The Problem

Frequently, say, one out of 10 times, when I try and log back into my Mac from the screensaver, or when I wake it from sleeping, I will get a spinning beachball and be unable to type my password. Other times I will be able to log in, but I am prompted to enter my password multiple times for various applications, and invariably one of them (usually gconsync) will get stuck after I enter my password with a spinning beach ball. I can still use most applications, but application that needs keychain authorization locks up.

I happen to be using a very handy tool called SSHKeychain, which turned out to be the culprit.

If you are using SSHKeychain, this post will walk you through fixing the unstable-wake-from-screensaver, and also solves the problem of having to type your keychain password 3-5 times when I returned to my computer.

If you are finding mail sometimes not appearing in your Mail inbox after upgrading to Snow Leopard, but then it appears again once you restart Mail, try shutting off the ‘Use IDLE command’ option in account settings. (Its at the bottom of the advanced tab).

After upgrading to Snow Leopard on my Mac, I noticed this was happening with email in my Dreamhost IMAP account.

I’ve been running with the ‘IDLE’ option turned off for a day, and it seems to be working correctly again.

Since the latest Mac operating system Snow Leopard adds Exchange support to iCal, I thought maybe now I could reach the holy-grail: Syncing my work calendar, in Exchange, to Google Calendar.

This would effectively let me see my business meetings on my Android-based cell phone.

I had tried various tricks and tools before, but nothing ever quite worked. But today I tried BusySync, and it seems to work great.

All you need to do is setup iCal to access your Exchange server, then in BusySync’s Google tab, check the off the calendar you want to upload in the ‘Publish to Google’ list.

There are two problems with this solution however:

1. Changes made to the calendar on Google aren’t synced back to iCal, and worse, they seem to be lost from Google.
2. The calendar name shown in Google is pretty awkward, its currently ‘Calendar[<user@exchangeserver>]’.

I’ve been using Mozy on my Mac for a while, but I’m strongly considering canceling my subscription. It took nearly a month to get the backup complete. Once it was, it ran successfully for about a month, but now I get errors like this in the logs, and the backup never finishes successfully:

2009-07-07 13:26:04.668 MozyBackup[7933:3603] WRN (updater) Error adding changes to scan cache: database is locked 2009-07-07 13:27:04.736 MozyBackup[7933:3603] WRN (updater) Error adding changes to scan cache: database is locked 2009-07-07 13:28:06.563 MozyBackup[7933:3603] WRN (updater) Error adding changes to scan cache: database is locked 2009-07-07 13:29:06.670 MozyBackup[7933:3603] WRN (updater) Error adding changes to scan cache: database is locked 2009-07-07 13:30:07.005 MozyBackup[7933:3603] WRN (updater) Error adding changes to scan cache: database is locked

I found this blog post, but I seem to have a slightly different issue, even though the errors listed are the same. I’m not using any backup sets at all, instead, I’m only having Mozy backup my home-directory (with specific exclusions setup, to avoid backing up a few virtual machines).

Granted, I have 300,000 files totaling over 100 gb to keep backed up, but I don’t modify many files on any given day. If this is too much data for Mozy to handle, the client should let the user know!

It turns out that ever since the IPhone came out, IPhone users have been able to sync their Mac Address Books with GMail. But that privilege isn’t extended to anyone else. Why every user can sync with Exchange and Yahoo!, but only IPhone users can sync to Google is beyond me.

Anyway, luckily there is a workaround, so if you are a T-Mobile G1 (Android) early adopter like me, you don’t have to update your GMail Contact list from scratch.

You can read how to do it on Lifehacker, but the instructions are pretty simple if you are familiar with Mac property files:

1. If you don’t have the Property List Editor (it comes with XCode, which is free, but a very large download) installed, download the shareware PlistEdit Pro and install.
2. Open up ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iPod.plist and save a backup copy of it. Then, expand the tree to reveal “Family ID.” Change that value to 10001. My 5th-gen IPod had the value 6 originally.
3. Save your changes. Launch Address Book and open the Preference pane. The Google contact sync option will be staring right at you.

I’m constantly having trouble with getting the backspace and delete keys to work properly in OS X. Whenever it works right on the Mac, one or the other key is broken when I  SSH to a Linux or FreeBSD box.

After some searching, I’ve found this solution, which seems to be working:

1. First, got to the Terminal menu, and choose Preferences… Under the Settings section, choose the Advanced tab. Make sure Delete sends Ctrl-H is checked.
2. Then, in the same window, go to the Keyboard tab (right next to Advanced). Find the line for forward delete, and set it to this value:
   \033[3~
3. Lastly, you need to run the following line at the terminal. The trick with the line below though is that you need to type the ^H by pressing Control-V and then Control-H. You can not just cut and paste the line below, you need to type it:
   echo -e "stty erase ˆH" >> ~/.bash_profile

For further reading on this topic check out these two links:

• Linux Backspace/Delete mini-HOWTO
• Consistent BackSpace and Delete Configuration

This problem, and various solutions are documented all over the net, but I found and used this page most recently.