One of the things that makes Delicious (formerly del.icio.us) so useful it that it can integrate, to varying degrees, with all broswers via its JavaScript bookmarklets. Many other sites also use these -- for example, I have bookmarklets for Digg, FaceBook, and more. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to activate these from a keyboard shortcut? You can!

1. Add a bookmarklet to your Bookmarks menu, not to your favorites bar.
2. In System Preferences, go to the Keyboard Shortcuts tab of the Keyboard & Mouse System Preferences panel, and add a keyboard shortcut with the exact name of your bookmarklet. You can specify the application as either your chosen browser, or for All Applications if you use multiple browsers. If you choose All Applications, just make sure the bookmarklet has the same name in all browsers.

Now I can post to Delicious by pressing the same keyboard shortcut everywhere. Yay!

[robg adds: This works, of course, and can be extended to create keyboard shortcuts for any site in your Bookmarks menu, not just bookmarklets. It was mentioned in a footnote to this older hint, which covered a possibly quicker (but definitely not GUI-based) method of creating keyboard shortcuts in Safari (and any other program).]

The problem: You have Time Machine set up using a sparsebundle on a network drive, such as a Time Capsule or an AirPort Extreme-connected hard drive. Most of the time, everything works great. Consider this reproducible scenario, however:

1. You are working away at home and a hourly backup starts. Time machine automagically mounts the sparsebundle.
2. You need to leave and put your laptop to sleep, not paying attention to the fact that time machine is working.
3. You move your laptop to work/school and wake it up.
4. The sparsebundle is still mounted, but obviously does not work. Finder and Spotlight grow increasing stuck until you have to reboot your machine. It occurs to you that the image back home was not closed properly and that eventually, this will corrupt your backups!

Solution:

1. Install SleepWatcher (I used the MacPorts build; don't forget to specify the server variant!).
2. Modify /opt/local/etc/rc.sleep or /etc/rc.sleep to include these two lines:

   logger -t $0 "Ejecting any mounted Time Machine images"
   hdiutil info -plist | grep /Volumes | sed 's/<string>/\"/' | sed 's/<\/string>/\"/'|xargs -I {} bash -c "if test -e \"\$0/Backups.backupdb\";  then hdiutil eject \"\$0\"; fi" {}

I am sure that someone better than I at script-fu can clean up that mess, but basically, it finds disk images that are mounted and are being used for Time Machine, and ejects them. backupd notices this automatically, and cancels the backup gracefully. The image is then safely offline before the machine disconnects from the network, as validated by console logs.

Skype always irritated me with its automatic microphone volume changes. The Windows version has the ability to disable this option in the preferences pane, but the Mac version does not. Today, I spent some time trying to solve this problem. After some searching on net, I found a solution for the Windows version which also works on the Mac.

Quit Skype and open the folloving file with TextEdit: ~/Library » Application Support » Skype » shared.xml. At the end of the document, you'll see this section:

<VoiceEng>
  <MicVolume>77</MicVolume>
</VoiceEng>

Simply change this section to look like this (adding one new line):

<VoiceEng>
  <AGC>0</AGC>
  <MicVolume>100</MicVolume>
</VoiceEng>

AGC means Automatic Gain Control, and setting it to 0 disables this feature. Set it to 1 if you want to enable it again. The MicVolume can range from 0 (mute) to 255 (full volume). Save the file and start Skype.

Note: I'm using Tiger and Skype 2.6.0. I have no experience with other OS X and/or Skype versions, but I hope this hint will help some frustrated Skype users.

[robg adds: I haven't tested this one.]

For those of us who miss being able to cut and paste in the Finder, I just found a pretty functional way to do it through Quicksilver triggers. Here's how:

1. Invoke Quicksilver (probably by pressing Control-Space)
2. Press Command-, to open its preferences
3. Go to Preferences » Application, and make sure 'Enable advanced features' is checked
4. Go to Catalog » Quicksilver and make sure 'Proxy objects' is checked
5. Go to Triggers and click the plus sign to add a new trigger and select Hotkey
6. Start typing Current Selection, and when the item pops up, press Tab
7. Start typing Move to... and then press Tab
8. In the last box, press Command-X clear the field. It must be completely empty for this to work -- no text, nothing
9. Click Save
10. Click the 'i' at the bottom right of the screen to show the trigger options
11. Under hot key, choose your preferred key command; I've chosen Shift-Command-X (see note below)

You're done! Select an item in the Finder, press your key command, then just start typing to move the selected file/folder to anywhere in your Quicksilver catalogue. Remember you can type '/' to access your computer and '~' to access your users folder from within Quicksilver.

Note: Quicksilver has a Scope function for the triggers which can limit the trigger to one app. In this case, the scope should be limited to the Finder. The Scope function, however, is broken under Leopard. If you're using an older version of OS X, you might be able to limit the trigger to the Finder and just use Command-X as the hotkey. Setting it to Command-X under Leopard, however, will break the Cut command in all apps.

I love Wunderground.com's forecast. You can read all of the numbers, and look at radar all you want, but 95% of the time, it's too much info. Wunderground has a one-line forecast that relates today or tomorrow's temperature to today's. "Today is forecast to be colder than yesterday" is all I need to know.

Once you've installed GeekTool, you'll also need Lynx, a popular text web browser. Once GeekTool and lynx are installed, create a new shell entry in GeekTool and enter this code, substituting in your zip code for 12345: This will tell Lynx to go retrieve the Wunderground site and cut out every line that dosn't start with "Tomorrow is." Of course, if you check the weather in the morning, you'll need to change it to "Today is." Either way, the GeekTool entry will disappear when that text is not present. I guess you could have the weather appear in different places on your desktop depending on wether it's forecasting today or tomorrow, but that's left as an exercise to the reader.

[robg adds: I tried this, and it works as described. It's probably possible with curl instead of lynx, but you'd then need to do more parsing of the output to strip out the HTML characters. Given this data probably won't change during the day, you should set the GeekTool refresh to a really large value.]

I use bit.ly as my URL shortening service, mainly because I like the way that it links to Twitter and tracks statistics on shortened URLs that I send folks. I am, however, lazy and I don't like to do any more clicking, copying, or pasting than I have to.

So I created a bookmark on my bookmarks bar in Safari which opens bit.ly in a new window and passes the current page I am on as a parameter. The net effect is that most of the work is done for me when the window opens. The JavaScript bookmark is:

javascript:window.open('http://bit.ly/?url='+location.href);

This approach will probably work with other shorteners as well, and the above shortcut should work in any browser.

In 10.5, the iCal user interface is quite limiting. For instance, you can edit only a single event at a time. But there is something of a workaround to that problem: open multiple iCal windows at a time. Here's how. Quit iCal, then paste the following line into Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.iCal IncludeDebugMenu 1

Now launch iCal and select Debug » New Calendar Window, or just press Command-L. You can now edit an event in one window, and another event in the other window. iCal keeps the windows in sync, so that a change in one appears in the other.

[robg adds: The iCal debug menu was covered in this hint, but I thought this workaround for editing multiple events was worth sharing.]

Over the weekend, my 12" PowerBook G4 was involved in an incident that, I thought, spelled certain doom for my all-time-favorite Apple laptop. I was using the machine with it perched on my knees, and happened to be applying the Safari software update when disaster struck. The update was at that point where the OS has shut down and the progress bar is marching across the screen. Just then, our youngest child came sneaking up on me and applied a running hug-tackle (I was on the sofa at the time, but hug-tackles can happen anywhere). At impact, the PowerBook flew off my knee and landed on the back right corner on the (thankfully) carpeted floor. When the machine hit the floor, it instantly kernel panicked, and I thought "well, that couldn't have happened at a worse time."

When I tried to boot it, I got a chime, but nothing else. Every trick I tried, including booting from a CD and setting it up in FireWire target disk mode, failed. Then I tried resetting PRAM, which also didn't work...but it did boot the machine into Open Firmware, so I knew the machine was functional at the lowest level. Typing mac-boot at that point, however, resulted in a scary-sounding error: ALLOC-MEM request too big!. From the sound of it, I thought maybe it was something with the RAM, but I wasn't sure. A quick trip to Google on another Mac found the answer to my problem in this blog post.

It turns out that (at least on this PowerBook, and probably others) the ALLOC-MEM too big! error is caused by a loose AirPort card. You can find instructions on reseating AirPort cards for various PowerBooks in this article on Apple's support site, and the linked blog post contains photos of the process.

After pulling and reseating the AirPort card, my PowerBook G4 started right up just as if nothing had happened -- hooray!

I must have gotten a bad first-generation Apple TV -- I've had so many issues troubleshooting it that I've almost become an expert. This afternoon, I finally found the time to write up all my Apple TV troubleshooting tricks, including one that involves a freezer:

But one day I had a bunch of friends over and we wanted to watch a movie on the Apple TV. And wouldn't you know it, the damn thing got too hot and froze again. Restarts weren't working and I didn't have hours to wait for it to cool down. So I tossed my Apple TV in the freezer for 10 minutes. After that, I hooked it back up and it worked fine.

WARNING: Before you even entertain the freezer trick, let me just say this: don't do it. I'm just telling you about something I did to get my Apple TV working again that involved my freezer. If you decide to put your Apple TV in the freezer and it cracks, explodes or gets soaked by an ice cube tray, you can't hold me liable. I'm telling you right now, don't do the freezer trick. Apple TV + Freezer = Don't do it.

From paired remotes and dead batteries to force restarts and preventing overheating with external fans, you can read about the various things I've learned while troubleshooting my Apple TV. If you're having issues, perhaps some will be of use to you as well.

[robg adds: Many of these techniques are documents in the Apple TV Setup Guide (1MB PDF), though in many cases, more detail is provided on the linked site than in the manual.]

I wasn't happy with the red eye editing in iPhoto, so I bought Photoshop Elements 6, which gives much better results. One thing I discovered is that with iPhoto open, I can drag a photo onto Elements in the dock, do the red eye adjustment, save it, and the newly-adjusted photo appears directly where it was in iPhoto. The original can still be reverted, too.

[robg adds: iPhoto offers, of course, the Edit Photo pop-up in the General section of its preferences, where you can specify any image editing program to use when editing a photo. I wasn't aware, however, that you could (successfully) drag-and-drop an image from iPhoto to a program in the dock.]