27 Jan
I always wondered what would happen if my backup disk I used for Leopard’s Time Machine feature ran out of space.
Yesterday I finally found out (and yes, I realized that it has been mentioned in the manual, also)…
As I have set up my backup partition on an external Firewire drive to exactly the same size as my hard disk inside the MacBook Pro (160 GB), that means that I’ve been producing about 60 GB of changing data since I installed Leopard and ran Time Machine for the first time in the end of November. Wow.
11 Dec
Today I stumbled upon a blog post in Hawk Wing’s blog which was written in 2005 but is still up-to-date: even with the latest version of Mail.app included in Mac OS X Leopard, you are able to use multiple e-mail addresses for one POP or IMAP account.
Within the mail account settings you will have to provide a comma-separated list of your e-mail addresses (e.g. me@example.com, mickey@example.com, donald@example.com) and then you can choose the address you want to use as the sender’s address from a pop-down menu in the “New Message” window. Nice 
More tips for Mail.app can also be found on Apple’s support pages.
06 Nov
Logitech, an industry leader in the computer peripherals market, provides an application called Logitech Control Center (LCC) to support their keyboards and mice under Mac OS X.
LCC internally used Unsanity’s Application Enhancer (APE) which unfortunately is not yet supported within OS X version 10.5 (Leopard). APE was one of the reasons why users weren’t able to straight-forwardly upgrade their Tiger installations to Leopard, ending up with some kind of blue screen once the installation was finished and they wanted to boot into their shiny new OS. Instructions for removing APE (highly recommended before upgrading to Leopard) can be found on the Apple support website.
So far, the special keys (“iTouch”, “Search”, “Shopping” etc.) on the Logitech keyboards can’t be used with Leopard. But at least most of the Media Control buttons (skip forward/backward, play/pause and the volume control) actually work and those are almost the only special keys I need on that keyboard.
What bothered me was the fact that the key binding for the Windows/Option and the Alt/Apple/Command keys were mixed up: on my MacBook Pro, the order of the keys (from left to right) is Control, Option, Command. The Logitech keyboard uses the same labels on the keys but with the factory settings of OS X, the Windows key acts as Apple’s Command key and the Alt key is used as the Option key. This is quite strange because you’re always hitting the wrong keys when you’re often switching between “docked” mode (using an external keyboard when you’re working on your desk) and “road warrior” mode when you’re using the MBP’s internal keyboard.
Luckily, with Leopard you’re able to change the key bindings within the Keyboard & Mouse preference pane of OS X’s System Preferences individually for each keyboard that is connected to your Mac (see the screenshot below). The Logitech keyboard shows up as “USB Receiver” in the keyboards list. After selecting this from the list, just change the binding of the Option and Command keys to each other’s function and voilà — it’s working.
Logitech keyboard picture by bargainmoose, CC-licensed.
31 Oct
Finally I also got my copy of the newest, freshest, shiniest OS X version ever… I don’t know how Apple does it, but I’m one of the guys who is always excited about new Apple products.
Although I read about best practices for installing Leopard on several web sites (most of them recommended either the archive and install or the clean install option), I wanted to give the update option at least a try — some of my friends confirmed that it seemed to work pretty well.
In the beginning, the installation ran very smoothly. I was upgrading from OS X 10.4.10 with all the latest updates installed. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to login after the reboot. My MacBook Pro hung at the point where the Leopard introduction intro should appear.
So I decided to wipe out the internal hard drive of my MacBook Pro, performed a clean installation of Leopard and transferred my old applications and files using the Migration Assistant during the second phase of the installation from a backup I had created with SuperDuper! before. (note: it took almost 3 hours to copy all that stuff from my external Firewire drive — I really have to clean up…). But that gave me at least some time to further clean up the apartment I just moved into.
04 Jan
Das nervt mich ja schon eine ganze Zeit: Ich haue immer mal wieder unabsichtlich statt auf Shift auf Caps Lock und sCHREIBE DANN ALLES IN gROßBUCHSTABEN. Argh.
Zum Glück lässt sich das unter OS X recht leicht abstellen, wie ich in einem Tipp in der Macwelt las. Leider ist die Macwelt der Meinung, dass ihre Artikel einen Tag nach Veröffentlichung nur noch kostenpflichtig abgerufen werden sollten. Schade, dann baue ich das halt hier nach:
Zunächst öffnet man in den Systemeinstellungen den Punkt “Tastatur/Maus”. Ganz unten gibt es einen Punkt, der bei mir “Modifier Keys” heißt, ich glaube im Deutschen sind das “Sondertasten”.
Drückt man dort drauf, kann man über den obersten Menüpunkt (“Caps Lock”) die Taste deaktivieren.
I always wondered what would happen if my backup disk I used for Leopard’s Time Machine feature ran out of space.
