Tag: os x

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Force eject CD/DVD stuck in Apple computer

If you’ve got a CD or DVD that simply refuses to eject from your Apple computer, whether it’s an iMac, MacPro or Macbook there’s a simple solution.

To eject a stuck disc:
Press and hold your mouse or trackpad button during bootup

  1. Power down the device completely
  2. Press and hold your mouse button/trackpad button and keep it held down
  3. Press the power button to turn it back on while keeping mouse button down
  4. Keep holding the mouse/trackpad button and eventually the CD or DVD should eject itself and then the computer will continue to boot as normal.

NOTE: I’m not sure if this technique still works with wireless (Bluetooth) pointing devices such as the Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad but I will endeavour to test this later and update this post.

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Apple update 10.6.8 and Lion (10.7) cause Kernel Panics on MacPro 1,1

I bought my MacPro (MacPro 1,1) in September 2006 and nearly 5 years down the line it’s still going strong, or at least it was.

Some recent projects I’ve been involved in have required some serious processing power to render gigapixel images and the original 2xDual Core XEONs weren’t up to it. I found a matching pair of cheap E5345 QUAD core processors on eBay and fitted them (that’s another post that will be on here soon along with photos of the CPU swap out process). I threw some SSD’s in a RAID array in there for good measure too and the combination of those two things made a phenomenal difference to the rendering times. My Snow Leopard 10.6.7 install was nice and stable, not a single crash/hang/kernel panic or reboot.

Then Apple released a Snow Leopard update 10.6.8 to “ready you for Lion” so I dutifully upgraded the 10.6.7 I had installed on my SSD’s and it all went terribly wrong. The system now erratically rebooted itself and a look at the logs showed Kernel Panics all over the place. I have a second OS X 10.6.7 for emegency situations, booted into that and ran that for a few days and it was all fine. I rolled back my 10.6.8 to 10.6.7 using a TimeMachine backup and everything was stable again.

Continue reading “Apple update 10.6.8 and Lion (10.7) cause Kernel Panics on MacPro 1,1”

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Safari in Lion adding a suffix of [SP] to web page titles [SOLVED]

Twitter user @benmarsh recently noticed that his Safari running under OS X Lion was adding [SP] after the title of any page he visited and was seeking some assistance.

Initially he thought it was just one of his Safari plugins but even after disabling all Safari plugins the [SP] still appears as shown in the screen shot below. Continue reading “Safari in Lion adding a suffix of [SP] to web page titles [SOLVED]”

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HTTP 403 error on site hosted on OS X Snow Leopard

I suddenly started getting http 403 errors on my self hosted [with native apache installation] site that worked perfectly until Feb 5th 2010. The errors showing up in the access log looked like:

[Fri Feb 19 02:05:25 2010] [crit] [client 127.0.0.1] (13)Permission denied: /Users/username/.htaccess pcfg_openfile: unable to check htaccess file, ensure it is readable, referer: http://127.0.0.1/

I’m not sure what changed, perhaps an OS X update from Apple, but after restoring all /private/etc/apache2/* files and the my /Users/username/Sites/ folder via TimeMachine to a date when things were working it still wouldn’t play ball.

Eventually I came across the soultion, it seems the chmod levels of the default folders had changed so doing the following in Terminal:

chmod 701 ~
chmod 705 ~/Sites

Solved everything…phew