Mac OS X Linux Tech

a blog about coding & IT

  • Wait to Install Apple Software Updates

    Here’s an example of why you should to wait to install updates from Apple: MacBook Pro EFI firmware update version 1.5.1 replaced version 1.5.0 very shortly after its release as probably thousands of complaints rolled in about blank screen on wakeup problems with 1.5.0. As much testing as any software/hardware team can do in house,…

  • AirPort wireless connection Drops on Leopard 10.5.2

    Symptoms AirPort wireless connection randomly stops working, even though signal strength to base station is good. Wireless connection strength drops, clicking on AirPort starts scanning, wireless strength returns to full, but Internet connection is lost. Can’t create wireless connection to DLink DIR-625 wireless router after upgrading to 10.5.2. Possible Causes AirPort attempts to connect to…

  • Slow Internet with Leopard

    How to fix Slow Web Browsing and Slow Internet in Leopard (10.5.x) Symptoms Web pages load slowly in Safari or Firefox in Leopard. Web sites won’t load, only load partially, stop loading after a few hours. Slow DNS (domain name) lookup in Leopard. First load of web site is slow with “looking up domain” in…

  • 1.0.0.127.dnsbugtest. 1.0.0.127.in-addr-arpa

    Update: Stuart kindly dropped me a note regarding Apple’s fix for this.ย  See the end of the article for his response. This evening while randomly working on articles for Installing Cats, I was watching DNS requests from tcpdump running in a terminal window and noticed something quite odd: a DNS request every three seconds for…

  • Debugging Mac OS X DNS – tcpdump

    Need to debug a slow Internet connection in OS X? Or simply have a desire to watch incoming and outgoing DNS (domain name service) queries in Leopard? Then tcpdump is your friend. Open a terminal window and use the following command: sudo tcpdump -i en1 -s 128 port 53 -i Sets which interface to listen…

  • Automountd trying to connect to Backups.backupdb

    An explanation of why automountd is trying to find Backups.backupdb on the Internet… I woke up this morning with a warning from Little Snitch outbound firewall that automountd wants to connect to Backups.backupdb on port 111. Here’s what I’ve discovered since then. automountd is a system service which mounts and unmounts network file systems (NFS)…

  • Leopard 10.5.3 update released

    Apple has just released Mac OS X 10.5.3 update and the changes are not earth shattering. Here is a list of changes in Leopard OS X 10.5.3 posted at Apple Support. Most important to me would be this one: “Addresses reliability issues when performing a full restore from a Time Machine backup.” [Hint: don’t install…

  • Alternative to Safari: Camino Browser

    A good alternative browser to Safari on Mac OS X Leopard is Camino. Camino is based on Mozilla’s Gecko engine, so it operates much like Firefox on Mac, but a hell of a lot quicker. Camino just released version 1.6.1 (May 20, 2008), which fixed stability and security issues from their last major release, 1.6,…

  • Download divx for Mac

    To play divx videos or movies in QuickTime / Front Row on Mac OS X, you need to install a divx codec. If you open an .avi file and see only black, you likely don’t have a divx codec installed. Download a free divx codec for Mac here then following these walkthrough instructions on how…

  • Switch Between Keyboards on Mac

    Say you have different keyboard layouts cause you’re bilingual and need access to accents or different alphabets. The normal way to switch between these two keyboards would be to show the keyboard icon on the top Menu bar and simply click on the icon and choose the keyboard layout you wish to use. Although this…

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