Today’s “forgetfulness” would seem related to my recent Safari 4.0.5 update. Unsubstantiated wild guess.

So, here’s what I do to correct this problem:

1. Shutdown Safari
2. Go to the /Library folder (the machine’s root /Library, not your 
user ~/Library)
3. Open the folder called “Internet Plugin-Ins” (I’m using 10.6.x)
4. Remove AdobePDFViewer.plugin
5. Restart Safari.

PDFs will now open directly in Safari using the native Preview application. This is ideal for most PDF uses. However, I find that if I am opening a PDF that has embedded fields and forms then it’s best to open with Acrobat Reader.

You may either continue to use Preview.app as your default PDF association and right-click to “Open with Acrobat Reader” — OR — you may “repair” your Reader installation by having Reader re-install the AdobePDFViewer.plugin that you just chucked out.

To do this:

1. Shutdown Safari.
2. Start Acrobat Reader.
3. From Acrobat Reader’s menu, choose “Help” and then pull down to “Repair Adobe Reader Installation”.
4. You’ll be prompted to enter your password and then AdobePDFViewr.plugin will be re-installed in /Library/Internet Plug-Ins. 
5. Restart Safari and your PDFs will now open using Acrobat Reader.

To switch back to Preview as the default, go back to the first set of instructions and delete ye olde plugin.

Shouldn’t this be automated within a Safari preference? Ahem.

If you have a MobileMe account (http://www.me.com/) and turn on the feature in your iPhone’s MobileMe account preference, you can locate your phone in two ways:

1. Geophysically. The onboard GPS reports back where on the planet the phone is and displays a Google map of its proximity.
2. Sound. You can send a message to the phone from the MobileMe website that causes the phone to vibrate and play the Sonar pinging sound (a little too quiet if you ask me).

Here’s what the MobileMe interface looks like:

You can also send a signal to remotely wipe all the info on your iPhone.

]]> http://www.crandell.org/2009/06/17/find-my-iphone/feed 0 http://www.crandell.org/2009/06/17/update-complete http://www.crandell.org/2009/06/17/update-complete#comments Wed, 17 Jun 2009 18:30:29 +0000 Jeremy http://www.crandell.org/?p=342 The iPhone OS 3.0 update took

Before I began the update my 16GB iPhone had 3.82GB available space.
iTunes backed up my current iPhone (which I had already done manually so it was pretty quick).
iTunes contacted the iPhone activation server to be sure I had the real deal.

The activation server seemed stalled for almost 45 minutes. I gave up and told iTunes to quit via the Dock and that seemed to goose the thing into action. The  ”Contacting activation server…” modal window went away immediately, the phone rebooted and a new modal window “Waiting for iPhone” took its place.

Soon that was replaced with an “Updating iPhone software…” modal window with progress bar. The actual software update and verification took about six minutes from beginning until the phone rebooted.

~/Library/iTunes/iPhone Software Updates/Phone1,2_3.0_7A341_Restore.ipsw

On to the update!

“Some of the Audible files in the iTunes library were not copied to the iPod <my iPod> because you are not authorized to play them on this computer.”

It’s a modal window that looks like this:

iTunes Audible Error modal window

There’s a lot of chatter out there as to what this might be. Here’s what I found:

1. This authorization is separate from the iTunes per computer authorization.

2. This authorization has no specific place to enter your authentication information except by clicking on the file that has failed. For whatever reason.

3. In iTunes, go to your Library and choose Audiobooks.

4. In my case, half the audiobooks there seem to work fine, the other half not so much. Oddly, these have all been purchased from Audible.com using the same account. I think some may have been downloaded via iTunes and some directly from www.audible.com. But I don’t really remember.

5. Since the error doesn’t tell me which books aren’t working (aren’t able to be synchronized) with my iPod, I looked in the iPod’s Audiobooks section and compared the books there vs the items in iTunes.

6. Clicking on one of the missing books prompted a new modal window that was simply an authentication dialog.

7. I entered my Audible username and password and now it’s all working fine.

Will I ever commit myself to implementing this fantastic product for The Crucible? It is so incredibly inspiring to see what nonprofits big and small are doing to improve their effectiveness by using great tools offered up for free or nearly free by large corporations that just seem to GET IT.

I feel that I should dedicate myself to ONE WEEK of intensive study and create a plan for improving The Crucible’s data management and quit waiting for someone over there to step up to the plate. I was at a presentation today where one woman, a graphic artist, has completely moved her tiny operation to Salesforce, supplemented by three other API apps and is now doing the work of entire teams of people because of the leveraged power of these tools.

Show, don’t tell.

QuickTime Plug-In is broken

Apple’s Quicktime Troubleshooting page solves this by simply having us download and reinstall Quicktime. Except that yielded no improvement of my particular situation. When I looked into the HD/Library/Internet Plug-In directory I saw the new QuickTime PLugin.plugin that I had just installed as well as QuickTime Plugin.weblugin that was part of the old Webkit and had a date of 2004.

Internet Plug-Ins directory contents

So my next step was to simply quit Safari, remove the older extraneous QuickTime Plugin.webplugin and restart Safari. Upon revisiting the QuickTime Troubleshooting page I was rewarded with this confirmation:

QuickTime Plug-In fixed

All’s well that ends well. Thanks to this MacWorld thread:

http://forums.macworld.com/thread/97546