Hyperactivity” seems preposterous as far as I’m concerned.

Now, where was I?…

I wanted to share the irony of this Temperature Monitor program that I use and that seems to simply stop when the temperature exceeds a certain threshold (in this case, it was 83C/181F for the CPU A Temperature Diode). How dumb is that?
Also, I note that I have yet to hear the fans of my MacBook Pro.

There was something else…

Oh well, it probably wasn’t that important. My minibreak time is up anyway.

Help them help me

Normally they don’t ask to install a weekly on top of a final version, but if I dare do so this time it will help they get more correct data, making sure that they continue to make a better browser for ME.
[adapted from yesterday’s Opera Desktop Team’s blog.]

The idea is that while some people tell us about their wishes and concerns in the blog and forums, thousands of people download the weeklies without giving direct feedback. By using a build with feature reporting, they will also contribute to improving the product for all of us.

I have submitted wishes and concerns in the blog in the past, but there are so many (irrelevant) comments each time the Desktop Team release a build or a final, that my wishes and concerns must have drowned in the noise. I can’t be bothered to comment what rank I am downloading their build. And I expect they are bothered that people do.

I welcome very much this experimental build.

Upgrade Java and SIMBL

I transferred my user account from Precious (a PowerPC mac) on Phoenix (an Intel mac), and when calling RDFPic (which needs Java), I got the following error:

java[1820] *** -[NSBundle load]: Error loading code /Library/InputManagers/SIMBL/SIMBL.bundle/Contents/MacOS/SIMBL for bundle /Library/InputManagers/SIMBL/SIMBL.bundle, error code 2 (link edit error code 0, error number 0 ())

The error didn’t prevent my photo RDFization, but I was bothered that there was the error in the first place.

I had the java version “1.5.0_06” (of maybe August 2005?) and found out on ACD that there had been a release on 12jan2007 for 1.5.0_07. I upgraded, but I got the SIMBL error anyway when calling RDFPic.

I located SIMBL stuff on my machine, but was none the wiser. I googled SIMBL.

SIMBL (Smart InputManager Bundle Loader) – pronounced like “symbol” or “cymbal” allows you to build hacks for Cocoa applications and apply the code selectively based on an application’s unique identifier.

I have no idea how SIMBL got installed on the Precious in the first place. But I installed the universal binary. And when I call RDFPic, not only does it keep working but also I don’t get the error message anymore.

If you look in your console.log (Applications/Utiliites/Console.app), and search “simbl”, you’ll see that a lot of applications use it and that a lot of errors are written.