Typing # on an Apple UK keyboard

Posted on By Mark Wilson

One thing that’s really annoying for UK-based Mac users is the lack of a # symbol on the Apple keyboard. In the US this is known as a “pound” but in UK English (or “English”, as I prefer to call it!), a pound symbol is £ for pounds sterling (our unit of currency) or lb for the imperial unit of weight and we call # “hash”.

Anyway, it turns out that UK keyboard users can type alt+3 to generate a # character.

Now all I need to do is work out how to get a backslash (\) when I’m working in Windows from a remote console (RDP) session on my Mac…

More on iChat AV

Posted on By Mark Wilson

A couple of weeks back I wrote about the issues I was having getting iChat AV working with services other than .Mac. Well, a few days ago, Alex and I finally managed to get it all working as intended.

This is what I learnt:

  • Audio/visual (AV) chat is not supported over Jabber (I thought that it might work on a point-to-point basis as some commercial real-time collaboration products do – e.g. Microsoft Live Communications Server); however it does work using an ICQ account via the AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) transport within iChat AV.
  • If your buddy keeps switching out of iChat into other IM programs (e.g. Adium) then it will break your testing… Despite having loads of nice features Adium doesn’t support AV.
  • Some IM client combinations will render the conversation as raw HTML. That’s not very nice.
  • After deleting a contact from my buddy list, I was having problems recreating it (and was receiving a bizarre Feedbag error 14 message). Eventually, I gave up trying to add the contact via iChat (on either the AIM or the Jabber transport) and instead installed the native ICQ client, added my contact, and then switched back to using iChat AV (which could then read the contact from my ICQ buddy list). Following this, the audio/video icons (and menu options), previously greyed out, were enabled and we were able to have an audio/video conversation.

There’s a conversation thread on the Apple Forums that describes some more of the troubleshooting steps that I went through.

Reloading deleted podcasts in iTunes

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Recently, I’ve had problems with a couple of the podcasts that I’m subscribed to via iTunes whereby I’ve downloaded a new episode only to find it’s actually a re-post of the previous one with a new description. After deleting the duplicate podcast, iTunes does not download it again (even by forcing an update) but I found a tip (unfortunately I can’t find the original link but there is a Mac OS X hint that sounds similar) that let me to hold the option/alt key and click on the triangle next to the feed name (when the feed is collapsed) to resync the feed, after which it is possible to download all the missed episodes that are still available. I’ve tried this using iTunes v7.0.1 on Mac OS X 10.4.8 – I guess it also works on Windows but I haven’t tried.

Windows Live OneCare Safety Scan

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Based on the content I write, I imagine that most readers of this blog will be IT professionals. That generally means two things:

  • Your family don’t understand what you do (e.g. “Mark works in computers”).
  • Your family and friends think that because you “work in computers” that you can fix their PC.

I fell foul of this a couple of times over the last few days. The first time was no big deal – a few months back, I had given my parents an old laptop and now they are really getting into e-mail and the web; however it was booting very slowly because a well-intended friend of theirs had installed the popular (and free for non-commercial use) AVG Anti-Virus (along with a load of unnecessary applications) and it was performing a full scan on every boot (I had already installed Symantec AntiVirus which was working quite nicely in a far less obtrusive manner). Once I removed AVG, performance was back to normal… so much for well-intentioned friends.

The second instance was last night, when my brother said he’d applied some updates to his PC and now he couldn’t get into Excel. That was easy enough (Microsoft Office XP required the original media to complete installation of an update), but I decided to check out the general state of the PC and was a little alarmed. Because the PC is only connected to the Internet via a modem, downloading updates takes a long time – automatic updates will trickle feed and my brother had kept his anti-virus definitions up-to-date but it still needed a lot of attention. Microsoft Update told me that it would need most of the night to download it’s updates, so I took it home (disconnected everything else from my LAN as a precaution) and hooked it up to my ADSL line, before spending the next couple of hours downloading and applying 61 Microsoft updates (as well as updating AdAware SE Personal Edition, which was over 700-days out of date).

Having given the PC a clean bill of health with AdAware (luckily the dial-up connection had minimised the spyware threat and it just had 52 tracking cookies to remove), I decided to check out another tool that, ironically, an Apple support page had alerted me to the existence of – the Windows Live OneCare Safety Scan.

Other antivirus vendors have online scanners (e.g. McAfee, Symantec and Trend Micro) but the advantage of the Microsoft version is that the full scan checks for viruses, spyware, disk fragmentation, temporary files, redundant registry data, and open network ports – what would appear to be a fairly thorough healthcheck, all through one ActiveX control.

Another feature is that you can run individual scans for protection, cleaning up or tuning the system (each effectively a component of the full scan described above). Finally, for Windows Vista users, the Windows Live OneCare site also provides a beta for a Vista-aware full service safety scan.