BigDiver

The scroll ball in the Apple Mighty Mouse is an essential piece of mouse hardware and it gets clogged often. When it does scrolling tends to become erratic and difficult, to the point where it stops completely. I use this method to clean the ball without opening the mouse. Trust me when I say you do not want to open the Mighty Mouse…

1. soak one Q-tip in alcohol, not dripping wet, you do not want to drown your mouse
2. start rubbing the Q-tip over the ball in all directions and notice that you’ll start to see dirt come to the top
3. gently rub off the dirt, or use a dry Q-tip to get it out.
4. repeat process until the ball is totally clean

Hope this helps. If you have no time, no Q-tips, or no alcohol, just press the ball down hard, and scroll it. Do this a few times and whatever is stuck will become free and you’ll usually regain scrolling right away.

Today I took my Macbook Air for repair at a local Apple store – broken hinge and antenna cover. Although the Air has been out of warranty for some time they said they would replace the whole top part – not jut the hinge – for free, because it was a known issue!

The Apple “Genius” guy told me that the Air would be ready in 3 to 5 days, but a couple of hours later I got a call from him saying that the computer had been fixed and was ready to be picked up.

The great service relieved a lot of the frustration of seeing the broken hinge. So if the same thing happens to you, don’t buy the hinges on eBay (some are selling for $300). Take your Macbook to an Apple store. They’ll do a professional repair and most likely it will be free.

Great job Apple!

After fighting with Snow Leopard for a couple of months on my Mac Book Air, and experiencing two serious data corruption problems, I have officially given up on Snow Leopard.

Here is the summary of my experience with Snow Leopard.

1. Snow Leopard came out. I upgraded both my Macs (iMAC, and MacBook Air)
2. iMac works with a few quirks, but after the first update from Apple things are stable and all seems to be working. A few applications needed to be updated, but no major issues.
3. MacBook Air upgrade did not work initially as documented in a previous post.
4. Got everything to work but it was so very slooooow…. NONE of the “faster” claims by Apple verified.
5. MacBook crawling, it got so bad that I decided to do a clean install. So I formated my HDD and installed SL from scratch.
6. Same thing, slow, slow, slow….
7. Found some fixes as documented in another post. This did work, especially the Terminal fix.
8. The MacBook Air was not hibernating or sleeping properly, was hanging constantly and finally I suffered data corruption when the laptop ran out of battery while stuck, and not going to sleep after I closed it and stowed it.
9. Tried to recode HDD but all data recovery tools complained an said they could not recover the data.
10. Second reinstallation, same thing happened after three weeks

Fed up, went back to Leopard, all is working to perfection…

There are many situations that require you to restore backups to different computers, other than the one from where the data was originally backed up from. In the case of Apple’s Time Machine the restore procedure to different machines is not very intuitive. You have to use the “secret” option key…

There is a supported way to restore Time Machine backups of other computers using the “option-key” click on the Time Machine menu. If you want to use it just do the following:

1. Connect the Time Machine disk to the Mac you want to restore the files to
2. Set the “Show time machine status in the menu bar” In System Preferences -> Time Machine.
3. Click the Time Machine icon in the menu bar and keeping the mouse button pressed, press the “Option” key.
4. Select “Browse Other Time Machine Disks”
5. Select the disk you want
6. click Use Selected Disk

The Time Machine will open with the selected disk and you can use it to restore the files.

If, like me, you are using a non supported Time Machine configuration, where the backup disk is mounted using SMB or AFP (see this post on how to enable that) then the procedure above will not work directly. In my case I backup to my Buffalo TeraStation NAS, and the “Browse Other Time Machine Disks” window shows up empty, with no disk to select.

In order for this to work you need to first mount the Time Machine disk by hand in using the command line.

1. Mount the shared folder where your Time Machine backups are stored
2. Open a Terminal window and cd to the Time Machine volume. in my case I called it backups

   sudo cd /Volumes/backups

3. use hdiutil to mount the specific Time Machine .sparsebundle file

   sudo hdiutil attach <time_machine_file.sparsebundle>

Now you should be able to see the mounted volume in Finder, with all the backups listed as folders, and you can copy any files directly from it. Remember that mounting the disk may take some time due to the size of the disk and network connection speed, especially If you do this over a WiFi network.

Another option is to repeat the supported Time Machine procedure  outlined in the beginning of this post. You should now see the mounted disk as a Time Machine disk. Select the the disk and click “Use Selected Disk” and Time Machine will open on the selected disk just like with a Time Machine supported back up disk.

Personally I like to copy them directly from the Finder but your preference may vary so I document both ways of achieving this goal. Hope this helps.