Macintosh How To » problems

How to stop iTunes from playing while watching TV

Wayne — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 22:43:50 +0000

With Snow Leopard Apple have made the pause button on the remote control ALWAYS start and stop itunes. This means if you are watching TV on your mac, and you go to pause it, iTunes starts playing! There is no way to disable this.

The best workaround it to open itunes, and go to the itunes store. From here the play function will not work. You can then minimise itunes and watch TV!

How to reset the OS X Installer

Wayne — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 02:20:46 +0000

In Snow Leopard if you try to install a program while another is installing you get an error message saying “Waiting for other installations to complete.” But what do you do if the message stays there after the program has finished installing?

Today I was stuck with this message even though there was no installation in progress. The computer won’t’ restart as it wants’ to wait for the update to finish first!

The first option around this is to ‘force quit’ the installer. Press Apple-option-esc then select ‘Software Update’ and ‘Force Quit’.

If that doesn’t work try deleting the following 2 files from your Library/LaunchDaemons.

com.apple.RemoteDesktop.PrivilegeProxy.plist
com.apple.RFBRegisterMDNS_RemoteManagement.plist

Search problems in Mail application

Wayne — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 05:35:21 +0000

I’ve been having a problem with mail – I can’t do a search on ‘entire message’. It is greyed out. There are all kinds of ‘fixes’ available on the internet, but most of them didn’t work. Finally I fixed it and here’s a summary of the most useful advice, try it in this order:

1. Have a look in ~/Library/Spotlight and make sure there are no plugins that might be causing problems. For example, I had an old Mailtags Plugin that was 2 years old, so I deleted it.

2. Make sure you haven’t excluded your mail folder in the spotlight privacy tab (spotlight preferences)

3. Reset the entire spotlight database by opening a terminal window and typing

sudo mdutil -E -i on /Volumes/*

(It will ask for your password)

4. Open Mail and click on Mailboxes:Rebuild.

That resets spotlight and mailboxes, which I think just about covers all options.