Odds & Ends: Display flashes at login; Entourage glitch;

Adaptec drivers; much more

Display flashes and new G4s Michael Anderson gets intermittent flashes on the display connected to his 2002 QuickSilver G4. He suspects that the problem lies in the GeForce 4MX video card. This Apple Discussions Board thread has been covering this issue.

Entourage Hide Folders glitch Michael Blake writes (and we confirmed): In Office v. X's Entourage, if you click on the Hide Folders icon it hides the folders. However, if you click and hold the icon, the application reports that there is "insufficient memory."

Adaptec drivers update: a follow-up Noah Rosenstein reports good news and bad news on the latest Adaptec SCSI card software (see previous item): "Good news: For the first time ever, my Belkin USB PCI card does not interfere with deep sleep. Even the fan turns off. Bad news: My APC Back-Ups Pro USB keeps waking up the computer with a warning that the computer has lost power (which it hasn't)."

Philip Ershler adds bad news: "I installed the driver for a 29160 and a 2930. Now, attempting to transfer data from a disk connected to either controller to a disk on the 29160, results in a kernel panic after a few seconds of data transfer."

Eric Turner reports the initial failure-to-wake problem he had "fixed itself" after a couple of restarts.

Microtech software: a follow-up Regarding our previous item on installing Microtech Card Reader software, Claude Bouhallier adds: "If the reader card doesn't work, it is important to verify in the inspector both the owner and the group of USBATxx.kext and IOUSBMassStorageClass.kext. They must be system and wheel - not 'your short user name' and 'staff.'"

Citibank and Explorer still no-go Following up on our previous item, Brian Povlsen writes: "I had problems accessing my Citibank online access from my Mac. Citibank told me that this was a known problem only with Internet Explorer. They explained that they had installed what they believed would be a fix on the 24th, but it only fixed part of the problem. Apparently they are still working on it, and had no time table for completion."

PhotoSmart & Classic: a solution Regarding our recent post from Ethan Miller regarding problems with PhotoSmart and Classic after installing the updated drivers for HP printers, Ethan now informs us of a solution he found: "I ran the Uninstall from the X121 version of the HP PhotoSmart drivers (for X) installer. While the installer reported a number errors, it did remove hundreds of files and now I can print again (from X, haven't tried Classic yet) and PhotoSmart 1.0 remains (as shown in Print Center). However, the Quality panes are still totally absent from the Paper/Quality screen of the HP Driver interface. Luckily, it seems to be defaulting to Best quality."

Update: George Golden replies: "That’s exactly what I got when I downloaded the HP drivers (v1.0) using Software Update. Not satisfied with that I went to the HP website and downloaded/installed the USB v1.2.1 driver for OS X. The v1.2.1 driver included the missing panes and has been working perfectly in X and Classic."

Java 1.3.1 glitch Pete Ware describes another glitch with the Java 1.3.1 update (see previous item): "When saving a file with a new file name, there is a dialog box that comes up stating: 'The name 'temp' is already used by a folder.' Fortunately, there is an OK button to get out of it. When saved as 'untitled file 27,' it will work OK. I just have to go to the folder where I saved the file and name it what I want it."

Anubis and OS X: not yet Clay Johnson received word from CharisMac that "Anubis currently works up to Mac OS 9.2.2 The Mac OS X version of Anubis should ship third quarter of this year. I would use drives setup with Anubis only with Mac OS 9."

QuickTime Player failure Our cable modem was down for a few hours yesterday. During this time, we found that we could not get QuickTime Player for OS X to successfully launch. Apparently, in its attempt to display the QuickTime Hot Pick (which it could not do due to the cable being down), it would hang.

Update: Stephen Dupont notes that once you can regain access to QuickTime Player, the work-around is to open its Preferences and uncheck "Show Hot Picks movie automatically."

Dial-up problems after cable modem goes down? Also noted after our cable modem went down: We had problems getting our dial-up connection to work, both in OS 9 and OS X. We could connect, but no applications could access the Internet. We eventually fiddled with the Network settings enough that something clicked and it started to work. One suggestion we forgot to try: Disconnect the Ethernet cable that links to the cable modem.

MaxMenus problems? Robert Ameeti reports various problems with MaxMenus, including forced remounting of previously mounted servers, problems logging out and a conflict with Timbuktu. On a likely related note, "haxie" utilities released today (e.g., FruitMenu and WindowShade, as cited below) fix a conflict with MaxMenus.

Snard & Maya Eric McMurry writes: "After installing Maya Personal Learning Edition on my PowerBook, the icon for Snard (0.8.2) no longer shows up in the dock. The space is still there, and Snard is otherwise functional, just no icon."

Retrospect and sleep Mirko Kranenburg found that Retrospect software (notably the daemon component) prevented automatic sleep as set from Energy Saver on his Power Mac G4. Uninstalling Retrospect resolved the problem. So will sleep is using the "kill" command in Terminal to quit the two "Retro" apps running as seen by the "top" command, as we have noted before. (Thanks, Marc Bizer for the reminder.)

Retrospect praise Regarding our recent comment on the potential difficulties of backing up Mac OS X, Jack Rogers offers this praise for Retrospect: "I use the Retrospect beta for X and backup to a matching size partition on an external FireWire drive using the Duplicate option. I can then boot from that backup with no problems. I have not tried Restoring from the mirror backup but do not see why it would not work. The Duplicate option creates Finder clickable files rather than a proprietary format backup."

Multiple open access to a file A reader notes an issue that we seem to recall reporting before: With Mac OS X Server, it is possible (with some applications) to have a document simultaneously open on multiple computers. This can obviously be a problem is users start saving different modifications. A suggested work-around, assuming you want the original to stay as it is: Set the document as "stationary." Users can now modify their own copy without affecting other users.