Month: July 2011

A Challenge to Myself

I couldn’t help but notice that I haven’t been writing a lot in the last year or so.

The truth is that I have been writing but not writing on my personal website nor have I really been doing much tweeting. Due to this observation I have decided to set a short term goal of writing 3 to 5 articles per day for the next week.

Will they be of use? I hope so.

As I make my way through Mac OS X Lion and all of the small issues that are coming up, I should have plenty to write about. (see the post below)

For example…

The first change I made after upgrading to Lion? I reversed the direction of scrolling. Honestly Apple? Really? Getting everyone used to a single direction of scrolling after a few years of everyday use and then deciding to change the direction was a disaster of a decision. Did you try that out on any everyday hardcore users? I’m guessing no.

I have read this morning that you will notice a speed increase after spotlight creates a searchable index file. If your system seems slow after the upgrade just wait a few hours and you should notice an increase in speed.

Three to five articles a day is a lot to someone who works two full time jobs. We’ll see how this goes.

How to Fix Your Skype Mic Problem in Lion

This was one of the first problems I encountered in Lion. The Skype “I want to automatically control your microphone input” problem that we’ve seen before. In the past, we would refer to the following via MacWorld…

Go there and bookmark the page…

The problem in Lion is that your Application Support library under your home directory is missing. Well, it’s not really missing. It’s just hidden from view.

To fix this problem, open up your Terminal (under Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app) and paste in the following statement and hit return.

defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles YES

Next, you’ll need to restart your finder. I would recommend just rebooting your computer.

You should now be able to see all hidden files. Now you should be able to disable the automatic gain as instructed above. (I would recommend removing the MicVolume statement all together as it is simply not needed.)

Now when you run Skype you should have complete control of your microphone input level.

The Problems With Lion

Yes. I have upgraded to Mac OS X Lion.I’m a geek. Don’t be silly.

Here is a small list of things that broke when I upgraded.

My timer for recording podcasts. (got a new one)

My seriously old version of Photoshop. (I have a newer version that I’ve been waiting to install)

My recording software as a whole. (I have a backup that I just NOW got to work)

Is it enough to make me regret the upgrade?

Not in your life.

I expected things to break so no surprise there. The operating system is working great for everything else. I love “Mission Control” and think they finally got “Spaces” right.